Fargo's Black Building rose as pillar of commerce
By Gerry Gilmour
The Forum - 06/12/1999

It was heralded as Fargo's "Cathedral of Business."

The Black Building - a massive eight-story structure of Indiana limestone built on Broadway - for years stood as a monument to the economic and retail power of downtown Fargo.

Businessman George M. Black made the bold decision to erect the business center in 1930. Bold because it was only the beginning of the Great Depression which would grip the nation for years to come. Bold because Black was sold on Fargo.

Black was a second-generation retail businessman. He learned the retail trade working in his father's stores and in the Dayton store in Minneapolis.

His father dreamed of a chain of Black stores. It was on a journey in search of suitable sites for clothing stores that George Black happened upon and fell under the charms of Fargo.

He recounted his find in "The Story of My Life," a memoir to his grandchildren.

"It was while I was at Crookston that I took a train into Fargo to catch a train back to Minneapolis," he wrote. "That was a day to be remembered!

"A beautiful day in May, 1912. Lots of women out shopping. That in itself was a contrast to Minnesota. I visited the stores - Herbsts, deLendrecies and Moody's. They were busy. Prices were good. It was an exhilarating experience. I could hardly wait to tell my father about this fine town we had been overlooking."

He returned with his father and, with the help of S.S. Lyons of Merchants National Bank, found a building - a movie house that had gone out of business - at 112 Broadway.

The out-of-town owner wanted $175 a month. The Blacks offered to fix it up and pay $135. Their offer was accepted by wire and a month later they ran a small advertisement in The Forum announcing that the Black Store was open, with $8,000 worth of stock.

First-day sales June 12, 1912, were $350.

Leslie Black returned to Minneapolis, and George Black stayed to run the Fargo store, sleeping in a room at the YMCA and spending the remainder of his time - from 8 a.m. until the last customer was gone - at the store.

Eventually, 10 p.m. was set as the Saturday closing time, and other downtown stores soon followed suit with a set closing time.

"An interesting thing about closing on Saturday nights was that merchants found their weekday business was better, we gave better service, customers were more satisfied and we were able to get a better class of salespeople," he observed in his memoirs.

The dream of a giant chain of Black stores never materialized, but the Fargo store prospered.

At the close of the first year the Black Store had done $75,000 worth of business. That grew to $100,000 the second year and $125,000 the third. Black bought the 112 Broadway property and soon acquired the dry goods building at 114 Broadway and a jewelry store building at 110 Broadway.

Black took pride in his store, handling all the business details, working the floor as a clerk and writing advertisements for the newspaper. "This was not a business that had been handed down to me," he told his grandchildren. "It would only succeed if I worked at it."

He was a promoter, and his memoirs claimed to have coined the term for that favorite promotion of all penny-pinchers, the "One-Cent Sale." Buy one item, get the next for a penny.

"These always drew a big crowd and remain popular today all over the country, even with the big drug store chains," he said.

The World War I years of 1920, 1921 and 1922 were among the most successful for the store, he said. By the late 1920s the store was doing almost $1 million in business annually.

Still, Black personally handled the buying. He took numerous trips to Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, capitalizing on his contacts in the New York Dayton's buying office.

A buying trip took him to New York in the fall of 1929. He was across the street from the celebrated Wall Street Exchange on Oct. 29 when the stock market collapsed.

"It was a terrible sight to see the tremendous crowds in panic," he said. "Fifteen men, fortunes lost and many responsible for the loss of others' fortunes, jumped out of the windows in the Wall Street district."

Sears Roebuck came to Black shortly after, anxious to enter the Fargo market and asking if he would sell his store.

Black used proceeds from the sale of the store and the Black name to help finance construction of the Black building, which would provide a lower level, balcony and second floor for Sears and six stories for modern offices in downtown Fargo.

Land, Raugland & Lewis, a Minneapolis architecture firm, designed the 100,000-square-foot building. T.F. Powers and Co. of Fargo, awarded the contract for steel and concrete work, used 250 tons of steel and 4,000 tons of concrete in pouring the footings and erecting the superstructure. Fargo Glass Co. won the glass subcontract, and installed $11,000 worth of glass and materials.

Advertising about the project bragged that if all of the electrical wiring and plumbing was laid end to end, the material would stretch 32 miles, from Fargo to Ulen, Minn. The building would feature a 2,000 gallon "hyrdo- pneumatic" tank with a capacity of 3,600 gallons per hour under 80 pounds of pressure. Hot water was supplied by a 500-gallon tank.

The Black Building cornerstone was laid on Nov. 17, 1930. L.B. Hanna, a former North Dakota governor, delivered a keynote address entitled "Have Faith in the Country," as several hundred looked on.

Among the throng was Black's daughter, Anna Jane Schlossman. The Fargo woman said she still remembers that day.

"It was a big thing to do during the Depression, and he was proud he was able to help give jobs to people who didn't have them," she said.

Black insisted that wherever possible, local contractors and workman would be hired.

Schlossman remembers going to the construction site with her father and her younger brother, George "Ned" Black, who was killed in World War II.

"I remember going down and visiting on Sundays when would check to see how things were going," she said. "My brother and I used to ride the elevator and got to operate it ourselves."

The Black Building and Black Sears and Roebuck store opened for business in 1931.

One of the first sales in front of the store included a dog show, to which Schlossman and her brother dragged their Boston bull terrier.

"We were convinced he could win, when in fact there was no way he could," she said.

The professional offices were leased largely by dentists, doctors, chiropractors, attorneys and hair dressers. Among other tenants: North American Life Insurance of Chicago; C.H. Robinson and Co. Fruit Brokers; Lincoln National Life Insurance Co. Commercial Credit Trust; Fargo Loan Agency; Warner and Co. Insurance; and WDAY Radio.

The Black Building stood as North Dakota's tallest until completion of the state Capitol in 1934.

George M. Black went on to create The Store Without a Name in downtown Fargo, so named because he had sold the right's to the Black name in his deal with Sears.

The Black Building has remained a retail and commercial center through the years. Sears Roebuck and Co. in 1968 announced it would be moving as the first tenant in the West Acres project at Interstates 29 and 94 and relocated there in 1972, the same year that George M. Black died, at the age of 90.

The Elm Tree Square shopping development came along in 1975 at the Black Building.

The Schlossmans sold the Black Building to a local investment group in 1986 for $2.75 million. The bond backing that deal was declared in default in 1990.

In 1993, just days before bondholders would have had to forfeit the landmark building for back taxes, a judge approved the sale of the Black Building to LTD Inc. of Grand Forks, N.D.