Apex Hotel

By Richard I. Gibson

429 West Park Street
Built: 1918
Map

1918

Built by William Robertson for the Tait brothers, this residential hotel is typical of many erected during Butte's population explosion in the 1910s. John Tait was a dentist in 1910, in partnership with A.H. Cole with offices at 48 W. Park. John’s brother George was a clerk for the Anaconda Company, boarding at 844 W. Silver. By 1914 the Taits were evidently successful enough to branch into real estate, hiring William Robertson to erect the Tait Hotel on East Broadway that year; John lived at the Tait Hotel in 1915-17. In 1918 John's office was on the sixth floor of the Phoenix Building and George was a teller at Miners Savings Bank, and both lived at the Apex once it was completed. In 1928, George was out of the picture, John had moved his office to room 103 in the Pennsylvania Block, four blocks east of the Apex Hotel, and his wife Hattie managed the Apex.

The Tait family home in the 1890s, where I believe John and George lived as children, was at 13 West Copper, next door to a Chinese Laundry. It is a vacant lot today. Their father Robert was a contractor and a carpenter.

In 1923 the five-year-old hotel's residents included Mollie Allen, high school teacher; Juanita Daniels, clerk at the Leggat Hotel; J.J. Delphin, manager at the Ground Gripper Shoe Store at 112 W. Park; Kathryn Dowd, bookkeeper at the C.O.D. Laundry; and H.R. Doyle, a concrete loader.

So far as I can tell, Dr. John Tait was only directly associated with the Tait Hotel on Broadway Street until 1918 when the Apex was built. Beginning in 1917, he is no longer listed as the proprietor of the Tait Hotel, which was run by Mrs. Niconor Swanson.

Resources: Architectural inventories; Butte Miner, March 24, 1918 (historic photo); city directories; Sanborn maps. Modern photo by Richard I. Gibson.