Fire and Vice
Photography: David Hampshire and Park City Historical Society
In the summer of 1964, Matt Alvarez was scouting locations for a new ski shop when he spotted a two-story building on the southeast corner of Park and Heber avenues. There were boards on the windows, and the building desperately needed paint, but it looked solid enough. Alvarez decided to investigate.
“So we opened the building up,” Alvarez said in a recent interview. “It was like opening up a casket, in a sense.”
There were no bodies. However, on the east side of the second floor, he stumbled across a sordid skeleton of Park City’s past: a large room that had been partitioned off into cubicles. Each cubicle contained an army-style folding cot.
“And you know what they were used for, of course,” he said. “That was Mrs. Foster’s whorehouse.”
If you were to ask people to name Park City’s most significant buildings, this one probably wouldn’t make many lists. But few structures have witnessed more of the town’s history and could tell more stories.
County records show that the property on this corner was purchased by John Harwood in February 1891. Harwood, an employee of the Daly Mine, built a two-story house on the property later that year.
Seven years later, downtown Park City was gutted by a devastating fire. Flames broke out at the American Hotel on upper Main Street, then swept down the street, pushed by a strong breeze out of Empire Canyon. Within hours, more than 200 buildings?virtually the entire business district?were gone, from Heber Avenue up to the present location of the Treasure Mountain Inn. A front-page sketch in the June 21, 1898, Salt Lake Tribune showed a scene of surreal devastation. The block between Main Street and Park Avenue was leveled, with John Harwood’s house the only survivor, its clean geometry conspicuous in a wasteland of blackened stubble.
Harwood’s secret? While virtually every other owner had built out of wood or brick, he had used concrete.
In December 1907, the Harwood family sold the house to William Ritter. According to a 1988 story in this magazine by Raye C. Ringholz, the Ritter family had just moved to town from Midway where they had operated Ritter’s Hot Pots (now the Homestead). Although William and his wife later separated, their son, Willis, stayed in Park City long enough to finish high school.
Willis Ritter went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago Law School, and in 1926 -- only eight years out of Park City High School -- returned to Utah as a full professor at the University of Utah. In 1949, President Harry Truman appointed him a federal judge.
In almost 30 years on the bench, Ritter became known as a cantankerous, unpredictable judge who waged a running battle with the media. (He once scolded this writer for having the nerve to take notes in his courtroom.) In 1976, members of the Utah Bar Association lobbied for his impeachment, accusing him of “being an arbitrary dictator with little or no regard for the law or fair play.” At the time of his death in March 1978, the U.S. Department of Justice was preparing to prevent him from hearing any further federal cases.
Meanwhile, Ritter’s boyhood home had fallen on hard times. It was sold for back taxes in 1916, changed hands several times in the next 20 years, then was purchased by a mechanic at the Silver King Mill, Dean Porter Foster -- better known as -- Slim -- in the summer of 1936.
That December, the concrete house provided a backdrop for probably the most violent confrontation in a century of often-strained relations between miners and management. In an attempt to break a nine-week strike by local miners, management had called in about 125 non-union workers from Heber City and other nearby towns. When they showed up for work on Saturday, December 12, about 400 union pickets were there to greet them. A photograph in the December 13th Salt Lake Tribune shows a mob of grim-faced miners clustered around the house. Several people are standing on a porch on the side of the building, apparently to watch for the oncoming caravan.
When the caravan of non-union workers arrived, the battle began. “Immediately, the mass of pickets closed in from both sides,” the Tribune reported. “Non-union men were snatched from the machines, and the two first cars were overturned by the pickets. Other caravan members alighted from the cars, to be met with the flying fists of the union men, and to suffer bruised and bleeding heads and faces.” The Tribune said that about 40 men were injured before Sheriff Ephraim Adamson could break up the fracas.
Tax records suggest that Slim Foster did little to upgrade the old building. In 1949, it was described as “vacated” and in “poor condition.” However, by the early 1950s, his wife Maurine had turned it into a restaurant.
Maurine Foster’s struggle to make ends meet in a town struggling to survive the closure of its major mines was witnessed by Park City native Gary Kimball. In a 1987 magazine article, Kimball recalled her decision to diversify:
“‘God knows, I’ve tried selling food, and they don’t want that,’ I overheard her say in Thompson’s Grocery Store. ‘I’ll just have to sell them what they want.’ A short time later, I would discover what she was selling.”
On the night of March 9, 1953, Kimball was passing the concrete house on his way home from the Egyptian Theatre when he was blinded by a powerful spotlight. “Suddenly two of the biggest plainclothes cops I’ve ever seen pounced on me and shoved me into the back of a parked car.” He had stumbled onto a police raid on Foster’s whorehouse.
He managed to convince the police of his innocence, but the raid marked the end of the line for Maurine Foster’s business, at least at that location. Kimball recalled that she moved to a house on Easy Street (not far from the present “shoe tree” on Deer Valley Drive) until another raid in December 1954.
Foster died in January 1956. Five years later, a Salt Lake City investor bought the concrete house from her estate. An investor? In Park City?
In May 1961, the major local mining company had announced plans to develop a year-round recreation complex on some of its land west of town, fueling a surge in real-estate prices. In December 1963, the company opened Treasure Mountains ski resort (now Park City Mountain Resort). And it was this climate of renewed optimism that lured Matt Alvarez and his partners, David Chaplin and Gordy Despain, to the concrete house in the summer of 1964. They signed a lease with an option to purchase. Chaplin, a local artist, painted the first sign for their new business -- the Timberhaus.
Since the building was then on the main route into town, they assumed “there would be a fair amount of traffic coming up Park Avenue, turning on Heber and going up Main Street. That was the traffic pattern,” Alvarez said. “What happened was, oftentimes there would be nobody -- nobody -- coming up the street.”
Skiers from Salt Lake City had little reason to visit Main Street. They would drive directly to the resort, stopping -- if they stopped at all?only at the businesses on the edge of town.
Rather than wait for the occasional customer, Alvarez would hang out in a small grocery store on the other side of Park Avenue owned by Bill Henrion and Gary Kimball. It was from Kimball that Alvarez learned the history of the concrete house.
“It was nothing for us to sit over there and talk all day long,” Alvarez said. “If my customer came in, you know, it was great!”
Chaplin and Despain soon turned their attention to renovating the Imperial Hotel, leaving the Timberhaus in the hands of Matt Alvarez and his wife Helen. They kept the ground floor of the building as retail space but converted the top floor into an apartment for themselves and their two young sons. By the mid-1970s, business had improved enough for them to justify a modern glass-and-steel addition on the east side.
The high interest rates of the early 1980s ultimately forced Matt and Helen Alvarez to sell the business and the buildings to Bahnhof Sport. In the mid-1990s, the space was converted to the use that Maurine Foster originally envisioned -- a restaurant. The Mercato Mediterraneo di Nonna Maria anchored the corner for about a decade before passing the torch to the Buona Vita.
But these days, the restaurant presumably supports itself.
David Hampshire recently collaborated with local historian Hal Compton on a chapter about Park City mining for a book, “From the Ground Up: A History of Mining in Utah,” which is due to be published this fall by Utah State University Press.
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