| Summary: | Oral History Interview with Keith Burkholder, 2002 Keith Burkholder, 1934- Oral history interview with Keith Burkholder, 2002 1 digital audio file, 48:05 Collection number: Institute digital audio collection, Keith_Burkholder_Spring_02 Abstract Biography Transcript OVERVIEW Access: The collection is open under the rules and regulations of the Institute. Provenance: Original tapes loaned by City of Fargo. Digitized by NDSU Archives, 2016. Property rights: The NDSU Archives does not own the property rights to this recording. But permission granted to mount on Digital Horizons by City of Fargo and State Historical Society of North Dakota. Copyrights: The NDSU Archives does not hold the copyright. Citation: Keith Burkholder, A collection of oral histories: downtown Fargo from 1900-1950, NDSU Archives, Fargo. ABSTRACT Downtown Fargo has experienced countless changes in the twentieth century and the community is interested in learning about those experiences. This project attempts to document a more thorough understanding of downtown Fargo and its historic architecture by tying the buildings to events that affected people’s lives. Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 2 of 10 This project includes sixteen oral histories on historic downtown Fargo conducted between January and May 2002. The interviewees range in age from 60 to 90 years. In addition, an annotated subject list is included to make the information in the oral histories as accessible to the public as possible. BIOGRAPHY Keith Burkholder was born in Rock Lake, North Dakota in 1934. After graduating from Langdon High School in 1954, he moved to Fargo and began studying architecture at North Dakota State University. Keith worked as a city planner in Fargo for most of his career and led several major projects such as the downtown Urban Renewal project, the renovation of the Northern Pacific Depot, and the West Acres Regional Shopping Center. Keith spent three years in Bismarck, ND, and three years in Fergus Falls, MN, before returning to Fargo. He was a founding member of the North Dakota Planning Association in 1973. After his lengthy career with the City of Fargo, he retired. Keith resides in Fargo with his wife, Vel Rae. TRANSCRIPT Date: Spring 2002 Interviewee: Keith Burkholder Interviewer: Jessi Glick Location: Fargo, ND Transcribed by: Jennifer Grosz Interviewer: Please tell me about your place and date of birth. Mr. Burkholder: I was born in Rock Lake, North Dakota, Towner County. My father was a customs agent on the Canadian border, so I lived in a lot of towns on the border, like Northgate and Maida. We spent the most amount of time in Maida. We lived in Langdon during my high school years. I’ve claimed that as my hometown, but I could claim a lot of towns. Then I came to North Dakota State University, took my degree in architecture, worked at that for about five years, and meandered into city planning. I did two stints for Fargo, and I was director of state planning for about 3 years in the middle of that. Interviewer: What kind of classes did you take when you were at NDSU? Mr. Burkholder: Architecture. I took the regular five-year architecture curriculum. Building design, that sort of thing. At that time, city planning wasn’t really defined as a sphere or working activity, so cities made planners out of whoever was interested and willing. Engineers, public administrators, and architects did a lot of it. Interviewer: How did you end up getting involved in city planning? Mr. Burkholder: I was interested in planning, I can’t tell you why or how I got interested in it. I wasn’t a really good designer, so my interests meandered into larger scale things. I did my thesis on the campus plan, so I dealt with larger issues. That came to be a little better forte for me. It was a natural interest, but other things pushed me that way also. When I went to work in architecture, after my five-year stint there [at NDSU] the general business for architects was not strong. I had to be looking around and a bunch of things fell together. City planning opened up in Fargo and I was really interested in it. I just got lucky. Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 3 of 10 Interviewer: What work did you do when you were involved in city planning? Mr. Burkholder: The position evolved over time. In the beginning I was just dealing with subdivision plots, and that’s what the planning commission did, was approve or disapprove plots. The other half of that was the zoning or the land use issues that went with that. Maybe way more than half the work was amendments to the zoning code. You know you zoned it originally, agriculture or residential, someone later wanted to make it commercial and it was just a lot of work, administrative business. The public decision making about land use. Gradually other things were kind of spliced in there. One of the big splices was the building inspections department. One time I added a management responsibility of transit and then federal