Reeder's Alley

At the south end of Last Chance Gulch, a cluster of brick rowhouses from the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties still stands at the base of Mount Helena. Louis Reeder built the original structures to house miners, mule skinners, and laborers who needed cheap lodging near the gulch. The buildings are part of the oldest intact neighborhood of early Helena, small and dense. Preservation kept them standing, and today Reeder's Alley operates as a small retail and dining district, its original rooflines intact, a surviving corner of the working-class Helena that built the mansions on the West Side.