As residents of Butte headed to vote in person last month, they skipped the usual polling location of Butte-Silver Bow Civic Center and instead walked through the doors of another building most locals had frequented for years -- albeit for an entirely different purpose.
They were casting their ballots in a now-closed Herberger’s, the department store which shuttered in 2018 in the Butte Plaza Mall. The mall, like most of its contemporaries, stands as a limping shell of its former self. It’s about a mile and a half from the civic center, where the nearly 30,000-square-foot space was otherwise occupied with a production stage, cast and crew for the latest spinoff of the wildly popular Yellowstone franchise.
