At a candidate forum last week, the moderator asked the six contenders for city council their opinion of downtown Kalispell. It was an area in which all of them agreed – they support its prosperity. Yet as someone who has worked in the center of the city, albeit for just over two years, it’s hard to imagine what that means.
There have been hopeful signs in that time, as incumbent Mayor Pam Kennedy pointed out at the debate. True, it appears more new businesses have recently moved into downtown than have moved out. And several – like Bonelli’s (Italian food), Camas Creek (yarn), Fawn (clothes) and Red’s Roost (bar) – have some staying power. But it is still a stretch to think of downtown Kalispell as a destination for entertainment.
To get a clearer picture of what Kalispell could look like, city officials should survey the past, before the highway that is our Main Street became far busier with those passing through than those window shopping. A small piece of that history is returning, with the reopening of the Kalispell Bar, which had many of our online readers reflecting with nostalgia on an era when this city bustled.
On a story about the “KB” returning, readers shared their memories of a time much different than today, a time when there were bars with a “little pinball and a punchboard.”
Back then, they wrote, the Kalispell Bar served “the best, hot winter and Christmas drinks.” The Palm “served Chinese noodles, late into the night.” And, for dancing, there was always the Eagles.
Back then, “my sister and I used to ride our bikes into town just to ride the escalator at Montgomery Wards. We loved hanging out in Woolworths, and we passed many hours drinking coffee or tea at Frank’s BiRight drug store.”
Back then, there were Penny’s and Gambles and Kings Market. There were two music stores where “buyers could listen to records in booths.”
While it’s often easy to recall the past as better days than the present, one reader, as evidence, linked to this photo he took on Kalispell’s Main Street in 1980, near where the KB will reopen in the coming weeks.
I e-mailed Joel Bonda and asked him the story behind it. He said the mimes were promoting a dance in the park near the courthouse and he “exposed about four rolls of film as they wandered around the downtown area.”
“One of the things that is noticeable in the picture is how wide the sidewalks were back then,” Bonda wrote. “Back in the mid 1970s, when I moved to the valley, you could get just about everything you needed within three blocks of Main Street – everything from a college education to a Volkswagen to sporting goods and groceries.”
What’s most striking about the picture, besides the mimes, is the number of people on the sidewalk behind them.
Today, several downtown business owners are working tirelessly, with some success, to lure crowds back downtown. With a bypass now in the works that should lessen traffic through the city and increasingly active members of the Business Improvement District, whoever is elected to city council will be poised to shape Kalispell into something that (while modern) might better reflect 1980’s bustle.
“Kalispell was a Main Street-type of town back then,” Bonda wrote, “and I probably miss that the most today.”
Many of us, who weren’t around to see it back then, miss it too.