Sometimes you have to know a town inside and out to appreciate its architecture on an emotional level. I grew up in Missoula and attended Hellgate High School in the mid-1990s. I had a few classes with windows that faced out onto Higgins Avenue from which I could view a block of elegant, old brownstones on Roosevelt Street.
I was a romantic even then, spending evenings with friends at the Crystal Theater (where Gild Brewing is now), watching foreign films set in Paris and Spain. I had not yet seen much of the world but I got a glimpse of the beauty of old-world architecture through these films. Those row houses felt as old-world as you get in a place like Missoula, and it struck me as exactly the kind of historic, artsy place I would one day want to live in. I imagined throwing dinner parties and sitting in the living room talking about world politics with my friends, like Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face” or something.
It wasn’t until later, when I returned to Missoula after living a few other places—Chicago, San Francisco, Portland—that I learned more of the actual history behind the apartments I coveted. While working at the Missoula Independent as the arts and culture editor I wrote a few architectural stories, and that’s where I learned about A.J. Gibson, Missoula’s most famous architect, who designed the apartments, built in 1909. They were referred to as the University apartments or the Roosevelt apartments. But they were first named the Johnson Flats after the builder, Charles E. Johnson, a cement contractor and the owner of Johnson Livery, Cab and Transfer Stable. They were considered one of the finest versions of modular row houses at the time.
Gibson was not formally trained in architecture but he apprenticed in Butte and moved to Missoula in 1887. Over the years he would design public, residential, and commercial buildings across the valley, some of which comprise the city’s most iconic structures including the Central High School (now Hellgate), the Missoula County Courthouse, the Atlantic Hotel, the original Missoula Art Museum (which was built as the public library), the Greenough Mansion, and the Marcus Daly Mansion in Hamilton. He also designed five of the University of Montana’s first buildings, including the stately brick Main Hall.
His single-family homes and multifamily buildings are what showcase how diverse his style was. Hipólito Rafael Chacón, a UM professor of art history, notes that Gibson was a revivalist in that his architecture echoed the styles of previous architects. But he also stayed on top of trends. He designed everything from modest bungalows to Queen Anne-style follies to Spanish mission-style dwellings with arched colonnades and twisted, barley-sugar columns. Versions of his modular row houses, like the Roosevelt, can be found up and down 5th and 6th streets, with their combination of neoclassical and Queen Anne details.
The Roosevelt apartments were built at a time that was a little bit like what Missoula is going through now: a growing city with a housing crunch. When the University of Montana opened its doors at the turn of the 20th century, the neighborhood between Higgins Avenue and campus developed rapidly. There was already a lot of construction happening on the south side of the river, including a new bridge and the Slant Street neighborhoods to the west of Higgins.
To understand this area of Missoula, you have to know the weird story behind the Slant Streets. If you have driven through the neighborhood just west and south of Hellgate High School, you know the maddening exercise of trying to navigate streets that seem to have gone rogue from the main drag like broken guitar strings popped loose from their frets. If you think you can’t get lost in a small place like Missoula, the Slant Streets will prove you wrong.
The Slant Streets came to be because two lawyers in the 1880s, W.M. Bickford and W.J. Stephens, tried to plot out a new town called South Missoula with streets running parallel and perpendicular to what was known as the wagon road with a bridge crossing the river at Stephens Avenue. However, the city’s co-founder, CP Higgins, made the decision to connect the bridge to Higgins Avenue and the streets in that area were built in grid form. This city planning feud is an oft told story and was the subject of a viral Tweet in 2019 in which a Google map showed an aerial view of the Slant Streets amid the rest of the gridded city. It some Twitter users and online travel sites to declare it one of into the weirdest and worst city planning examples in the country.
At the edge of the Slant Streets and the beginning of the grid is an oddball triangle block that doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. And in that prominent spot is where the Roosevelt apartments were built in 1909.
“It’s speculative on my part,” said Rafael, “but the fact is there are no Gibson buildings as far as we know in the Slant Streets. I don’t know if that’s because he didn’t favor the development of a new town or if he didn’t have a good working relationship with the developers of that project. The history is a little bit murky on that.”
Gibson believed in good craftsmanship and design for everyone. Many of his dwellings were for working class people as well as the wealthy. The Roosevelt apartments were built to house university faculty and staff as well as staff from the high school. They are small dwellings for small families or single occupants. The humbleness of size is outweighed by the beauty of large bay windows and leaded glass transoms that filter rainbows across the hardwood floors, and the built-in China closets with beveled glass doors in the dining room.
In the years since I returned to Missoula I’ve seen the city develop in wonderful ways with new restaurants, bakeries, arts, and community spaces. The housing crisis however has left a bad taste, as people with means are buying up houses sight unseen and landlords hike up their rents so that service workers can no longer afford to live here. I made it just under the wire, with help from family, to purchase a Roosevelt apartment when they were recently turned to condos. It feels lucky and maybe a little serendipitous. It’s a dream I hope others who work and live here can attain.
During Gibson’s time, the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright criticized a lot of America’s new architecture as inhumane. He believed buildings should be both functional but aesthetically pleasing in a way that enriched the people living inside. And he thought this was true for everyone: Not just the rich, but the working class and children who were both often seen as groups that did not appreciate, understand, or need beauty.
“He was talking about how Americans live in cubes and boxes—cages, basically,” Rafael said. “He described the windows as guillotines. So there was this awareness that American architecture had very mean spaces.”
Contrary to popular belief, the building of multi-family homes and condos isn’t new in Missoula. It’s exactly what Gibson was doing but he was doing it with great care and an eye for beauty—and that’s something we should keep in mind. He also built affordable spaces, which is another thing we can learn from, and require to get out of this crisis.
“AJ Gibson was an important developer—not just an important architect, designer, and contractor,” Rafael said. “He had his sights on how this city is going to grow reasonably. And he wasn’t alone. These are historic patterns I think we can learn from on how to do it sensitively, how to do it beautifully. With him, design and craftsmanship went hand in hand and that’s something we need to be mindful of as we develop today.”