I am not sure why these faded patio chairs remind me so much of the spirit of the North Side, but they do. There were in an alley off North 24th Street.
When the mansion of Billings pioneer Paul J. McCormick was torn down to make way for the Transwestern complex on North 32nd Street, part of it was cut up and rebuilt on the North Side, on Burnstead Drive.
If you want to get some sense of what Billings was like in the old days, you can’t do much better than walk through the North Side, that triangle of land bordered by the BBWA Canal, North 27th Street and Sixth Avenue North.
Officially, the North Park Neighborhood as designated by the city of Billings extends south all the way to Montana Avenue. But for me, the neighborhood’s cohesiveness can’t survive the jump across Sixth Avenue, a busy four-lane, one-way street that marks the southern boundary as obviously as the canal does to the north.
Ed Kemmick
Between Sixth and Montana, commercial uses have mostly crowded out the houses, so that it feels less like a neighborhood than an aging industrial park sown with a few scattered homes. Besides, I already named that area Forlornville in another photographic outing.
So let’s talk about what I think of as the real North Side, that historic part of Billings that rewards the patient stroller with multiple glimpses into this city’s earlier days.
There are plenty of portions of the South Side that have a similar feel, but the South Side is so large, with so many parts and pockets and discrete components, that I have trouble thinking of it as a neighborhood at all.
But the North Side is a fairly compact triangle, and if you leave out of consideration its northeast corner, which is full of apartment buildings and multi-family dwellings, the rest of it has a distinct and fairly uniform feel to it.
It feels like what it has always been: the modest, working-class, blue-collar neighborhood of Billings. There are a few, but only a very few, of the grand old houses that still dot the South Side, that dominate the neighborhood just west of the Moss Mansion and that are not uncommon in the North Elevation and some of the close-in neighborhoods under the Rims.
It is in keeping with the spirit of the neighborhood that many of the houses in the oldest part of the North Side were built by one man, a Greek immigrant by the name of Tom Sturios (shortened in transit from Stouriotis), whose farm once took up most of the area. When he subdivided his farm and began selling lots in the 1930s and ’40s, Sturios built many of the houses himself—after digging the basements by hand.
The streets are all very wide, dating from an era when it seemed like there was plenty of room in the world, and of course there are sidewalks everywhere, as in all the old neighborhoods.
If you walk around the North Side, you’ll stumble on all sorts of surprises. In one section of the neighborhood you might feel like you’re in the old part of any American city and then, a minute later, wonder if you haven’t come upon the outskirts of a farm town.
In one part of the North Side in particular, on the east end of Ninth and Tenth streets, there are some oddly shaped, and unaccountably huge, lots. I heard this might be a remnant of the days when there was a golf course there, but I don’t know. I do remember that years ago, when the City Council was thinking of basing some fee or other on the square footage of people’s lots, a bunch of North Siders showed up to oppose the move.
There were people living in quite modest houses who happened to have lots of 20,000 square feet, or even much larger. The council saw their point and came up with another billing formula.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Most of the north-side streets on the North side dead-end at the BBWA Canal, and you see a lot of these scenes: Signs warning people not to trespass on ditch right-of-way…right next to well-worn paths leading to ditch right-of-way.
There are places where one neighbor has invested lots of time and money in remodeling an old house, right next to another house that hasn’t seen a coat of paint since the Carter administration, or a new shingle since Nixon occupied the White House.
I especially like walking the alleys on the North Side. Front yards are generally what homeowners want you to see; back yards are for living in, sort of like the difference between a dining room and an unfinished basement. In the back is where you’ll see old cars, tractors, rampant gardens, clotheslines, heaps of lumber, half-finished construction projects, decrepit patio furniture and no end of dogs.
You will also find a wonderful assortment of old, old sheds, obviously homemade, consisting of weather-beaten boards or rusted corrugated steel. No ready-made sheds from Lowe’s for these hearty folk.
And looming over the whole neighborhood are the Rims, those golden-hued sandstone ramparts that, in recent years in other parts of town, have begun to show a marked increase in the shedding of enormous stone slabs and boulders.
I was struck the other day by the proximity of the BBWA canal, the Rims and all those hundreds of apartments up in the northeast corner of the North Side. I don’t want to indulge in fear-mongering, but given the events of the past few years, it seems more like a question of when than if there will be a rockfall on the North Side.
And if a boulder should open a breach in the canal when it is bank-full of Yellowstone River water? As I said, I don’t want to be a fear-monger…
Anyway, those are my impressions of the North Side. There is so much more to say about the neighborhood, but I will let my photos (there’s a gallery full of them above) tell the rest of the story.
