No One Called Pocatello’s Multi-Ethnic Neighborhood The Triangle

They made it up.

No one who lived in Pocatello’s North 4th Ave eastside enclave called the area the Triangle.

It’s just not true.

I’m sorry Idaho and Mary, but the term only surfaced with the publication of the book, The Triangle: A Slice of America, in 2005 and authored by Idaho Purce, Mary Watkin Sanders and Kevin Marsh.

As for Marsh, he may have, and he may not have lived in the area in which he attempts to define in the book.

As most folks know, who lived in the area, the narrative Purse, Watkins and Marsh are attempting to establish as historical fact is not true.

No one called the 4th Street Neighborhood the “Triangle.”

A more accurate designation for the historic area should be what it was called by those who lived in the neighborhood. It was simply called 4th Street, and not the North 4th Avenue Neighborhood, or the Triangle. It was simply called 4th Street and it was referenced that way in most exchanges.

The historic neighborhood was always referred to as 4th Street to the people who resided in the neighborhood that was bound west to east from old Front Street, now called Pocatello Avenue to North 5th Avenue and south to north from East Center Street to East Hayden Street.

It was within this enclave, separate from the rest of the Bonneville District, where the city’s poorest and most diverse ethnic groups came together with a unique and shared determination to succeed in a racially segmented and stratified social environment.

The seeds of the 4th Street Neighborhood were planted by Pocatello’s Old Timers who arrived to the city on horseback or on horse-pulled wagons if they hadn’t come by train. Most were railroad workers and they were a tough and rowdy bunch by nature, and hard-working, too.

Pocatello has always been a tough place to live and work in.

It has been recorded “Pocatello Junction was described as a “rough, wide open town” in the beginning with no formal government, according to The Early History of Pocatello, Idaho by Robert L. Wrigley Jr.

“One traveler stated it had ‘all the activity, wickedness, and glaring freedom of an awakening metropolis,” Wrigley said.

Why only people of color and people of the wrong faith to those of the dominate religion of the area managed to be corralled within the confines of the 4th Street Neighborhood may have been determined at some point in the early days by the city’s founding fathers and by one’s purse. It may have been a way to secure the area from which all the vice the city was known for to operate from with some semblance of police control.

The following passages from A Rail Town Grows With A Sense Of Its Past, by Elizabeth Jacox and Barbara Perry Bauer, describe Pocatello’s early view of the citizens of Pocatello’s east side.

“The city’s “initial layout divided Pocatello into two separate but united communities — Eastside and Westside. For the first few years of the town’s existence, the Eastside was seen as the marginal area, where immigrant and minority workers lived and where cheap lodging and low class entertainment were available to transient workers and traveling salesmen.”

The authors went on to further describe the city’s eastside rise from low class to middle class status.

“The Eastside became home to the laboring classes – service workers, railroad laborers, etc., and was the area where immigrant workers settled, particularly those from Italy, Greece and Japan. When the Academy of Idaho was established in 1902 on land on the east side of the tracks, a gradual change in residence desirability began to evolve, with homes near the Academy becoming more attractive as permanent residences for community leaders and those affiliated with the school.”

Pocatello’s eastside’s heydays were from 1910 to the early 1940’s when life was really wild and tough, especially on the weekends. Most of the action took place along East Center and Front Streets, which was an area filled with restaurants, pool shops, bars, Italian and Greek grocery and dry goods stores.

During the Prohibition period there were plenty of bootleggers operating out of the respectable markets along Front Street during the night. Only a few blocks around the corner from all the hustle and bustle of the the mostly immigrant-owned stores, dens of prostitution flourished.

By the 1940’s, Pocatello mellowed some and the children born in the 1920’s from those Old Timers were just hitting high school, or graduating from high school about the time Pearl Harbor was bombed.

In the ensuing years, those returning world war II soldiers, having most been born in the 1920’s, and along with the rest of their generation married, and their children, the Baby Boomer Generation, was the final generation to inherit the 4th Street Neighborhood that dissolved by the early 1970’s, and whose demise was brought on by the Interstate-15 reconstruction which started in early 1960’s.

It’s important to know the Pocatello generation born during the 1920’s crossed racial and cultural divisions at early ages and grew up with shared community concerns, values, extended friendships and with lots of mixed marriages for many families throughout those bonding years.

The 1920’s decade-born generation from the 4th Street community, despite all its apparent differences, managed to embrace one another and worked as best as they could to give their children better lives than from the ones they found themselves in.

It was from this generation in which the bonds between Pocatello’s early families were forged. And, it was from the 1920’s-decade generation that were born American citizens from households whose beginnings were started in some distant foreign land.

Yet, in all the whirl of people interaction and across all the years, no one called the 4th Street neighborhood the Triangle as a “nick-name.”

It’s just not true history.

Now we have people making references to the “Triangle” that is giving rise to an eagerness to harness the area’s history naively with an invalid nick-name.

In a 2011 ISU Press Release promoting an interview with Purse, Watkins and Marsh at the ISU campus, it was announced: “the “Triangle,” a nickname for a section of old town Pocatello, has a rich history that the authors have many stories about. The event is aimed at highlighting Black History Month by sharing local history and discussing current experiences.”

A recent example of the 4th Street Neighborhood being referenced as the Triangle Neighborhood was when newcomer-to- Pocatello activist Jane Vitale , who is opposed to demolishing the old Franklin Jr. High School/Bonneville Elementary School, was quoted last month in the local newspaper saying:

“I want to get our arms wrapped around this history of ours,” Jane said. “I want the community to know how important that building is or was to our history, how it intersected with the Triangle because the Triangle is a consequence of our being a railroad town and that’s why you’ve got all these people into our community who people didn’t understand.”

The author of the article, Doug Lindley, kept referencing the Triangle as the “famous Triangle.”

The most egregious example of applying the wrong moniker to the 4th Street Neighborhood is the monument erected in 2010, on Third Avenue and Lander Street on which contains the misspelled names of several families from the 512 families names listed on it who reportedly lived within the 4th Street Neighborhood throughout the years.

The monument is dedicated to the people of the “Triangle.”

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