View Source: WilmaMissoulaNight

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A view downtown Missoula taken from the top of the Wilma Building.

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The Wilma is really the psychic heart of Missoula.  It's an old theater right in the middle of downtown that hosted all the famous artists back in the 20s.  Like all great old theaters, it has decayed.  By the lat 1980s, it was owned and operated by a fellow who married a pigeon (he was a little loopy).  To celebrate his love for this pigeon, he named the small theater in the basement of the building the ''Chapel of the Dove''.

I saw ''Pulp Fiction'' in the Chapel of the Dove in 1994.  By that time the place was so run down that they only had one projector working and you had to wait while they switched reels.

Another notable detail of the Wilma is that it had a manually-operated elevator.  There was always someone on duty to run it (the operator also had other tasks in the building, like mopping the floors).

The front of the Wilma was apparently once a hotel.  At some point it was carved up in to apartments, and a number of my friends ended up living there over the years.

So to get to someone's apartment, you would go in to the lobby and ring the buzzer on the elevator.  Eventually the operator would bring the elevator to your level (this could take a while if it was the middle of the night and the operator was off mopping somewhere).  The operators were trained to be very distrustful - they wouldn't just take you to the floor you asked for - they would first demand to know who you were there to see.  If you answered them satisfactorily, they would take you to your floor.

You couldn't just take the stairs up to someone's apartment because there was a locked door on the stairs that would only open when you weree coming out - thus the elevator operator controlled all access to the apartments on floors 3 through 8.  Actually it was a nice setup.

They finally remodelled the Wilma a bit in 1999 after the crazy owner died and replaced the elevator with a modern automatic one.

Oh, in case I wasn't clear, the reason there was an operator is that the elevator wouldn't just stop at a floor automatically - the operator had to control it while it was moving and stop it at just the right moment to level it with the floor.

Update 2002: Latest word is the Wilma is now closed down because the owner ran out of money.
Update 2004: Latest word is the Wilma is up and running with three theaters, 2 that play movies and one 1,000 seat auditorium.  Everything is working great.

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View Source: WilmaMissoulaNight

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