Livingston’s a great town. I’ll undoubtedly be doing many more posts on it sometime soon. It’s home to some of my favorite thrift shops, a great drive in restaurant, bars, a movie theater with a neat, mostly in-tact interior, and a ton of neon. It makes for a great scene at night!
The Road Island Diner
981 W Weber Canyon Rd, Oakley, UT
I missed the Road Island diner by a little bit back in my early Dinering days back when it was in Middletown, RI operating as Tommy’s Deluxe Diner. It was moved to Oakley in 2007 and I missed it again in 2008 when I came through this part of the west for the first time while roadtripping to and from the National Folk Festival for its first year in Butte, MT. I finally made it earlier this year.
The restoration is beautiful, and while there are a few touches, it plays it very straight. No Elvis, no Marilyn, no checkerboard. I think the biggest surprise to me, even after reading reviews, after following the move eight years ago and seeing reviews of it since then, was the location. Oakley is a town of just over 1500 people and nearly an hour down winding roads outside of Salt Lake. It was a destination for me, a seven hour drive south, but with its location, it really struck me as a neighborhood joint, and its move and restoration as a labor of love.
Cruising East out of Bozeman, and coming back, I always see this whale off to the side of the highway. I finally tracked them down and shot them, and they bring up more questions than they answer. They appear to be made out of sculpted foam, coated in some kind of stucco. The whale and the sphinx are both inhabitable, with a skylight visible there in the whale photo. Play houses for an artist’s children?
I finished this one up last night. The Blue Anchor is at such a wonderful location, in the crossroads town of Twin Bridges, Montana. Standing on the bridge, with that deep perspective of the road, the mountains tower, blue, over the bar. It’s an elegant building, simple and strong, with enough intricate brickwork to show the kind of craftsmanship that was in the area some hundred plus years ago.
You notice things staring a a building for hours when doing a painting that you wouldn’t otherwise. The window spacing, for instance, is off on one side of this building from the other. I haven’t been able to find historical photos going far enough back, but my guess is that the building was originally just the one side up to the center window, and that the other side was added on later and trimmed to bring the entire building together. Usually in that case, there will be differences in the coloration of the brick, like when they stopped and started on the Washington Monument. But with the harsh Montana sun and likely the same brickmaker and craftsmen working on it, I still have a feeling like this was the case.
In the 1930s, the building was updated into more or less what you see today. The ground floor windows were bricked over and re-proportioned, a glorious blue facade was added, along with a full width neon sign, inset glass brick doorways and a huge anchor shaped neon, protruding from the face of the building. The left hand side is a cafe, with a lunch counter and barrel roof straight out of an east coast diner of the 1930s. The right side is a bar, and with the separate entrances, from what I can tell, the two aren’t connected.
Val’s Alpine Bar – 2806 Pine St, Butte, MT
I would love to know what the Alpine looked like when it was new. It’s a great curved building. My guess would be it was originally white stucco, and that the siding came along later, but that’s just a guess.
Great old neon, with mountains wearing a Tyrolean hat. The sign is located in a park attached to the bar, just across the parking lot. The bushes, which once provided a bit of privacy to the park, now have grown to the point where they nearly obscure the sign.
Some shots of the interior of the Alpine. It’s for sale for $285,000. http://www.markovichinc.com/bin/web/real_estate/AR82693/ACTIVATE_FRAMES/COMMERCIAL_LISTINGS/Butte/1411074861.html
Here’s an exciting find from Walkerville, up above Butte. With the “66 Years of Public Service”, it puts the date of painting around 1935. There are a few layers of different ghost signs visible one on top of another, but it’s hard to say what the other layers are. At some point, likely in the ’60s or ’70s the building was nearly completely remodeled, with a metal facade and stucco and brick sides, studded out from the original brick structure. The parapet is crumbling, and likely contributed to the renovations. It appears the building was for sale several years back, and presumably was sold, as the renovations have been largely stripped off, exposing the historic building inside.
It looks like this one’s been out of business for a while, but with the glass brick windows and heavy door, this was formerly a bar. Before then, it was the Walkerville Mercantile Company, with a partially exposed ghost sign on the opposite side of the building identifying it as such. It’s a solid brick building and originally had arched windows and an arched doorway on the ground floor. There is a faint ghost sign at the top that reads “Family Liquors”. This is located at the corner of North Main St. and West Daly.
I love Google Maps’s new time-machine feature. Here’s a shot from 2012 of the same building showing some particularly ugly remodeling. It did, however, protect the ghost signs, which otherwise would likely have faded considerably more by now. The other side, with the Walkerville Mercantile and another Bull Durham Tobacco sign, were also studded out and stuccoed/bricked over. That covering has been partially removed.
Here are a couple of drawings I did while in Butte last fall.
The building of the Club 13 was built in the 1880s and renovated into its current form, with corner door, porcelain enamel facade, and glass brick, in the 1930s. The blue is so striking against the skies we have out here.
The backside is probably my favorite alley in Butte. So many textures, from the ghost signs, from staining, from 80 year old graffiti carved into the bricks, replaced sections of brick, voids left from removed fire escapes. A lot going on.
With the rise of refrigeration and the demise of iceboxes and block ice, an old fashioned ice house like this is a surprising find. It’s a typology from another era, another way of day to day life.
A photo of a different ice loading bay from Shorpy.com, showing what this kind of setup would have been like 80 years ago.
I love Butte. It’s about 85 miles west of me, which in Montana terms is a hop skip and a jump. Every time I go, I comb the streets and always find new and interesting things and always leave with the feeling that I’ve barely scratched the surface. Butte is a city of hidden treasures, of tucked away secrets, of back rooms and second stories.
Diner Hunter 