Order a malt at the counter inside Lyon's Corner Drug and you'll notice the black-and-white tile, the red stools, and, if you look up, a building that clearly predates everything else on that stretch of Lincoln Avenue. Most people who've lived in Steamboat for more than a few winters know this building is old. Plenty assume that because it's "historic," it's untouchable. That assumption has been wrong for thirty years, and it only became true on July 20, 2026.
Here's the distinction that matters, and the one almost nobody outside a planning department actually knows: being listed on the National Register of Historic Places does not stop a building from being torn down. It never has. The Maxwell Building, as it was originally called, became the first structure in downtown Steamboat listed individually on the National Register back in 1995, and the six-block Steamboat Springs Downtown Historic District around it followed with its own National Register listing in 2014. That's a federal honor. It photographs well on a plaque. It does nothing to a demolition permit application.
Local Landmark status does. That's the designation the city just added on July 20, and it's a different animal entirely.
A Plaque Isn't a Property Right
The city's own announcement made the distinction explicit. Historic Preservation Planner Caitlin Berube-Smith put it this way in the release: the building "isn't just significant because of its architecture, it's significant because of the memories it holds," and the owner's decision to place it on the local register "makes the Maxwell-Squire Building one of four structures in our Downtown National Register District that are safeguarded from demolition."
Read that sentence again. Within the entire historic district, only three buildings have ever carried an individual National Register listing on their own: the Maxwell Building, the First National Bank Building, and the Routt County National Bank Building. None of that trio's federal recognition, on its own, blocked a wrecking ball. As of this July, the Maxwell-Squire Building becomes one of just four structures in that district that the city considers legally safe from demolition, and it got there through the local process, not the federal one.
"For more than a century, people have gathered here to shop, work and connect with neighbors. This was the logical next step to ensure it is preserved for generations to come."
That's Erica Hewitt of Hewitt Design Studio, who represented the owner through the designation process, quoted in the same city release. She's not being sentimental for effect. She's describing the gap between a plaque and a property right, and why the owner chose to close it.
What the Building Survived to Get Here
The Maxwell-Squire Building has earned its plaque the hard way. It went up in 1908, built by James P. Maxwell, one of six Boulder residents who incorporated the town of Steamboat Springs in 1900, using pressed brick from Henry Trogler's kiln near Fish Creek and native sandstone. The plate glass windows arrived by wagon before the Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railroad ever reached town. Construction cost roughly $20,000, close to $600,000 in today's dollars, and for more than four decades it stood as the largest commercial building in Steamboat Springs. A room on the ground floor served as the town post office from 1909 until 1962.
The pharmacy lineage is its own small history of Steamboat. Davis Chamberlain bought the building from the Maxwell brothers in 1920 and installed the Chamberlain-Grey Drug Store, the first drugstore to occupy the site and the ancestor of today's Lyon's Corner Drug. Frank Squire, a prominent local rancher, eventually owned the property, and when he died in 1959 his three daughters inherited it and placed it in a family trust, which is where the "Squire" half of the building's name comes from. The pharmacy itself passed through Chuck Lyons in the early 1940s, then Tom and Nancy Clapsaddle for decades, then Wendy Lyon and Jennifer Campbell starting in January 2007, then Matt Johnson in 2019, and most recently Josh and Amanda Jones in 2024. Six ownership changes at one counter, and the soda fountain never stopped pouring phosphates through any of them. It remains, as the city noted in its designation announcement, Steamboat's oldest operating soda fountain.
The Crash That Exposed the Gap
None of that history or federal recognition mattered much on one afternoon in late January 2025, when a driver experiencing a medical emergency crashed a vehicle into the building's Lincoln Avenue corner. Lyon's Drug took the brunt of the damage and closed for six days, and the sidewalk at the corner of Ninth and Lincoln stayed roped off for months while the building waited on repair funding.
The building's National Register status didn't pay for a single brick. Repairing it required Historic Routt County, the local preservation nonprofit, to apply for a competitive grant through the History Colorado State Historical Fund, which is funded by a share of the state's gaming tax revenue. The nonprofit's executive director, Kristen Rockford, described what was at stake in blunt terms, calling the building "one of the last buildings in town to use native sandstone and bricks pressed by the Henry Trogler kiln near Fish Creek." Historic Routt County was awarded $250,000 toward the repair, and restoration work, covering windows, brickwork, repainting, light fixtures, and exterior woodwork, began that summer and was expected to run six to eight months.
That's the part locals lived through: a beloved storefront boarded up, a sidewalk cordoned off for months, and a nonprofit scrambling for state money to fix a building everyone assumed was already protected. It wasn't. The National Register listing gave the building prestige. It gave it exactly zero dollars and zero legal insulation from a bulldozer. The Local Landmark designation, arriving a year and a half after the crash, is the city's way of making sure that gap doesn't get tested again.
The Rest of the Block
The building today holds Lyon's Corner Drug and the coffee shop Beard and Braid on the ground floor, along with a dozen other businesses upstairs. A few doors down sits F.M. Light & Sons, which the Light family opened in 1905 after moving from Hicksville, Ohio, and which their descendants still own. Between the two storefronts, that corner of Lincoln Avenue has been in continuous commercial use for over 120 years without a single gap.
The timing lines up with something bigger happening downtown. In 2026, Main Street Steamboat earned national accreditation from Main Street America, placing it among just 18 Colorado communities recognized this year for funding stability, community involvement, and measurable economic impact, according to the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. Statewide, Colorado's Main Street programs reported 87 net new businesses, 303 net new jobs, and more than $159 million in public-private investment in 2025 alone. Main Street Steamboat's executive director, Lisa Popovich, said the accreditation reflects "the people who make downtown Steamboat what it is," naming the volunteers and business owners who "show up again and again to support a downtown that is welcoming, resilient and full of character."
Put the two stories next to each other and the pattern is clear. The same summer the city drew a hard legal line around one of downtown's oldest buildings, the organization responsible for downtown's day-to-day health got the state's confirmation that the whole commercial core is still working. One protects the past. The other is keeping the present solvent enough to deserve it.
Worth the Detour
Next time you're on Lincoln Avenue and duck into Lyon's for a milkshake or a prescription, the corner you're standing on means something different than it did last month. It survived a car crash. It survived a $250,000 restoration fight. And as of this July, it finally has the one kind of recognition that actually keeps a wrecking ball off a 118-year-old building instead of just commemorating it after the fact.
That's the difference between a building being old and a building being safe. Steamboat just closed that gap for one more corner of downtown.
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