theatre | The USA: Landscapes and Urban Spaces

Pocatello is an important railroad junction with a marshalling yard, a locomotive depot and an old station. Railroad employees now use parts of the old station as offices and storage facilities (sadly, Pocatello is no longer served by passenger trains). Lots of landmark buildings survive. Some of them are along Center Street to the east of the railroad (Center Street has a tunnel under the railroad to connect the east and west sides of Pocatello), but the majority are along or very close to Main Street, which runs parallel to the railroad. A small Greyhound bus station is near the old railroad station. More old buildings in the centre of Pocatello are occupied than in many settlements of similar size in the US, suggesting that the local economy is quite buoyant. In fact, Pocatello must be quite prosperous because, near the leafy residential district south of Center Street and to the east of the railroad, Idaho State University has a significant presence. The presence of the university helps to explain why some of the downtown businesses aspire to attract middle class customers.

Pocatello, Idaho

Railroad station, Pocatello, Idaho

Pocatello, Idaho

We liked Pocatello because it had more to offer than many Utah settlements, and because it reminded us of settlements that grew along the railroads in states as distant from one another as Montana and Texas. We pushed on to Blackfoot confident it would also be of interest.

Blackfoot is smaller than Pocatello and cannot hide the scars of economic decline. However, it is on a railroad with a junction and the one-time station is now the Idaho Potato Museum (yes, I kid you not. No wonder most Idaho numberplates have “Famous potatoes” written on them). The town’s most interesting buildings are on Main Street, which faces the old railroad station and its single track, and Broadway one block to the west of Main. There are a lot more empty business premises in Blackfoot than in Pocatello, and the businesses that remain seem to be struggling to make some money. As so often in settlements the size of Blackfoot, most human activity manifests itself around a thrift shop and premises to help people combat domestic or substance abuse. But Blackfoot has a small theatre still used to stage the occasional play and, in common with dozens of settlements we had already visited, there is somewhere for girls and young women to refine their dancing skills.

But let me return briefly to the very interesting and informative Idaho Potato Museum where we learned the following. Idaho’s potato industry originates with Mormon pioneers who:

“laid the foundations for modern-day production. A century ago, when the pioneers constructed the first system of irrigation canals, they made the desert bloom. With gradual mechanisation, spud farming graduated from ‘small potatoes’ to a major portion of the economy. During world war two, J. R. Simplot used the first mechanical sorter, invented in Shelley, Idaho, for efficient packaging of potatoes destined for the military. The advent of sprinkler irrigation over the past two decades allowed 250,000 more acres of potatoes to be planted in Bingham County alone. However, quality is not the whole story. Idaho producers constantly strive for better potatoes by improvements in genetics, cultivation, storage methods, processing and transportation.”

We also learned that scientists consider the region around Blackfoot to be:

“an optimum growing region for potatoes due to consistent warm days and cool nights, rich volcanic soil and plentiful irrigation supplied by the mountain snows and Snake River aquifer. Although Russet Burbank potatoes are grown in other states, the ones produced in Idaho (the Russet Burbank is the variety most commonly grown in Idaho) are of the best quality, thereby setting the standard for other places to emulate. Idaho produces more potatoes than any other state and accounts for about 30% of the nation’s total production.”