In 1902, renowned Missoula architect A. J. Gibson began designing a grand apartment house and commercial building in the area known as the “Knowles Addition” south of the Clark Fork River. After completion in 1905, the three-story brick structure towered over its neighbors. The building now known as the Babs is an example of pure Queen Anne–style Victorian architecture, featuring two front towers that resemble candle snuffers, an ample, airy, column-lined porch, and at the very top gabled dormer windows.

The building’s first owners were John and Hattie Keith (as in Keith Avenue in Missoula’s University District). Originally from New Brunswick, Canada, John Keith served three terms as Missoula’s mayor, each time running unopposed on a “citizen’s ticket.” The next owners were Mary T. Bandman, the recent widow of a well-loved Shakespearian actor, and Edward Charles Reitz, who operated the Garden City Commercial College. “The Athens of Business Education,” as the college was called in a 1905 advertisement, had started on the north side of the river, but moved into the new building in 1910. “Garden City Commercial College” is still etched in the sidewalk at the bottom of the front steps. Students of the college learned banking, bookkeeping, commercial law, practical English, shorthand, grammar, dictation, commercial arithmetic, rapid calculation, penmanship, and civil government.

Renamed the Missoula Business College in 1913, the college continued educating students until 1930. That year, the building was turned into apartments managed by a man named Harry Rawn. It became known as the Rawn Apartments. Harry and his wife, Mabel, lived in the building–supposedly in Apartment #10–for the next two decades with their children, Dorothy and Melville.

The building received its current moniker just after World War II, when Jerry Aasheim bought the icon and named it after his little girl. The original Babs, Aasheim’s daughter, is alive and well and teaching school in Corvallis, Oregon.

By the late 1950s, the Babs began housing an increasing number of University of Montana students. Over the past half-century, the Babs evolved from prim-and-proper to wild-and-woolly. It earned an enduring reputation as “the place to be.”