Marketplace 3301

Just inside the front doors at 3301 First Avenue North in Billings stands a 1942 half-ton Chevrolet pickup named Bernard. Shelly Turk found the truck on Craigslist. It came off a farm in North Dakota, and she named it, she says, for no particular reason. Bernard serves as the store’s mascot and is usually dressed for whichever holiday falls closest. Behind it are two floors and 44,000 square feet of booths held by more than a hundred vendors. The owners call Marketplace 3301 the largest antique mall in Montana. Visit Montana lists it as one of the state’s largest. A KTVQ report from the Covid-19 shutdowns called it the biggest antique warehouse in Montana and Wyoming.

Two floors of booths

The booths run in a maze across both levels, lining every nook of the building. Every vendor starts upstairs, and the downstairs sellers are chosen from among them. A lift, a ramp, and a service elevator move heavy pieces between floors. The stock runs to antiques and primitives, glassware, quilts and textiles, jewelry, art and photography, Western and lodge decor, dried florals, painted and repurposed furniture, and vintage-inspired women’s clothing. In September 2020 Simply Local Magazine counted 115 vendors from five states. Yellowstone Valley Woman counted 112, with 50 more on a waiting list. Turk named one of the most popular booths as a booth of “oddities and curiosities.” There is a full-sized book booth, and a counter sells Dixie Belle chalk mineral paint with its glazes, waxes, stains, and finishes. A certified appraiser on staff values pieces for insurance or legal purposes only, and not items offered for sale in the store.

Some fixtures came with the building. A floor-to-ceiling birdcage and a log cabin display from the old Holliday Furniture store remain, and customers count them among their favorites. Turk has seen a handmade table built in the 1700s that “came over on a ship from Spain.” Handwritten letters and recipes have turned up tucked into the cracks of old furniture. “People find items from their own history,” Turk told the Billings Gazette in 2019. “Maybe it was a plate set your grandmother had or a toy that you had as a child. Once, a woman found her own family photos. She was in tears.” Jennifer Ingraham, her daughter, said: “I love to hear that gasp of delight when someone has found something that triggers a memory.”

Turk keeps a firm line on what an antique is. She told Simply Local Magazine that authentic antiques date from before 1950, vintage pieces come after 1950, and retro pieces are new things made to look old. She has met purists angered by a coat of glossy paint on an old piece. She has also watched buyers sweep up anything made before 1950 and ship large lots of it to China. Her advice to new shoppers: “Instead of looking for something to buy, look for how something is presented.”

The Sleepy Poet, behind the front desk

The Sleepy Poet Coffee Shoppe sits just behind the front desk. It serves hot and iced drinks from lattes to smoothies, along with cookies, pastries, muffins, chicken salad sandwiches, pretzel wraps, and soups in the winter months. Business meetings, book clubs, Bible study groups, and students use the seating area, which can be reserved at no charge. On some Saturdays Rich Buchaklian comes in to play the piano there. He and his wife, Sandy, were vendors for six years. “This one outshines everything we’ve ever seen,” he said of the store, measured against antique malls he had visited around the country. Connie Charette, a regular, brings out-of-town friends and relatives: “They have to go to Marketplace 3301.”

Saturdays are the busiest days. Turk says they draw “literally hundreds of people.” One group of regulars is made up of flight attendants who arrive whenever they have a layover in Billings. “You wouldn’t believe how efficient those women are at getting stuff in their suitcases,” Turk said. Twice a year the crowd moves outdoors. The mall holds an annual flea market, set in 2020 for June 13. On a Saturday in September 2026 it held its Antiques and Automobiles car show, with live music from Kactus Jack, the Criollo Street food truck, and signs, shop cubbies, collectible cars, and emblems for sale inside.

The store runs on family. Turk does most of the buying and handles customer service. Ingraham manages the store and the paperwork. Brice Turk, Shelly’s husband, does renovation, construction, and wood refinishing. Josh Ingraham, Jen’s husband, works with the vendors and does maintenance and cleaning, or as he puts it, “I do everything around here except make decisions.” Jen and Josh’s daughter Annie keeps a booth of her own, stocked from garage sales and secondhand stores, and sometimes walks the aisles asking customers whether they have questions. “I think half of our customers come to see them, not us,” Turk said of her granddaughters.

After Granny’s Attic

Turk was teaching English at Joliet High School and turning over business ideas with her daughter. They had considered an antique store, a bookstore, a coffee shop, and a clothing store. In the fall of 2010 her favorite antique mall, Granny’s Attic on Minnesota Avenue, announced it was going out of business. “When she closed, I mourned for about 20 minutes,” Turk said. “I thought, oh, we can do all that!” Ingraham remembered it as a question about the vendors: “We loved shopping at Granny’s Attic antique mall and when it closed, we wondered what would happen to all of those vendors.” One realtor told Turk she would never succeed. “I looked at him and said, ‘Watch me.’”

The family began leasing the old Holliday Furniture building in November 2010. Late that summer Jen and Josh were finishing college, she in education and he in criminal justice, when her mother called to ask about their plans after graduation. They moved to Joliet in January 2011 and went to work at the store. Turk later left teaching to work there full time.

In the Covid-19 shutdowns the mall stayed closed for five weeks. “Boy it was just a really long five weeks, and it’s scary for a lot of people,” Turk told KTVQ. Vendors used the closure to restage their booths. Turk shopped the empty building alone for customers and sent them pictures. “We sold tons of paint during all this,” she said. “I think people being home, they really started nesting.”

A Chevrolet showroom with a tower

The building went up in the late 1920s as a Chevrolet service station and showroom for the Goan Motor Company. A 1926 photograph in the Billings Public Library collection records it as a McIver & Cohagen project for P.S. Goan. The architect, Chandler Cohagen, said: “The new Goan building, with its color, its modern treatment and its tower has an individuality that lifts it above the commonplace.” The Billings Gazette gives the later owners. Some 20 years after construction, Lew Williams acquired the business and named it Lew Chevrolet, Inc. In 1954 Roul Hoyt bought Lew Chevrolet and made it Rowe Furniture.

On Dec. 20, 1986, an alley fire destroyed Marian Cooke’s Holliday Furniture store at 202 N. 29th St. Cooke then bought Rowe Furniture and reopened Holliday Furniture in the old showroom. Billings residents still know the building by that name. After Holliday closed, Cooke went looking for a tenant and found the Turks. Turk later described her as kind and helpful.

In September 2016 the family learned the building would be sold. They had one year to buy and renovate it or move out. Their banker for 30 years, Brian Thompson of Western Security Bank, sent them to Dena Johnson at the Billings Small Business Development Center. They worked with the center for more than a year and put together $840,000 in capital. It came from a Western Security Bank loan, an SBA 504 loan through Big Sky Finance, a revolving loan through Beartooth RC&D in Joliet, and their own equity. The Gazette reports the purchase in December 2018. “That’s not something I ever thought we’d do—buy a building almost as big as a city block,” Turk said.

Owning the building meant replacing the roof and facing the tower. Cohagen’s tower had begun to lean, and its weight had pulled water into the interior and left a large hole in the ceiling. Contractors told Turk it would come down sooner or later, perhaps in the right storm. “It had to come down. It took us weeks to accept that we couldn’t fix it,” Ingraham said. The last of the Holliday Furniture lettering came off the exterior. The family repainted the facade and added corrugated, rustic metal accents. “Now that we own it,” Turk said, “we wanted it to look like ours.”