Butte, Montana

 

Butte, Montana.

Although Butte was on our list of places to stop—Mark has always wanted to see the Berkley Pit—I did not expect to drive into down the historic district with my mouth hanging open in shock, awe, and a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. Butte is the quintessential city of my northeastern childhood, shifted 2000 miles west and on the edge of an open pit mine, rather than blocks of closed factories. It looks like Manchester, and Haverhill, and Worcester, and all of the other post-industrial towns of the 1970s, before some of them were rediscovered and remodeled and others fell apart. Butte hovers on that edge; I was at home.

It’s not a huge town, although it is surrounded by the commercial sprawl of the interstate, abetted by a large “shop-shed” and the proximity to some amazing natural scenery.  Coming in at ten at night, looking for a motel room, we were watched by a 90 foot tall Virgin Mary perched on a hill and lit from below, glowing in the darkness. We crashed into bed on the fourth floor of an over-priced hotel, after glancing out the window at the city lights, and headed into town the next morning, searching for breakfast and the open pit mine, still foggy from a 450 mile drive the day before.

The edge of the old part of town is working class housing, surrounded by empty weedy lots. There are fourplexes built before that was a term—squared off shoulders, porches on the first and second floors, all of the doors lined up off of the first floor porch, a few chairs to sit and have a smoke, and a couple of old cars in the driveway or on the street. It looks like Haverhill, I thought. I have seen those houses—and those empty lots—before. Right next door were small single family houses, old windows, peeling paint, funky design with something added on as the family grew. A few of the houses were well maintained, with flower gardens an cheerful paint jobs, an some looked like grandparent’s houses, where the occupants cared, but were limited in what they could still do. Not all of the housing was working class; there is a lovely street lined with solid middle class houses built for the mine managers and the businessmen who ran the downtown, as well as a few amazing houses built for and by the very wealthy. Several spires from Catholic churches dominate the skyline. Familiar patterns.

As we climbed the hill into downtown, which was, according to a roadside sign 50 miles out, the largest historic district in the country, the buildings changed. Three and four story brick buildings, still surrounded by the empty lots, rose up. On their sides were old advertisements for hotels and diners, targeting a population that was in town to make a deal or do a job, not settle down forever. On the sides of other buildings, you could see where something once was, but has now come down. There were not so many gaps in the built environment in Butte’s heyday.   Some had windows for second and third story apartments, and curtains blew out from them and tough houseplants balanced on the sills. I know those windows, I thought, they have not changed in 50 years.

Downtown still held signs of the glory days of the mines, when Butte was the wealthiest city between Chicago and San Francisco. Elaborate facades from the late 19^th century, when turrets and carving were popular, lined the streets. Banks, hotels, businesses, dance halls, social organizations—as well as labor unions—all built and inhabited these glorious buildings. There were stairs dropping down to basement establishments. Apartments and rooms for rent on the upper floors.  Amazing. But, the upper stories were, for the most part, boarded up and empty. There were occupants for most of the first floors—which is a positive sign, unlike some other downtowns we have seen on this trip—and there were going concerns…a couple of new coffee shops, banks, stores. But the streets and town were built for a much larger population than we saw on a Friday morning in July. This was a town that once had  money—a lot of money—that has left the area.

And it was that feeling, more than anything else, that haunted me as we drove the streets, looking for breakfast (which we did find) and then wandered around, staring at the beautiful old  buildings that were all empty upstairs. We walked by a mission and a collection of people waiting for it to open, the first group of clearly down and out, if not homeless, we had seen since Oakland, two weeks and 2,500 miles before.  There was once money, jobs, union activists, families, and now, there is not. Butte in a northeastern city, 2000 miles west.