24-26 North Main Street (Rookwood Hotel)

Built: 1912
Map 

James Pratt, proprietor of the Red Boot and Shoe Company, spent $30,000 on the construction of this hotel/rooming house in 1912, replacing a building destroyed in the Creamery Cafe fire. The shoe company occupied the ground floor space through the 1930s. Large display windows and a Tudor-arched entry, designed to entice customers and guests, enhance the ground floor. Green tile embellishes the façade and caps the unique copper-clad cornice. Inside, a wrought iron staircase with marble treads leads down to the hotel lobby. Marble wainscoting recalls its once-elegant hospitality.

The ground floor also housed “The Town Talk Tailor” for several years in the early 1930s. The lodging house above, renamed the La Salle Hotel in 1938, had more than forty-five rooms. During Prohibition from 1919-1933 the hotel’s thirty working-class lodgers perhaps enjoyed the hidden saloon tucked beneath the sidewalk. Known to historians but rediscovered in 2004, the clandestine establishment in the basement had all the trappings of a period speakeasy including a secret entry and two-way mirror. The room continues the architectural motif with decorative Tudor arches spanning the ceiling. Elaborate support columns sporting carved griffins, terrazzo flooring, dark hardwood wainscoting, remnants of stained-glass skylights, and marble trim expose a piece of Butte’s once-spirited underground. We know of one raid here, by Federal agents in March, 1928, when Curly McFarland was arrested.

The residential hotel portion of the building was effectively vacant by the late 1980s. A ground-floor restaurant continues here in 2013, but apart from the speakeasy museum in the basement, the rest of the building is vacant.

Text modified from historic plaque by Montana Historical Society. Photo by Richard Gibson.

Silver Bow County Courthouse

By Richard I. Gibson

155 West Granite Street
Architect: Link and Haire
Built: 1910-12
Map

This is the second Silver Bow county courthouse to occupy the corner of Granite and Montana Streets. Built in the Beaux-Arts style and faced in part with 70-million-year-old sandstone from Columbus, Montana, the building cost about $385,000 – nearly as much as the state capitol in Helena.

In the rotunda

Basic construction is steel frame. Interior columns contain ducts designed to allow fresh air flow into the building. Rotunda door frames are granite, painted to resemble wood—one of many details that addressed Butte’s persistent fire hazard. Pink railings surrounding the rotunda on upper floors are cast iron with scagliola plaster coatings— colored and polished plaster designed to resemble marble. Genuine marble is found in the main interior steps, rest rooms, and decorative elements throughout the building, as well as in the pendentives supporting the rotunda dome.

Two years after its opening, the courthouse served as barracks and headquarters for the militia that came to control Butte under three months of martial law in the wake of the dynamiting of the Miners Union Hall on North Main Street in June 1914. In September 1914, a Gatling gun was set up on the courthouse steps and a 5,000-candlepower searchlight was placed on the courthouse roof. The steps have seen visitors such as Eamon de Valera in 1919 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Since 1977 when the city of Butte and county of Silver Bow merged, this building has been the sole seat of government for the city-county. Prior to 1977, the City Hall served the city and this building served the county.

In 2012 the courthouse celebrated its centennial with a grand ball and other festivities.

Photos by Richard Gibson.