programs got to be a big part of it. The last sequence of all the programs was the block grant program. That’s still administered by the city planning office. I don’t know how much they get, maybe a couple million dollars, and they figure out how to invest that in the community. Interviewer: Did you have any work involving downtown Fargo when you were in there? Mr. Burkholder: Oh yeah, quite a bit. For some reason, that’s where the heart of the problems are. The periphery, in a way, kind of takes care of itself. Landowners decide what they want to do and you just go along with that. Downtown almost from the beginning has been a remedial program. What do you do with it? Prior to my working with the city, I hope Earl Stewart hasn’t been part of this paper, he was the Urban Renewal director and he did the first and second urban renewal projects. That was where they had federal funds to acquire property, tear it down, and resell the property. There were a couple of little programs in there, but they all evolved and lumped into one. I’m trying to think of specific things I could point to. After urban renewal died, the government just gave you money. They killed the program because it was probably too expensive to begin with. But they discovered that if all of the federal urban renewal projects had been handled in a different way, they could’ve been self-financing. When you hear the term tax increment, that’s what that is. There’s a device in the law that allows you to claim all of the additional tax revenue that a project generates and use those funds to do the project. What that would mean is that say the Radisson Hotel does a tax increment project. They tell us they want to do it, and they would like to have this private property. Well, taking private property for private use is a tricky business, you know. The original owner is not that likely to be enthused about it, but there is a way to do it. There are a lot of requirements about how you have to treat the original owner in terms of compensating. Then we have the developer, who proposed new projects, set up a financial instrument so that the city can’t lose any money. Then we go ahead and acquire the property. We demolish it and clear it and turn it over to the developer and then the city starts collecting taxes on that project, which we used to pay the bonds and the borrowed money back. We were involved in a lot of those. I could hardly remember all of them, but Dakota Bank, it’s now called Fargo State Bank. They’re kind of pocketed all over town. I’d almost have to get an old map out and show you how many of them. They kind of overlapped some of the old urban renewal projects and go off into new areas. It’s been very successful. They have paid off on schedule or ahead of schedule. Then there’s an interesting, sort of quirky project. The skyway project was ours. Interviewer: What exactly is that? What is the skyway project? Mr. Burkholder: Downtown, you see the skyways? It was thought at the time, about the time we did the Radisson project, that if we could interconnect some of the major buildings, like they do in Minneapolis, that would bring some vitality to the downtown, that it needed. It was only partly successful. We just didn’t really have enough, I call it critical mass, where there were enough bodies on the skyway to stimulate investment in the skyway. It runs from civic center to the Radisson to First Bank then over to Broadway. We did have a scheme to connect, at that time, Bell Telephone and the Forum. We weren’t able to pull that off, primarily because there was an intervening property that didn’t want to be involved. Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 4 of 10 There wasn’t enough political will to do it over the opposition, so it was dropped. The downtown bus terminal was another major responsibility of mine. What else? Those were probably the big ones. Is your main interest in downtown? Interviewer: Yes. What do you know about the Urban Renewal projects? I know very little about them. Mr. Burkholder: Well, as I said, those were just being wrapped up when I started. They were based on federal grants. The original, Urban Renewal One, we called it, was where the Civic Center, City Hall, Chamber of Commerce, which is something else now, Pontopiddan Church, the Library, that general geography, it was Metropolitan Bank, now it’s Midwest or something like that, was the first urban renewal project. Then right on top of that, right following that was what they call the Main Avenue Urban Renewal Project, which ran along Main Avenue to Broadway. Essentially, it was Norwest Bank, Community Bank, were parts of it, and back to the river, it seems to me. Well, that was the main area of the second project. It was very successful. Earl Stewart got a lot of credit and a lot of notice. Fargo was the first small city urban renewal. They were all in Boston or New York. It was finished ahead of schedule. The federal government paid a lot of attention to that one, very clean and very