51 Below Speakeasy

The story

In 1913, following the devastating Thompson Block fire a year earlier, the Miner's Savings and Trust Company constructed a massive, 17-inch-thick concrete stronghold in Uptown Butte. The building originally housed three distinct operations: the bank on the street level, quarters for miners upstairs, and National Furs in the basement. It was designed to be virtually indestructible, which explains why the heavy reinforced vaults down below survived intact long after the original bank vanished.

When the Ackerman family restored the property into The Miner's Hotel in 2014, they converted the basement's two original 1913 bank vaults into 51 Below Speakeasy. One of those spaces served as a secure fur vault where wealthy women during Butte's mining boom paid to store their mink and fox coats in climate-controlled safety. In 2022, local owners Thomas Klemp, Chuckie Richards, and Beau Randall took over, preserving the original wooden floors and hanging vintage furs along the thick vault walls as a nod to the room's past life.

Getting in requires navigating a plain basement entryway under 53 West Park Street—you either pick up the wall-mounted rotary phone or knock three times until a false wall slides open. Inside, you're sitting inside actual 110-year-old steel and concrete safe rooms, sipping cocktails in the very spaces built to protect copper-boom cash and cold-weather luxury.