The Cleveland Building sat empty for almost forty years. Built in 1916 on East Galena Street, it spent most of the twentieth century as a Leskovar family car dealership, then just sat there through the eighties, nineties, and 2000s while Uptown Butte cycled through its long stretch of boarded windows and for-lease signs. Last September, after three years of construction, it reopened as the Cleveland Market. Same building. Same brick. Six tenants inside instead of a showroom floor.
That reopening tells you more about what's actually happening in Uptown Butte right now than anything the district's new governing board has managed to do yet, and the timing of both is the real story here.
What moved into forty years of vacancy
Walk into the Cleveland Market today and you'll find The Local, a market deli that started as a food truck and a small kitchen out at the industrial park before owner Katie Flint got a permanent Uptown address with a beer and wine license attached. Next to it is the relocated Dancing Rainbow Natural Grocery, a Black Dog Creamery ice cream counter, a leatherworking studio called Work in Progress run by Gilmore McLean, a gift shop named Something About February, and a vintage and home goods store called El Camino Collective.
None of that happened by committee. Building owner Carly Leskovar, whose family has held the property since 1957, had tenants committed to spaces two years before the doors opened. "This building has been in my family since 1957," she said when it finally did. The soft opening was timed to coincide with the Butte Food Truck Festival, so the first crowd through the door was already Uptown for something else.
That's the pattern worth noticing. The fill-in of Uptown's empty storefronts has been happening building owner by building owner, tenant by tenant, well ahead of any coordinated push to make it happen.
The district that's still figuring out trash cans
Butte spent years as the largest city in Montana without a business improvement district. That changed after a petition drive crossed the 60 percent threshold of Uptown property owners in 2024, county commissioners approved the district that winter, and a seven-member board (Shanna Adams, Azhar Bougary, Michael Potts, Jeff Riggs, Maisie Sulser, Matthew Stajcar, and Cassie Wick) was formally seated last September. The district covers roughly 249 parcels between Silver Street and Copper Street, and Washington Street and Arizona Street, and it's expected to generate around $220,000 a year for the neighborhood.
Here's where the district's actual priority list stood as of its April 2026 public forum:
| Priority raised at the forum | Status |
|---|---|
| Additional trash cans Uptown | Board voted to buy 10, plus 10 more from county storage |
| Sidewalk lighting | Identified as a concern, not yet funded |
| Greenery near Taco Bell Cantina bench area and the Broadway/Main parking lot | Idea stage |
| Wayfinding signage and a visitor kiosk | Funded through a $50,000 state Department of Commerce grant |
| Façade improvements, pop-up shop space, Sunday business hours | Floated by attendees, no action yet |
None of that is a criticism of the board. Snow removal, lighting, and trash pickup are the unglamorous plumbing that makes a commercial district function, and somebody has to do it. But it means the institutional effort to revive Uptown is still working through its startup list while the Cleveland Market has already been open for a year with six operating businesses inside it. The district's wayfinding kiosk hasn't gone in yet. The ice cream counter has.
The businesses betting on Uptown before the infrastructure catches up
The Cleveland Market isn't the only sign that owners are moving toward Uptown rather than away from it. Butte Copper Company relocated its shop from Harrison Avenue to West Granite Street, trading a commercial strip for a block of brick storefronts. Co-owner Jailee Coyne has talked about the shift in terms of foot traffic and character rather than square footage, noting how much has opened around her new location in a short span.
Then there's The Copper Plate, opened by Krista and Vinay in the historic district. Krista grew up in Butte, graduated from Butte High, and spent more than sixteen years working for Disney before coming home. Chef Vinay, originally from Mumbai, brought eighteen years of culinary background with him. The menu blends American traditional food with Indian flavor, which is not a combination Uptown Butte has had before, and it exists because two people specifically chose to build something in this neighborhood rather than somewhere else.
None of these are large investments by national standards. A market deli, a leather shop, a relocated retailer, a family-run restaurant. But stacked next to each other on a few blocks of Uptown, they add up to a district that's filling in from the ground up, storefront by storefront, while the formal apparatus meant to support that growth is still assembling its own priority list.
The weekly proof, if you want to see it yourself
If you want evidence that doesn't require reading a board meeting recap, Uptown Butte already runs two weekly fixtures that predate the BID entirely and don't depend on it to function.
Music on Main happens every Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. on North Main Street between Park and Broadway, running this year from July 2 through a September 3 season closer. That final show is a fan's choice format, where the audience votes on which of the year's bands gets one more turn on stage. The series is sponsored by Clearwater Credit Union and Butte Auto, with grant support from the Town Pump Charitable Foundation and the Superfund Advisory and Redevelopment Trust Authority, and it's organized independent of the district's own funding.
The Butte Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. through October 10 on West Park Street, between Park and Main and the Phoenix Building on Dakota Street. It's produce, cut flowers, plants, and Montana-made crafts, and it's been a Saturday morning fixture long enough that most Uptown regulars build their weekend around it without thinking about it.
Both events happen with or without the district's wayfinding kiosk. They're proof that Uptown's actual social infrastructure, the reasons people already walk these blocks on a given evening or morning, was built by individual organizers and business owners well before anyone formalized a tax assessment to fund improvements.
What this means if you already live here
The thesis isn't that Uptown Butte is thriving because of some coordinated master plan finally paying off. It's closer to the opposite. The neighborhood is filling back in because individual people, a building owner who inherited a family property, a chef who moved home, a shop owner who packed up and moved a few blocks north, decided to bet on these specific blocks before there was any institutional reason to expect it would work. The district exists now, and it will eventually fund the lighting and the greenery and the sidewalks that make all of this easier to sustain. But if you're looking for where Uptown Butte's momentum is actually coming from this year, it's not the board meeting agenda. It's the six storefronts inside a building that sat empty for forty years, and the Thursday night crowd on Main Street that's been showing up long before anyone put a name on the effort to make it official.
Next time you're walking past the Cleveland Building or catching a set at Music on Main, you're not looking at the result of a plan. You're looking at the plan still being written, one lease at a time.
If you're keeping an eye on what's happening in this neighborhood for reasons beyond a Thursday night out, whether that's a property you already own here or one you've been watching from a distance, Dayle Stahl knows this stretch of Montana block by block. Get a Free Home Valuation and find out what a piece of this changing neighborhood is actually worth right now.
