Fargo, North Dakota
This article in the L.A. Times about Fargo’s supposed reinvention is, in turn, uplifting and maddening.
I have good memories of Fargo. I really, really do. Growing up, it was the only “big city” that I visited regularly. Some very fun times of my formative teen years were spent hanging out in Fargo. I really liked the place.
Once in college, my trips to Fargo were not as frequent. Whereas I used to go there once a month, I’d be lucky to get up there once a year. And what I found usually depressed me. Things changed. Fargo turned into just another casualty of suburbanization, ripe with sprawling housing developments, strip malls, and a decaying downtown. I felt like the place wasn’t so special anymore.
Returning there for a friend’s wedding this fall, I brought with me all of the past memories of the city, good and bad, and wanted to reconcile them with what I was told was a place that was really coming into its own.
We went out and cajoled at night. By day, I revisited the art museum, hit the mall, and walked around downtown. But it felt less like Fargo than ever, and more like Anyplace, USA. The sprawl, unhindered by geography, had spread across the North Dakota plain like milk spilled on a table. Roads, which had seemed wide enough before, had gained extra lanes, creating vast obstacles to pedestrians unfortunate enough to want to cross the street.
And the downtown. Missing all vestiges of the past, it looked barren and felt dead. The revitalization effort was in full swing and had left little behind for the eye to enjoy.
The efforts by local investors to get things moving downtown, like the Hotel Donaldson, are brave and noble indeed. But even more needs to be done to save Fargo from its slide into sameness.
Getting people out of the developments on the edge of the city and back into the center seems like a good place to start. But, with places like these being offered for sale, city life will remain economic folly for the practical-minded North Dakotan:
From a warehouse so long abandoned that icicles hung from the basement ceiling in winter, developer John Dalen has carved out 11 luxury condos. Most are priced around $300,000. The showpiece, though, is a half-a-million-dollar, 5,000-square-foot loft with two fireplaces, hardwood floors, vaulted ceilings and 18-foot-high atrium windows.
Sure, they’re being bought up, but the moneyed folks alone can’t make for an active scene. One can only hope that as this movement picks up steam, things will be done to address the desires of the rest of us, who would like to get in on the action but at a more reasonable cost.
And, as always, overcoming social stigma is the hardest thing. The hardest challenge may not be “persuading folks to come to Fargo by choice.” Instead, it may be that the hardest thing is getting Fargo to be Fargo – not Anyplace, USA – again.
