Music Hall, Theatre, Saloon, and Rooming House, through the years this has seemingly done it all, today including gambling house, being the present home of Gamer’s Cafe & Casino. Quite Queen Anne in its styling, it is one of the half dozen or so of Butte's surviving buildings which sports a corner tower, or turret. With keyhole windows, a pair of oriel dormers jutting from its Second Empire roof, a prominent gabled centre portico with little hipped roof towers on each of its sides, Roman arched windows mixed in with the rectangular ones, and stone lintels, modillions and dentils, this is a really "busy" building. Lots of eye candy here.
And, as if that weren't enough, the building has, in recent years, been forced to house a casino, which has, as one would expect, added neon to the façade, creating something of an anachronism of the building. While Gamer's Cafe has been around since 1905, it would seem that Gamer's Casino is a more recent addition.
The hall was built in 1892 by John H. Curtis, an immigrant from County Cork, Ireland. Curtis came to America with his family in 1843 as a child of 5, settling in Missouri. In 1866 he travelled to Helena, soon becoming a successful grocer. Not long after moving to Butte on August 20, 1880, he became a phenomenally successful real estate investor, soon owning property not only in Butte, but also in Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, and Madison Counties. We assume that, being of Irish stock, Curtis felt right at home in Butte as it had then, and still has today, one of the largest concentrations of Irish immigrants and descendants in the country.