successful, very few real problems. The mayor at that time, they tell me, was Herschel Lashkowitz, who we all knew pretty well, originally was very much against the urban renewal project because he saw it as being unfair to low income people. There were lots of poor people, terribly poor people in there at that time. There were buildings with dirt floors. I think that the leaders of the community were finally able to convince him that they would be more than taken care of in a fair way. They would wind up much better off. Then he kind of swam around in it, and it really evolved to be his program, which is kind of the way that it had to be. Earl had a gift for working with Herschel Lashkowitz. He was a very difficult man to work with, I can tell you. The reason I went to Bismarck was that we had a confrontation, I mean just continuous confrontations for about three or four years. Finally we got to a point where I said, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” [Laughter] I just got lucky and the governor appointed me to state planner. Then about three years later, Herschel decided that I was not as bad as some of his other choices and he invited me back. So that’s a recommendation, I guess. Interviewer: How long have you lived in Fargo? Mr. Burkholder: I came here in 1954 to go to college, and really, except for three years in Bismarck and three years in Fergus Falls, I’ve been in Fargo continuously. Interviewer: Are there any other famous or important buildings you remember in downtown Fargo? Mr. Burkholder: There are a lot of them. In some ways, some of the sad ones are the Carnegie Library that was torn down, that’s too bad. But it happens. It always happens over parking, you know. That reminds me, the renovation of the Northern Pacific Depot was an important project of the office. You know, where the Park Board is. That’s an important building. We actually talked to someone who was big on historic preservation, they probably would say all of them. Elm Tree Square [the Black Building] is obviously an important building because of the time and place when it was built. Kind of down in the depths of the depression, the Black family invested, at that time, a horrendous amount of money in this building. It’s in very weak occupancy right now because all of downtown has poor occupancy. But it will recover. That set of buildings along NP is kind of called “Machinery Row.” The Stephens Office building and the Reineke Building all the way up to what is now the Plains Art Gallery. I think I’m missing some, but they were all machinery distributorships. Fargo, from the turn of the century on to the depression, was a major distributor of farm equipment, all those buildings along there, for the whole United States. One time a lady brought to the mayor, then Mayor Lindgren, a copy of a book that she and her sister had put together out of the working papers of a man called A. R. Johnson who was one of the original mayors of Fargo. It’s his letters and articles and stuff like that. Trading, man. He sold farm Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 5 of 10 machinery around the world, and some of the letters had to do with countries – if you went into a country like Bogota [Colombia], you just didn’t go flying in and selling tractors, you had to talk to the king first. So there were meetings with all these kings and banana republics. That was an interesting part of it. Another interesting part of it was that he was the center of a big national debate about whether cities should own water utilities and electric utilities or have it done privately. He wound up being very much on the public ownership side based on his observations. He claims in the book of his letters and articles, and I have no reason to doubt it, that out of this debate he helped to create the National League of Cities, which is a little known kind of court that came out of Fargo, considering Chicago, New York, and San Francisco but this guy was a super dynamic man, and pulled things together. I don’t know how you ever would get your hands on that book, but Sharon Odegaard has been the principal secretary for several mayors, she still is. She may know who has the book. It may be in the library for all I know. The man’s name was A. R. Johnson. It’s got some of the niftiest history of Fargo that there is. Interviewer: I’ve heard of that – Mr. Burkholder: You have heard of that? Interviewer: I don’t know about there being a copy, but one of our instructors mentioned something about it one time. Mr. Burkholder: Yeah, okay. But you asked about important buildings. The Gray Insurance Building over here, I call it Western States, but it’s now Clarion Insurance, that used to be called Dill Hall, was the original Fargo College. That’s the sight of that. It’s not there now, but that’s where it was. I think [ND]SU was kind of outside the city limits during the early years, that’s where the trolley stopped. Interviewer: Until this project, I didn’t know that Fargo had a trolley. Mr. Burkholder: