Chateau Club Burns – by Jay Persen
The article below appeared in The Missoulian April 20, 2011
The site of the once popular Club Chateau Restaurant was destroyed by an early morning fire Wednesday. The historic building was located off Highway 200 East in Piney Grove between East Missoula and Bonner.
Brent Christopherson, who is an assistant with the Missoula Rural Fire Department, said smoke was billowing out when they arrived and there wasn’t much they could do to save the building. He said they did a check of the building to make sure no one was inside.
Fire crews from Missoula Rural Fire Dept., Missoula city, Clinton and East Missoula arrived to help fight the blaze and make sure the fire didn’t spread to nearby homes.
The building was the site of the Club Chateau, a popular restaurant from the 50’s through the 70’s. It later was turned into a nightclub with live music and then a casino. It became the home of Blue Star Tipis in the 1990s.
In recent years it has been vacant and there had been a problem with transients staying in the building. Christopherson said both a construction crew and Missoula County sheriff’s deputies struggled to keep the transients out of the building. He added that there was supposedly someone in the building yesterday and that will be investigated when looking for the cause of the fire.
The owner of the building was located in the Dominican Republic and notified of the fire.