During the 1970s and early 80s, Boise, Idaho, struggled to revitalize its fading downtown. City leaders fixed on the idea of building a large enclosed regional shopping mall--the first such mall in Boise--in the heart of the downtown commercial district. The Winmar Company of Seattle was awarded the rights to develop it. Their plans were ambitious, but never realized.  Major retailers--the large department stores that serve as anchor tenants--never bought into the idea of a downtown mall, and the city was forced grudgingly to approve a mall proposed by another developer elsewhere in town (closer to the Interstate) or lose the mall completely to one of its neighboring jurisdictions.  Downtown Boise was indeed revitalized--and quite successfully--in the 1990s, but through ways and means that preserved a more traditional urban form.  The story of Boise's attempts to build a mall downtown, and of its urban renewal efforts in general, is preserved in two collections in Albertsons Library: the Boise Redevelopment Agency documents collection (MSS 250) and in the Charles F. Hummel "Planning Boise" collection (MSS 244).