Yeah. They keep finding pieces of it when they dig up streets. It’s too bad, they should have kept it. Although buses are good enough, somehow trolleys are better. There’s still brick streets around town, too. Under the asphalt. Interviewer: I didn’t know that. Mr. Burkholder: A lot of the streets were some kind of wood block, I suppose I should know, but I don’t. They were about the size and shape of bricks laid on the street. They made good streets, except in case of a flood they would swell and pop up, so they would have to re-lay them. [Laughter] I saw some of that. That’s about the end of what I know about important buildings, although there are historic preservationists who would point out quite a few others. I suppose that’s one of the tragedies of urban renewal and tax increment financing, it’s a device by which the city moves on and the buildings get to be a victim. I don’t know what you do, you can’t save everything. I think what you have to do early on is identify ten percent of the buildings that really stand out and protect them. Just say we are going to protect these buildings and then let the rest go. Interviewer: What do you think of the projects that are happening now in downtown, like the Donaldson Hotel? Mr. Burkholder: It’s wonderful that people are still around, willing to risk money and their reputations on projects like that. All you can do is cross your fingers and hope they’ll succeed. Things like that almost have to happen. The underlying problem, why they are vacant, is that the whole political/financial Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 6 of 10 structure of the city favors the edge of town. It’s much cheaper and easier to go out on the edge of town and build new. If the city did not, for instance finance public improvements like a lot of cities do, that would help. They say, if you want to build there, you build your own paving and your own sewer and your own water. That has a tendency to make people prefer to develop downtown, because that’s all there. We kind of sowed the seeds of our own demise that way. In my career, that really showed up in the form of street planning and street investment. Most of the funds that come into streets, big streets, come from state and federal sources, and so the city chooses where that money should go. I’d say 75 percent of it has been invested into the benefit of the edge of town. Very little has been spent to the benefit of downtown. The very first city of Fargo meeting I went to, it was really a month or so before I was employed, someone said they’re developing a transportation plan over at Moorhead City Hall and you might as well go watch it because ultimately you’ll be interested in it. At that meeting they were debating the issue of one ways on 10th and University. The man who was the planner, a professional transportation planner, an amazing man, he worked for a firm called Martin Ashman, and he was doing three projects while he was doing Fargo. The Fargo Master Plan, the Transportation Plan around the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and a new street plan for Buenos Aires, Argentina. Those were his three projects! I took him pretty seriously, if those places did, you know. He recommended very strongly against making the one way up here. He said it was poor and confusing access. At that time, we were aware that we had to save downtown. He indicated that if you want to save downtown, you’ve got to have high-speed low friction traffic to downtown. The interstate had just gone by the edge of town. Mayor Herschel Lashkowitz said under no circumstances was the city going to cut down any trees, which you can sympathize with. But that very much has a large role as to why downtown Fargo is as weak as it is. Downtown still does not have any access. If you want to go to a town that has a prosperous downtown, Duluth is my best example. Sioux Falls is a good example too. Very vibrant downtowns. You can drive downtown at 70 miles per hour. Interviewer: Whereas here, you can barely go 5 on Broadway. [Laughter] Mr. Burkholder: The community made that decision, so not only did they do the wrong thing on 10th and University, by the evidence of history, they took whatever money they did have to strengthen West Acres. So that was a shaping moment, that first meeting was very much of a defining moment in the city of Fargo. It predates me, and I’ve only heard it, kind of almost folklore, but it’s well known that the interstate did a lot of damage to a lot of towns, a lot of cities. By the time the Interstate got to Fargo, the transportation planners really understood what an Interstate does to a town. So the original dotted lines on an aerial photograph would have put the Interstate out by Riverview, do you know where that is? Interviewer: No. Mr. Burkholder: We call it the convent, but it’s a large retirement home on 52nd Avenue South. That would’ve been Highway 94, and Highway 29 would’ve been west of West Fargo. The general idea was that that would leave