Ask anyone at the bar on a Thursday night what's happening with the old Sport building and you'll get a theory, not an answer. Someone will mention the taxidermy that used to hang inside. Someone else will bring up the string of owners who tried and failed there since the '70s. By the third round, somebody always says the word cursed, like it's settled fact, like the building itself has opinions about who's allowed to stay in business inside it.
It doesn't. What it has had, for most of its life, is a string of operators who ran out of money before the town ran out of patience for a new concept. That distinction matters right now, because for the first time in the building's history, the person trying to fix it has neither problem.
The Corner Everyone Calls Cursed
The building at 114 South Main went up in 1890. A pub called The Sport opened inside it in 1903, and Livingston-based realtor and local historian Bruce Lay has described what it was for the next six and a half decades in blunt terms:
"Until 1968, it was a smoke-filled, card-playin', burger-grilling hangout for Livingston men."
After that, ownership turned over repeatedly for decades. The most recent stretch of that turnover ended in late 2023, when the space, then operating as Elemental Kitchen, closed. It sat empty for close to two years, plywood in the windows, before construction crews finally moved onto the site in force late last year.
That's the part of the story most people already know. What gets less attention is why the building kept changing hands in the first place, and it's rarely about the address. In 2021, the space reopened as The Sport under executive chef Ryan Aspen with real community momentum behind it. Actor and part-time Livingston resident Jeff Bridges had already donated a guitar to benefit the Livingston Food Resource Center, and the relaunch leaned into that goodwill, down to a burger named after one of his most famous roles. That version worked for a while, then the concept was rebranded as Elemental Kitchen, and by late 2023 the building was quiet again.
None of that is a haunting. It's a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched small restaurants open on thin margins: good intentions, real community support, and not quite enough runway to survive a slow season or a broken walk-in.
The Buyer Nobody Guessed Was Already Here
In February 2024, Livingston attorney Karl Knuchel sold the building, which had been listed at $795,000, to an LLC called Massacre Hill. At the time, the buyer's identity was kept quiet. A source close to the deal would only say the new owner had lived in the area for more than 20 years. Later reporting put the actual sale price at under $1 million.
That buyer has since been identified in local reporting as Russell Gordy, a Houston oil-and-gas billionaire who has spent two decades as a part-time Montana resident. He isn't a stranger showing up to flip a bar he saw on a drive through town. Gordy already owns the 44,000-acre Rock Creek Ranch in Springdale, the smallest town in Park County, bought in 2002 for $40 million. That ranch is home to Hunter's Hot Springs, a resort and music venue that has hosted acts including Billy Bob Thornton and The Boxmasters. Across Texas, Montana, and Wyoming, Gordy's ranch holdings run to roughly 200,000 acres.
That reframes the whole story. This isn't outside money discovering Livingston. It's money that has quietly been part of the Park County landscape for twenty years finally turning its attention two blocks off the river, to a building most other buyers would have walked past.
What Two Night Shifts a Week Actually Buys
The original 2024 plan called for a barbecue concept with lunch, upscale dinners, and Sunday brunch, led by a chef named Danny Rice who relocated from Scottsdale, Arizona, to run the kitchen. That plan stalled. What's under construction now, per longtime Livingston builder Chris Salacinski of C&L Builders, is closer to a full rebuild than a renovation.
A few specifics worth knowing if you walk past the plywood:
- Salacinski's crew of about ten has sometimes worked two shifts, day and night, to hit a summer 2026 opening.
- A 7,000-pound grease trap was set at the site during one of those night shifts, the kind of detail that tells you this kitchen is being built for real volume, not a soft relaunch.
- The Sport's original sign, a Main Street fixture for decades, was carefully taken down and is currently sitting in storage at C&L Builders' warehouse on Second Street. It's slated to go back up once the new building is finished.
Salacinski has been straightforward about what this project actually is, telling a reporter the crew is basically building a "brand new restaurant," with pieces of the old Sport kept for heritage rather than function. He's also been direct about the money behind it: "He's done a lot for Big Timber and Livingston," Salacinski said of Gordy. "This will probably be one of the most expensive buildings downtown when it's done."
That's not hype talk from a broker trying to move a listing. That's a contractor telling you the budget is bigger than what usually shows up on this block.
Down the Block, a Different Story
114 South Main isn't the only historic watering hole sitting dark right now. Livingston Bar and Grille, a separate and long-running establishment, is currently closed, and its website says the owners are looking for an experienced operator to take over the bar and restaurant rather than funding a rebuild themselves.
Two historic bars, both empty at the same time, and two entirely different paths forward. One is being absorbed into a rebuild bankrolled by a single deep-pocketed owner. The other is waiting for a new operator willing to take on the building as it stands. Neither path is wrong, but they tell you something real about how downtown gets saved when a longtime business finally closes. Sometimes it's community continuity looking for the next steward. Sometimes it's outside capital patient enough to eat two years of vacancy and a construction budget most storefronts on the block couldn't approach.
What This Actually Changes About Main Street
Compare that construction budget to how the rest of downtown Livingston tends to raise money. The vintage market known as 406 Flea runs its events with a stated goal of celebrating sustainability and vintage finds, and folds in five-dollar donation bins for local causes as it goes, donating $460 to the Human Resource Development Council after one recent event and aiming to support Thrive with the next. That's the scale most of downtown Livingston operates on: real, useful, community-sized.
The Sport's rebuild operates on a different scale entirely, and that gap is the actual story here, more than any curse. For most of its life, 114 South Main failed because the people trying to save it were working at 406 Flea scale against a building that needed Rock Creek Ranch scale money to survive a rough stretch. Now it has that money. Whether the food is good, whether the crowd comes back, whether the Wolverine Lounge feeling survives a ground-up rebuild, those are separate questions. But the reason this attempt looks different from the last dozen isn't luck. It's capitalization.
The Rest of Your August
While that crew keeps working night shifts on Main Street, the rest of downtown hasn't slowed down. The farmers market is still drawing vendors and live music down along the Yellowstone. Pine Creek Lodge has kept its summer concert calendar full, already bringing ShadowGrass and Satsang through earlier this month before Gov't Mule played there on August 18.
This coming weekend brings a cluster of Livingston's biggest late-summer events at once. Coup de Rouge, the town's fashion and entertainment weekend, runs Thursday and Friday, August 27 and 28, at 116 South Main. Down the road, Pine Creek Lodge's three-night Creekside Revival runs August 27 through 29, and the Park County Fairgrounds close out the weekend with the Beartooth Brawl Demolition Derby on Saturday, August 29.
None of that has anything to do with whether The Sport reopens on schedule. But it's a reminder that Livingston's calendar doesn't wait on any single building, even the one everyone keeps arguing about at the bar.
If you've lived here long enough to remember the old Sport before it was Elemental Kitchen, you already know how these stories usually go. This one might actually be different, and not because the ghosts finally moved out. Because for the first time, somebody showed up with enough money to outlast a bad year.
We keep a close eye on stories like this one because they say something real about where this town is headed, corner by corner. If you're curious what that kind of change means for property values near Main Street, or you're weighing a move of your own somewhere in the Yellowstone Valley, Chelsea Stewart Real Estate is happy to talk it through. Request a free home valuation any time you're ready, no pressure, just an honest read on where things stand.
