The Gleim Building
Near Missoula, Montana
On the south side of downtown Missoula stands a three-story brick building that dates to eighteen ninety-three, when Missoula was a rough railroad and lumber town. The Gleim Building was built for Mary Gleim, a madam known as the Queen of Missoula's Bad Lands, and operated as a brothel until the city shut down the red light district in nineteen sixteen. A billiard parlor came later.
It was one of several such establishments that operated openly in Missoula's tenderloin district through the early nineteen hundreds. The building survived successive waves of downtown redevelopment that demolished most of its contemporaries, and it sits on the National Register of Historic Places today as a record of the commercial culture that accompanied western boomtowns. It is among the oldest commercial buildings still standing in Missoula.