enough room around the core city to grow for possibly 100 years. Which would be the natural life of the highway, and there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It was far enough away so that it wouldn’t immediately start to compete with downtown. But the Chambers of Commerce and the political structures said no, no, no. It has to be closer than that, so we’ve been fighting the Interstate system ever since trying to get on and off of it. We’ve rebuilt the 13th Avenue interchange; I think we’re into the third or fourth time. Interviewer: Wow. Mr. Burkholder: Because we just can’t – Interviewer: I know it’s a mess down there right now [Laughter] Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 7 of 10 Mr. Burkholder: And it’s going to get worse. It’s kind of a comedy thing. And that’s one of the things you have to develop is a sense of humor about this. But when I first started, the chronic complaint of the Chamber of Commerce and the governments was there were not enough interchanges off of the Interstate. There was no interchange on 25th Street, 13th Avenue South, or 19th Avenue North. So there was only a couple places that you could get in and off. But the highway department said “no, that’s all you’re getting and there’s not going to be any more interchanges, forget it.” This was a debate that went on and on and on and on. One day, in walks the highway department staff. They were looking for a location for the state highway garage, which is right out there south of the Chevrolet garage. We looked around and looked around, and they, in their best judgment, thought that was where it had to be. Because it was there, they needed an interchange, which was good thinking I guess. Plus they could give Fargo what they wanted. But in my mind and this is reading between lines I don’t really have a right to read between, immediately West Acres was announced. And it never could have gone there [without the 13th Avenue South interchange]. So they were able to get in on some land that had virtually nothing but farmland value, and then get a free interchange, and then what you see is what you see. So they out-thought the group. That’s how the city has sort of exploded out, and imploded inwards. I guess what started me on this line was the hotel project and the other Burgum [Doug Burgum] giving the Northern School Supply building to NDSU and stuff like that. There have been many, many attempts to do worthwhile things downtown. I do think that it will regrow in a different format. It’s not clear yet, but obviously public city government buildings, county government buildings, federal government buildings. If you were to take a map and color in red all of the new government buildings that have been built since World War II, you would be amazed. You’d be just totally amazed. When I started, all of the department stores were downtown, almost all of the car dealers were downtown. All the furniture stores were downtown. Interviewer: Do you remember those old businesses? Mr. Burkholder: Yes. Some of the owners are still around of course. Interviewer: Why did they end up moving out? Just because other parts of Fargo were prospering? Mr. Burkholder: The town in general was prospering. They all were working out of limited space, obsolete buildings, they needed to grow, needed to expand. It was just easier to go over, out where you’ve got lots of parking and lots of one story space, and start from scratch. It’s always just a matter of economic efficiency. And to overlay that set of issues, is access. Where are you going to put a Ford garage? Someplace where you can’t get a Ford to it? [Laughter] So that’s how that happened. Interviewer: I think that about covers most of the questions that I had to ask. Mr. Burkholder: Well, I’ll offer some stuff. [Laughter] How’s your tape? Interviewer: It’s got an hour or so. Mr. Burkholder: Another defining moment in Fargo’s history was the Fargo Fire. I don’t know a lot about it, but I think if you were to talk to some of the people at the fire department, there are people around, there are firemen who are good at keeping the history of things, they could fill you in on it. I really think that the Fargo Fire, as disastrous as it was, turned the city from a shack village to better buildings. Some good things result, growing out of that. Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 8 of 10 The real defining moment the city is, of course, selecting this site as opposed to any other site for the railroad crossing the river. During that period when they saw the railroad coming, there was a lot of speculation as to where it would cross. A lot of the names you see on the tops of buildings are the early speculators. The Hector’s were the winning…there are descendants of the Hectors around town now. It might be fun to talk to them. Fred Hector, I’m sure would be an entertaining visit. Erleane, also, she was on the planning commission for many years. They founded the Fargo airport, Hector Airport out there. I’m told that their father lived in dugouts, or grandfather probably, to anticipate where the railroad would cross so he would be there to stake out the land. [Laughter] He was successful at it. At that time, the land in Moorhead was significantly higher, well, at that time, it still is, and Fargo was considered the big slough. All the good land was over there. And it was in very few hands. The Comstocks, for instance, had kind of a monopoly on good land. When the railroad crossed, they brought with it lots of workers. Right behind the workers were a lot of immigrants, you know, the Germans, the Norwegians, people that were sort of conned into coming to North Dakota for good grain land. [Laughter] They couldn’t get land in Moorhead. So they went over to the slough, and pitched tents and built shacks, and according to the literature, Fargo was almost overnight bigger than Moorhead, because of all those immigrants. That was a big defining moment. Here, I have my favorite possession here, it fell into my hands. That’s an actual woodcut from the 1881 Harper’s Bazaar and that’s the Fargo water [indistinct]. You’ll see photographs that approximate that all over town… [Mr. Burkholder steps away from the recorder for a moment] I think the owners of Interior Lumber, Alsop, John Alsop, would help you if you can get access to him. Of all the people that I’ve thought of that you should call, if he’s still around and still able to talk, or his son even who’s an active businessman at Interior Lumber. They could probably tell you a lot about the riverboat business going up to Winnipeg and making the connection from the railroad to Winnipeg. The original trade route was from Winnipeg to St. Paul on the ox cart trail. Then the southernmost outpost of the Hudson Bay Company, you ever heard of this? It’s up at Georgetown… Interviewer: Yes. I didn’t know where it was but… Mr. Burkholder: …which is about ten miles north of Moorhead. So that was a trade route that was going on here. It was a sort of magnet, if you could call it a magnet, that held this geography together. Ft. Abercrombie, as I understand it, was built partially to protect the railroad from Indian activity through here. So those are the big issues. One of the things that’s hard to grasp for me, at the turn of the century, 1900, we were building out of these shacks and through the twenties there was the First World War that interrupted everything for everybody. Almost on the heels of the First World War was the Great Depression, which stopped everything. Then we had World War II, so there’s a long period of time when not much of anything could happen because the country was occupied with bigger things. So when we got done with the Second World War, there was an awful lot of catching up to do, and that’s what led to Urban Renewal and tax increment financing. It went almost overnight from the business owner living upstairs to West Acres; that was a big leap to make all at once. It was pretty hard to handle. Those comments I made about the Interstate being further out, that would have been far preferable except for one thing--North Dakota has never been very friendly to land use regulation; that comes out of our farming traditions or whatever, a person’s land is a person’s castle, or something. If that had happened, my hunch would be that Fargo would have jumped out, and people could do whatever they wanted to do, we would have a strange city [laughter] and this would be an empty pocket. Part of the debate about small schools and big schools and neighborhood schools is kind of mixed in there and there are people who want things to hold together. I’m certainly one of those. But the school system, for reasons that they have, want larger schools and more geography, intend to pull things apart. Nobody’s figured it out yet. [Laughter] I think that even the legislature is more inclined now than they were. One of the big successes that I felt good about is that we couldn’t issue permits or control land Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 9 of 10 use outside of the city limits, so a lot of really strange stuff would happen right outside of the city limits and beyond. Really bad rural subdivision type things, not that they’re bad in and of themselves, but a lot of them over a long period of time creates a bad situation. We were finally able to, after two or three sessions, convince the legislature to give us jurisdiction two miles beyond the city limits, which helped a lot. More recently, I would say in the last five years or so, the problem was big for West Fargo. We were a nuisance to West Fargo, I’m sure we felt they were kind of a nuisance to us, so the legislature stepped in and doubled it, and they gave us four miles and some other rules and regulations. We were far behind the curve of the rest of the country, in terms of managing land use, so while that’s not about downtown, it really is about downtown because if you can manage your edges, you can hold your downtown together better. Before West Acres was