Powers family built F-M hotel empire
By Jonathan Knutson
The Forum
There was a time in Fargo when the Powers family controlled most of the city's finest hotels.

The family dominated the Fargo hotel industry for decades and, in its heyday, owned and operated four of Fargo's most prominent hotels - the Powers at 400 Broadway, Gardner at 26 Roberts Street, Fargoan at 319 Broadway and Waldorf at 700 Front Street (now known as Main Avenue).

"The name Powers is synonymous with hotel service" in this area, as a 1976 Forum article put it.

In 1924, Fargo native F. Urban Powers, who had been selling table pads on the East Coast, returned home to manage The Fargoan.

"All the time I was out there I was picking up ideas for the hotel business and finding out what people wanted," he said in 1975.

Managing a single hotel was just a springboard for him.

In 1925, he and a brother bought the Powers Hotel, which had been built in 1914 by their father, Fargo businessman Thomas F. Powers. His construction firm, T.F. Powers Co., built many of the most notable structures in Fargo-Moorhead.

In 1935 Urban and his brothers Edward and Thomas L. formed the Powers Brothers Hotel Co. and took over the Gardner Hotel as well.

A fourth brother, Joseph M., was an attorney and looked after the legal aspects of the family's business ventures.

The four brothers had an uncle, Joseph G. Powers (the brother of Thomas F.), who also played a major role in Fargo's hotel market.

Joseph G. operated the Powers Hotel for many years until selling it to his nephews in 1925. He then bought the Waldorf hotel here.

In 1942 he sold the Waldorf and it became the Milner. It later was renamed the Earle and burned in 1951,

The Power Brothers Hotel Co. really hit its stride in 1937, when it renovated the Powers Hotel coffee shop.

In a 1975 interview, Urban Weber called the coffee shop "the first dry nightclub I know of in the United States."

The coffee shop had air conditioning, something of a novelty at the time. As a 1937 Forum article helpfully put it, the air conditioning system "furnishes six complete changes of air each hour. The system will cool and remove humidity from the air during the summer."

The air-conditioned coffee shop featured hot entertainers, most notably singer Peggy Lee, who appealed to young adults.

"We were aiming our entertainment at the front of the train and not the caboose," Urban Powers said in 1975.

The Powers Hotel was a trendsetter in another way, too. In 1940 its lobby began displaying illuminated transparencies of room interiors.

That allowed prospective guests to see what their room would look like without actually visiting it.

"I believe it is something original for hotel usage," Edward Powers said in 1940. "At least I have never seen or heard of the plan."

The Gardner Hotel coffee shop was another early, though less successful, innovation of the Powers Hotel.

"It was just a little ahead of its times," Urban Powers said in 1975. "We had developed plans for everything - had it all down to a science for the movement of food and customers."

Fargo in the 1930s apparently wasn't quite ready for the time and motion studies around which the Gardner Hotel coffee shop operated.

After World War II, the hotel industry began changing - in no small part because people were relying more on autos and less on trains.

The Powers family was quick to recognize the changes. "This is the end of an era and the beginning of an entirely new era in the transportation and hotel industries," Urban Powers said in 1946.

Anxious to become part of that new era, the Powers family that same year brought in the director of the hotel administration school at Michigan State University to spend a month with the department heads of the Powers, Fargoan and Gardner hotels. Renovation plans for the hotels were announced as well.

The three hotels remained successful. But the federal interstate highway system, construction of which began in 1956, began shifting motorists from downtowns to cities' outskirts, where a growing number of new hotels were built.

By the late 1960s, the Powers family began to scale back.

Bill and Lil Kenny, owners of Moorhead's Silver Moon Cafe which burned in 1967, purchased the Gardner Hotel in 1969 and moved their restaurant to Fargo.

Orlando Scherling, owner of Scherling Studios at 315 Broadway (now occupied by the Golden Razor) and Erwin Beilke owner of All Brands Shaver Shop at 311 Broadway (now occupied by Mr. Print) both located on the ground floor of the Powers Hotel, bought the building in 1972.

The Powers family held on tighter to the Powers Hotel. A 1976 Forum article called the Powers "the last of F-M's grand hotels" and said occupancy remained strong.

Weakness in the downtown hotel market took a growing toll, however, and on Oct. 17, 1981, the Powers Hotel closed.

The building came under new ownership and subsequently was renovated into apartment complex.