Helena was a closely packed place at the peak of its historic boom, in the years around 1890. Fifteen thousand people lived and worked in an urbanized area of about three square miles. Everything had to be kept within walking distance.

Our population has tripled since then, but the size of the urbanized area has increased at least ten-fold. This disproportionate spread is due mostly to cars.

It's been a complicated process: did we always want to sprawl and should we thank our cars for finally letting us do so; or did we have to sprawl, reluctantly and at unwelcome cost, just to make room for all those cars? Both, actually, in varying mixture.

In any case, we've made a revolution in scale. We build to suit cars now and it's not easy to grasp what a close-grained place this was when we scaled it to the person on foot. One way to do so, though, is to stand on the corner of Sixth and Warren, under the Harvard Block's distinctive corner tower, look around, fill the gaps, and imagine it's 1892.

Downhill to the west, the brand new Power Block stands toward the north end of the retail district. Most of Helena's retailers - at least 125 of them in 1892 - line Main Street between Sixth and Bridge, and most of the rest are found within a block of Main. Upstairs are one to five stories of offices and walk-in services. The district grows taller with every new building.

On the high ground to the east, starting with the classy Ewing Street district, is a residential square mile where much of the town's population lives. It runs not quite as far as Montana Avenue, though there's an expensive new streetcar-suburb called "Lennox" just beyond.

To the south, Warren leads to several more closely built districts. The Grandon Hotel, whose four-story corner tower faces your 1892 vantage point from the southwest point of the intersection, is the most northerly in a bunch of big hotels on the slope between the Gulch and the Courthouse (which serves also as Montana's capitol building in 1892). This hotel district is the part-time home of hundreds who come to take part in Helena's life as the state's political and commercial center.

Immediately beyond the hotels is lower Broadway, not only an extension of the Main Street shopping district and the site of Helena's lively publishing industry (our two daily newspapers enjoy taking editorial potshots at each other from their respective strongholds on opposite sides of the street), but also the center of a clump of lodge-halls and other popular gathering places.

These include, just off Broadway, the much-loved Ming Opera House, venue for everything from prize-fights to lectures to variety shows - even an occasional opera.

Looming above Broadway are Saint John's Hospital and the other institutions on Catholic (Firetower) Hill, and just over that narrow bump there's room for a whole red-light district, a more respectable mixed-use district, and a populous Chinese enclave before the gulch narrows at the foot of Acropolis Hill.

Finally, just north on Warren from your vantage point is one more tight bunch of pedestrian destinations. Central Elementary School, the new Helena High School, the public library and the community auditorium all stand within hollering distance along the west side of the street.

So, in 1892, most of Helena is within an easy walk of the corner of Sixth and Warren, much of it within a thousand paces. That odd little corner tower has presided over a lot of foot traffic.

Dennis McCahon is a Helena-based writer and artist.