really clearly understood, we knew there was going to be a regional shopping center somewhere because developers were sticking their nose in the door and asking a lot of questions. We weren’t enthused about it greatly because we could see what was coming. We knew somebody was going to be successful eventually. So then we thought that our job, if we’re going to be successful at making a bad situation not so bad, is to manage the regional shopping centers. So the planning commission adopted a policy of limiting commercial zoning to something like 40 acres per quarter, or 80 acres persection, or something like that, so they wouldn’t aggregate all in one place. That would have kept the critical mass in downtown and not say you can’t do a shopping center. It’s just you can’t have it all in one place because you do get the critical mass, and aside from the competition factor, it creates an unsolvable traffic problem, which is what we have. The land that West Acres sits on, that little triangular piece, is 80 acres. I would guess that the commercial complex out there would have to be close to 1000 acres right now. If we could have maintained this theory we could have had better distribution and it would’ve been all the way around town. The first attempt at doing a shopping center was undertaken by a man by the name of John Moler. He was prominent. I think he was in the radio/television business. He was a real estate dealer. He and other investors acquired a half section on this side of I-29 across from where West Acres wound up. It was more than a mile from the city limits. Thirteenth Avenue was just a dirt trail with two paths that went out into a pasture. [Laughter] He came in and asked the city to plot it and zone it all commercial. We met with him and asked how big does your shopping center have to be? Well, what he showed us was about 80 acres. We said okay, fine, we can work with that, we just don’t want more than that. He took that as pushing him around and the Planning Commission refused the plan because it was connected to the city within a mile long, they call it the “umbilical cord.” It got taken to court. The planning commission was overruled, and the City Commission wouldn’t back up the Planning Commission. So there went the distribution policy and he got the whole 360 acres. Then they spent the next twenty years really, converting most of it to apartment buildings. So it was a debate that didn’t have to happen, primarily because Schlossman, the West Acres interest, had a stronger proposal than Moler. But if that policy had prevailed, that was new and original. All these cities east of us that had gone through the Interstate experience, and this is what they all were doing. A lot of Fargo’s history is shooting ourselves in the foot. Maybe we’re not original with that, but again you see places like Sioux Falls and Duluth doing really, really good, strong planning and having a better result. I don’t know if the people think so or not. Interviewer: One more question for you. Would you happen to have any pictures of Fargo or downtown Fargo that you collected? Mr. Burkholder: I don’t, but they’re all over the place. There is a book around. It was put together for the centennial and I’m sure the NDSU library has copies. I really don’t. When I was thinking about you coming over, the only thing I have, is that Centennial booklet. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. Those are the front pages of the [Fargo] Forum for a hundred years. …They’ve done another one, more recent than that one, but in terms of what your range of interest is…I think I even found my name in there. One of Herschel Leshkowitz’s quirks was he would go into terrible, long, violent tirades in City Keith Burkholder Oral History Interview, 2002 Page 10 of 10 Commission meetings, and one time the City Commission just had enough of it, and just walked out, and he declared one man rule. [Laughter] I’d be willing to loan that [book] to you, I’d be wanting to get it back, if you think you could mine anything out of it that talks about the environment of the time. Interviewer: I’ll check the library and stuff, and if they don’t have it, then I would like to borrow it and photocopy it. Mr. Burkholder: Okay. It is kind of odd that I don’t have any, but I didn’t leave the office with any sort of city papers. Shoot. I hope you contact Alsop, or his son, I haven’t seen Mr. Alsop out and about and it makes me think maybe he’s ill, but if he’s not ill, I’m sure he probably escapes the snow outside [laughter] but his son is around, he’s got to run the store. Do you know where Interior Lumber is? Interviewer: No, I don’t. Mr. Burkholder: When you go northbound on 10th Street, under Main Avenue, you come up and you make a hard right and there’s a lumberyard right there. Interviewer: Okay. Mr. Burkholder: And that’s his business. Interviewer: We’ll see if I have time to see him. Mr. Burkholder: So that family goes right to the pluck.
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