Uptown attracting attention

In short, it was missing people.

The population of Uptown, and Butte in general, had been in relative decline from the 1920s through the early 2000s, and that loss of customers carried with it a significant loss in business.

Revitalizing the old commercial district – warehouses, large office buildings and retail storefronts – was rarely feasible because the possibility for profit was slim and the cost of refurbishing large.

But recent investment into Uptown has been directed toward residential projects in an attempt to once again make one of the largest historic districts in the country self-sufficient and prosperous.

“Residential and commercial are inexorably linked,” said Nick Kujawa, the developer spearheading a multimillion-dollar renovation of the 80,000-square-foot Sears Building at 32 E. Granite St. in Uptown. “You have to have both.”

His building has both, with residential properties on the upper floors, commercial space at street level and a nonprofit museum set to operate out of the basement.

“It’s a gigantic step forward,” Karen Byrnes, Community Development and Urban Revitalization Agency director for Butte-Silver Bow, said of the project.

The crux of the new Sears Building is the 34 rental apartments on the building’s upper floors, which include penthouses that look over the city, to small one-bedroom flats. More than half of the apartments are already inhabited, only a few weeks after they became available Dec. 1.

Just down the street from the Sears Building, the 35,000-square-foot Leonard Hotel is in the midst of a

$2 million remodel of its own, and it will soon house 40 additional apartments.

That could put 100 more people living within two blocks of each other, and it opened a niche for an Uptown grocery store, something that the area has been without for more than a decade.

So Kujawa decided the first floor of the Sears Building would become the Hennessy Market, a 20,000-product grocery that includes organic and gluten-free products as well as traditional discount and national brands.

The Sears Building originally housed a grocery back in the early 1900s, and it’s one of those businesses that a neighborhood just can’t do without.

“I don’t know how many times these last six years I’ve heard people say that we need a grocery Uptown,” said Byrnes. “It’s a huge asset.”

George Everett, director of MainStreet Uptown Butte, a nonprofit that promotes the Uptown area, said rehabilitation of the Sears Building is a victory on many levels.

At the most basic, it took a long-dilapidated structure that had been a boarded-up eyesore for decades and spruced it up. The building now boasts large, wide well-lit windows and shows off an inviting storefront for cars driving up and down Granite Street.

But more than an aesthetic improvement, it brought economic development and people to Uptown.

“It shows me that people are starting to reinhabit the hill,” said Everett.

And that is the goal both for the development agencies and the businessmen. Kujawa said he would like to do what he has done with the Sears Building for other Uptown properties.

The Metals Bank, Acoma, Eugenia and Garland buildings have all been remodeled in the past thee years and now offer apartments for rent and purchase.

“The goal has always been to attract people to this area, to live Uptown,” said Byrnes.

Reporter Tim Trainor can be reached at (406) 496-5519 or at tim.trainor@lee.net.