Filed Under Butte

Finberg's Furniture Store

Butte National Historic Landmark District

French-Canadian brothers founded the Nadeau Investment Company in the late 1800s and amassed Butte real estate, much of it red-light properties that made the family wealthy. Their holdings at the height of Butte’s tenderloin included the far-famed Mercury Street Dumas Hotel and the Copper Block at Wyoming and Galena. The Nadeaus also owned legitimate commercial real estate like this property they purchased in 1886; portions of the present building date to circa 1885. In 1927, the Nadeaus remodeled the façade. The buff brick in a herringbone pattern with diamond and triangle concrete insets speaks to the 1920s trend toward subtle ornamentation. By 1928, E. J. McMahon’s cigar store and the Central Café occupied the ground floor. The Olympia Club, a soft drink parlor likely disguising a speakeasy, operated in the rear during Prohibition. Russian Jewish immigrant Samuel Finberg moved his furniture store to this location in 1932 where he became a local fixture, eventually purchasing the building from the Nadeaus in 1946. Finberg was in business here until he handed over the store to his son in 1966.

Images

Finberg's Furniture Store
Finberg's Furniture Store Finberg's Furniture Store (PAc 91-51 B1 RollCBD09 F29). Front view of the building, facing south on East Park Street. B&W. Source: Montana State Historic Preservation Office from the Photograph Archives at the Montana Historical Society Creator: Photographer unidentified Date: 1985

Location

44 East Park Street, Butte, Montana | Private

Metadata

The Montana National Register Sign Program, “Finberg's Furniture Store,” Historic Montana, accessed March 29, 2024, https://historicmt.org/items/show/2021.