Picture 1975: Mountain Bell's tower took the skyline. This high rise building in Boise sits at 999 Main Street, rising 206 feet across 14 floors. Imagine the year it opened: completed in 1975 by Mountain Bell, it immediately changed the city’s skyline and held the title of tallest building in Boise and the state of Idaho from 1975 to 1978.
For a few years this tower mattered in height and presence; today it still stands proudly as the fourth tallest building in Boise. Picture the 13th floor, where billionaire J. R. Simplot (1909–2008) kept an office, a quiet human detail tucked into the vertical life of the structure. From street level you can sense the scale — the clean rise of 14 stories, the way the building anchors this stretch of Main Street.
You can think about those decades when it marked the top of the city and how the skyline has shifted since. You can still picture billionaire J. R. Simplot's office tucked away on the 13th floor, a quiet detail inside all that vertical Main Street life.