From a Tent to Three Storeys: The Bentley Block
In June 1885, a man named Harry Bentley set up a store in a tent. That's it. A tent, some goods hauled in from Medicine Hat, and a mining camp that didn't know it was becoming a city.
By fall, the tent was a two-storey store. By 1905, the company he'd founded had raised the city's first three-storey building, groceries below, clothing above, dry goods at the top. Bentley never saw it. He'd left the company years earlier, but his name stayed on the door.
The doors closed in 1915. After that, the trail gets thin. A hardware store, some say. A furniture store, others remember. Who kept the lights on last, nobody seems to have written down.
Today, the windows on 5th Street South are boarded.
So it waits.
Boards on a building don't mean the end. They just mean the future is open.
