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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
November 4, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
Jeff Danz looks pretty good on the cover of Preservation magazine. He's standing on Phillips Avenue of Sioux Falls, S.D., in front of the Zandbroz store. Knowing the sibling rivalry between him and Greg, who runs Fargo's Zandbroz Variety on Broadway, I'll have to point this out to Greg--maybe suggest that he put a tie on too.
Preservation is the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This issue for July/August 1999 devotes its lead article to the revival of Phillips Avenue and the changing nature of community in Sioux Falls. The article is by Alan Ehrenhalt, who also wrote the book, "The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America."
Sioux Falls and Fargo, it's North Dakota neighbor on I-29, are so much alike it's spooky. Ehrenhalt recounts deftly how Phillips Avenue came to grief in the past generation. In the 1950s it was a commercial hive that boasted 14 women's-wear stores. Then came the malls, most potently the Empire Mall out on 41st Street, opening in 1975. Sioux Falls banned cars from the downtown and tried to make it into a pedestrian mall--an ill-conceived and disastrous experiment.
Accompanying the obvious changes on Phillips were deeper economic and social changes in the city. Financial services, Citibank and all the rest of them, came to be the main employer in town. According to Ehrenhalt, four-fifths of the women with children of school age in Sioux Falls are employed. Women with leisure time--the people who were the plasma of community in a previous generation--are no more.
Still, he observes, "Commercial life has not disappeared from Phillips Avenue; it has merely changed." Now it is a place of espresso bars and specialty stores, and more than that, a place for the renewal of business based on personal relationships--"a commerce based on human interaction, on stable relationships," as Ehrenhalt puts it.
Cities across the region, take note. Because, farm fundamentalism aside, it's important to have sound cities spangled across our region, and as Sioux Falls goes, so go the others, with more or less success. Minot, N.D., differs from Sioux Falls only in scale, and if things keep rocking and rolling in Minot, the difference in scale is going to narrow. Dickinson, N.D., has an espresso bar and a micro brewery downtown--but no longer has an independent bookstore.
Which brings me back to the Zandbroz, which deals in books, operates a funky variety department, and dispenses beverages and lunches from a comfortable soda fountain. Perhaps I'm a little old for the Zandbroz, but I'm beginning to get used to nose rings, and the Zandbroz stores in Sioux Falls and Fargo represent perfectly the sort of businesses with a heart that Ehrenhalt is talking about. In the 1990s they have been pounded by upscale competition from Barnes and Noble, which has opened capacious bookstores-cum-coffee-bars in both cities.
It's so easy, you know, to describe the transitions in our cities and towns in clinical fashion, to deal with them as manifestations of large, impersonal forces. We do the same thing when we talk of the loss of farms and the depopulation of the countryside in terms merely of agricultural economics. I'm here to say that these things are not ordained by God or any other omnipotent force. They are matters of choice--yours and mine.
There was a time when people on the northern plains could claim victim status, could say that their troubles came from boardrooms and trading pits in the distant metropolis, but no longer. In an age of containerized transport and digital communications, there is no such thing anymore as a hinterland. We are a grown-up region and responsible for ourselves.
Today I need to buy a copy of Michael Wallis's new book about the 101 Ranch. I have two choices where to buy it.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)