Friday, Oct. 2, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Tara Leon-Bertoli doesn’t just have a window to history. She restored it.
As owner of the Boulder City Company Store and a nearly lifelong resident of the town that grew from the seed of the Hoover Dam, Leon-Bertoli poured herself into bringing the shell of a Depression-era department store back to its glory. She revived the name of what was once a social hub during the dam’s construction, and celebrates Boulder City’s unique character with a singularly local combination coffee shop-souvenir boutique.
Her city returned the favor by naming the shop as one of the properties on this year’s Historic Preservation Month tour. The annual event, postponed and then put online only because of the pandemic, recognizes four residential, commercial and government buildings from the town’s golden age with video tours that started rolling out on Thursday. It’s a highlight for the Boulder City Historic Preservation Committee.
The store at 525 Avenue B was built in 1931 in the mission style using concrete from the Hoover Dam job site.
“We are fortunate to have so many people who value our past and work to preserve it,” City Manager Al Noyola said in a statement.
A high school chemistry teacher in Henderson, pharmaceutical sales representative and stay-at-home mom before launching into specialty retail, Leon-Bertoli — who owns a home on the Nevada Preservation Foundation tour — knew she wanted the next phase of her working life to be in her hometown.
The original Boulder City Company Store is long gone, demolished in the 1930s. But another building just a block away still stood, and would become its spiritual sibling.
Other honorees include:
• The Bureau of Reclamation administrative building at 1200 Park St., built in 1932 in the Spanish Revival style
• The garden-style apartment complex at 508-510 Ash St., built in 1938 in the ranch style
• A single-family home at 1342 Denver St., built in 1932 in the Spanish Revival style, and also the recipient this year of the preservation committee’s Historic Preservation Award
The shop had most recently been an antique store. Like the original, it was a one-room structure in the local historic district, which Leon-Bertoli calls the most charming part of town.
“I was able to move into a 1931 structure that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, which was also very important to me,” she said.
Leon-Bertoli bought the building last year and hollowed out nearly 90 years of modifications — two layers of drop ceiling, five layers of flooring and two layers of walls — before opening the doors last October.
Sunshine now filters in through 36 original skylights and illuminates exposed ducts, aesthetically bare brick and a centerpiece, patinaed 1928 DeSoto sedan elevated above tables of merchandise. She restored the foyer using the original architectural drawings for the building that started as the Roy Fairbanks Men’s Store. Pieces from the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum, such as dam workers’ tool belts and harnesses, are on permanent display, along with a memorial to the roughly 100 men who died building the dam.
Drywall and two-by-fours blocked what were once full-length windows that displayed mannequins — and, Leon-Bertoli noted, a time capsule from 1983, placed by workers from a medical supply store that also once inhabited the 4,200-square-foot space. These restored windows are her favorite part of the store, she said.
Under the Boulder City Company Store name, which in its day had been attached to the largest department store in Nevada, she now sells gifts that promote Boulder City as its own destination independent of the Las Vegas glitz, like T-shirts, mugs and miniatures of the iconic Art Deco angels that stand sentry at Hoover Dam’s Nevada gateway. The lettering from the scrip used in the one-time federal company town is now the shop’s logo.
“I branded Boulder City as a destination in my store — I thought we needed to brand Boulder City a little better,” Leon-Bertoli said. “I don’t focus too much on Hoover Dam when you come to my store. I focus on ‘Come to Boulder City, home of Hoover Dam.’ Yeah, we have Hoover Dam, but Boulder City’s pretty cool too.”
Leon-Bertoli, 49, said people her age and younger don’t know Boulder City’s modern origins, so her store is an educational experience.
“They don’t really know why they like it so much, but the reason is because it’s authentic,” she said of her customers. “They don’t know it, but that’s the reason.”
The Boulder City Historic Preservation Committee has been honoring local historical architecture and ambassadors since 2011, and the city partnered with the National Park Service and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office last year to become a Certified Local Government to promote historic preservation efforts. The city is working toward updating the survey of properties in the Historic District and preparing a Historic Preservation Plan.
For more information on Historic Preservation Month, visit www.bcnv.org/613/Historic-Preservation-Day.
