Broadway Avenue: A Great Street in a Small Town
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Broadway Avenue, the main street of Red Lodge, is one of the better-preserved nineteenth-century commercial streets in Montana. The brick storefronts that line it were built during the coal-boom years of the eighteen eighties through the nineteen tens, when Red Lodge was a prosperous enough industrial town to invest in architecture meant to last. The American Planning Association named Broadway Avenue a Great Street in twenty ten, a recognition of how well the physical fabric of the street has been maintained while continuing to function as a genuine working commercial center rather than a museum district.
The Carbon County Historical Society and Museum occupies the three-story Labor Temple, a building put up in nineteen oh nine by the Red Lodge miners union. The museum itself began in nineteen fifty-nine, when Alice Greenough started it to house the collection of her rodeo family, and its exhibits cover the early history of the town as well as the rodeo heritage of the surrounding ranching culture.
The architecture of Broadway reflects the immigration history that built the town. Buildings erected by Finnish, Italian, and other immigrant entrepreneurs sit alongside those built by the mining company itself, and the variety of scale and ambition in a compact commercial block tells you something about the range of resources that converged in this coal town at its peak. Red Lodge was never as wealthy as the silver towns of the central Rockies, but its downtown has survived in a way that some of those wealthier places have not, which is another argument for the durability of communities built by people who came to work rather than to speculate.
