Between 1878 and 1882, Dodge City's business center stood just north of the railroad tracks along Front Street, where in the two or three blocks west of the depot settlers, travelers, cowboys, and soldiers could find nearly everything they needed. Known businesses included a blacksmith and wagon shop, saddle and harness shop, Dr. T.L. McCarty's drug store and post office, merchandise and mercantile houses, hardware and dry goods stores, a barber shop, restaurant, opera house, boot and tailor shops, butcher shop, bakery, the Dodge House hotel, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad depot, along with eight saloons such as the Alamo, Long Branch, Lone Star, Alhambra, and Occident. The first business buildings were simple frame structures, but fires in 1885 destroyed much of downtown and several warehouses south of the railroad, after which brick buildings replaced them until an Urban Renewal project removed them in the early 1970s. Front Street served cowboys arriving from long cattle trails, who often bought new clothes and supplies from firms such as Rath and Company, later Robert M. Wright's General Merchandise Company, one of the largest businesses in western Kansas. They also sought recreation in saloons that offered mixed drinks, ice-cold beer, billiard tables, music, gambling rooms, and even cells for drunks, while the Dodge House, the town's primary hotel from 1872 to 1883, provided thirty-eight rooms, a restaurant, bar, and billiard hall and also housed a U.S. Army Signal Corps weather station between 1874 and 1876. Front Street's changing businesses and lively frontier life made nineteenth-century Dodge City a distinctive Old West setting whose stories and legends endured for later generations.