Old Butte Historical Adventures - City Underground Tour

The story

In 2004, a local preservation group began prying open what decades of municipal silence had sealed off beneath Uptown Butte. What they uncovered wasn't a set of empty crawlspaces, but fully intact rooms from the boomtown's illicit heyday. Beneath the sidewalks near Main Street lies the Rookwood Speakeasy—a Roaring Twenties subterranean bar hidden behind a basement coat closet with a two-way mirror, sealed away during Prohibition and untouched for more than half a century. Walk down today and you'll find original terrazzo flooring, dark hardwood wainscoting, and support columns carved with griffins, looking less like a museum exhibit and more like a lounge where the crowd vanished overnight.

The subterranean circuit doesn't end with bootleg gin. The tour pulls you into the 1890 City Jail, a gloomy stone-and-iron facility that remained in continuous municipal service until 1971. Its holding cells carry a notorious piece of local pop history: it was inside these subterranean bars that young Robert Craig Knievel landed after a reckless driving arrest, earning the rhyming moniker 'Evel' from an amused jailer. Between the damp holding cells, a vintage 1950s barber shop setup, and forgotten subterranean vaults stretching right beneath public foot traffic, the walk lays bare how much of Butte's real history went down under the street line.