Harvat Block

After an 1886 fire destroyed the one-story tin shop and hardware warehouse on this lot, meat merchant and rancher John Harvat bought the property two years later. Livingston architect I. J. Galbraith designed the Harvat Block, completed in 1890. Harvat first intended it for his meat market but instead opened his shop a few doors away and kept the building as an investment property. For most of its history, the first floor housed saloons and sometimes a restaurant, while during Prohibition the storefront became a billiards hall and soft drinks parlor. The second story served at different times as lodge rooms, hotel rooms, furnished rooms, and briefly a noodle parlor run by former railway worker Fukutaro Akao. Its rounded Romanesque-style second-story windows, elaborate corbelled brickwork, stone stringcourse, and galvanized iron cornice and pediment reflected Livingston’s optimism and the nation’s taste for flashy ornamentation in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Livingston, Montana · United States