History Hotdish Ep. 36- The Christianson Family

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to History Hot Dish, a casual conversation about the
historic people and events that give Bismarket's unique flavor. History
Hot Dish is brought to you by the Bismarck Historical Society,
a local nonprofit whose mission is to learn, preserve, and
promote the history of Bismarck. Sit back, turn up the
volume and enjoy another helping of History Hot Dish.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to another episode of History Hot Dish. I'm your
host Kate Waldera, a member of the Bismarck Historical Society's
Board of Directors. Today's episode is a special version of
History Hot Dish where we feature another important project of
the Bismarck Historical Society, the Prairie Pioneers Early Families of

(00:44):
Bismarck Programs. The Prairie Pioneers Project is a video collection
of twenty interviews with current family members from some of
Bismarck's early and influential families and residents. The Prairie Pioneer's
Early Family Only's a Bismarck project was funded through a
donation by Chad and Stacy Walker of Bismarck, a Cultural

(01:07):
Heritage grant through the State Historical Society of North Dakota
and donations from local history enthusiasts. The project was done
in collaboration with Matt Fern and his team at the
Creative Treatment. Matt is joining me today in the studio
to help bring you another tasty helping of history hot dish,

(01:29):
and of course, another wonderful partner in this project has
been the Dakota Media Access, where you can find each
of The Prairie Pioneer's original ten episodes, along with ten
new families and their stories of Bismarck that began airing
on Community Access in December. Matt, thank you for joining

(01:49):
me today to share some of your work with our audience.
For your listeners, please take a moment to introduce yourself
from the role that you played in this wonderful collection
of interviews and videos.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Thanks for having me, Kate. I'm Matt Fern. I'm born
and raised here in Bismarck. It's my favorite city in
the whole world, and I've been running the Creative Treatment
for about fifteen years here in Bismarck. We do a
lot of ads across the state and across the country,
as well as podcasts and documentaries. My main my main

(02:24):
passion has always been telling the stories of North Dakota.
I did a docuseries called Daily to Codin that kind
of started out my whole my whole filmmaking career, and
so when the opportunity to do Prey Pioneers came up,
I jumped on it. A lot of these names Walked
or Woodman, See, they have been around, you know, the

(02:46):
Bismarck community my whole life, and so to put a
face to the name, to humanize and to actually hear
the story behind those names was really exciting, and so
I'm very grateful to be part of the project. And
it wasn't just me. I have a great team working
with me as well as the Bismarck Historical Society and
Dakota Media Access. But this has been just a really

(03:09):
awesome project where the Bismarck community has come together and
some of the histories.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Of these families have just been very unique, very interesting,
and as always, everyone learns a lot of about the
families and their important part that they played. Today's episode
of History Hot Dish will focus on the Christiansen family.
We will hear from Bismarck native Jim Christensen. He will

(03:38):
share stories from his family's history, including a grandfather who
served on a North Dakota Supreme Court, his parents, Mark
and Betty, who started the Dakota Zoo, and his own
successful efforts to preserve one of Bismarck's most iconic landmarks.
Let's discuss this episode. What stood out to you from it?

Speaker 3 (04:00):
This is another hard episode to edit because of the
impact the Christensen's have had on the community. From the
library I'm sorry, not the library, from the two to
the revitalization of you know, the downtown, Oh gosh, space

(04:21):
wants the Hotel Patterson. Yes, there are so many amazing
stories that Jim gave us, which is interesting because a
lot of times, you know, if you only have one
or two guests, it's hard to get content. But we
had so much to choose from from them, and it
was hard to kind of narrow it down. But I
had not heard any of these stories of how the
Dakota Zoo got started, or how the Patterson was kind

(04:45):
of falling in disrepair and Jim kind of rallied together
and was able to bring new life to that building.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, and I remember listening to the episode just how
close it came to meeting the wrecking Ball and that
would have been a tragedy. And thank you Jim for
your efforts in saving it.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, I can't imagine Bismarck without that building. My grandparents
got married, had their wedding dance on the roof there,
and so many good memories of that, And that's such
an iconic image of Bismarck. Especially with the loss of
the bridge coming up. We got to hold onto these, oh, absolutely,
these iconic buildings that give us character and define our community.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Well, there is just so many stories to tell, so
many stories to tell. That was a hangout for the legislators.
Legislators too as the Patterson, so I'm sure a lot
of table talk.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, Jim has so many amazing photos. And his office
is right next door, right above the Dakota Stage theater,
and that's where we filmed this episode. And he has
access to the old ballroom of the Patterson Hotel and
right now it's used for storage, but that is always
one of my favorite places to go in Bismarck. And

(05:58):
after we filmed, he let us in there to luck
and show the whole crew. But that old ballroom is
very beautiful. It's right above where Dakota Stage was the
areas and it's fallen apart, and it's it's used for storage,
but you can just imagine the parties and the impact
the community society.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
People there dancing and having a wonderful time. I mean,
you can just close your eyes and see that in
your mind throughout history of all the celebrations that were
held in that room.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah, So if you ever, if you ever see GM,
see if you can take a look at that ballroom,
it's definitely worth a peak.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Absolutely, And with that we will launch into the Prairie
Pioneers episode featuring the Christiansen family.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
He retired, and one week after he retired, Clyde, the
world's largest podiaclascan brown bearing captivity, died, So everybody said
that Clyde died of a broken heart.

Speaker 5 (07:36):
Born in Norway, Adolph Marcus or Am Christiansen moved to
Bismarck in nineteen fourteen after growing up in Minnesota. He
served as a Justice of the North Dakota Supreme Court
from nineteen fifteen to nineteen fifty four and was a
North Dakota Supreme Court judge for nearly forty years. His son,

(07:58):
Am Christensen the second, also known as Mark, was a
former Army flight instructor. After owning a farm full of
rescue animals that included everything from housecats to mountain lions,
Mark open Dakota Zoo with his wife Betty in nineteen
sixty one.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
The Christiansen family, such as it is, started with my grandfather,
Am Christiansen, who was born in Brumandalen, Norway, in eighteen
seventy seven, and he came over to the United States
on a steamship with some relatives when he was about
eight or eight years old, I want to say eight
or nine years old, left his family behind, which wasn't

(08:38):
uncommon back then because I suppose times were tough and
too many kids to feed. And in his case, there
was a relative that had a farm in Polk County, Minnesota,
northern Minnesota that he could stay with. So he kind
of grew up in Minnesota, went off and attended law
school in Tennessee, and around nineteen hundred nineteen oh one,

(08:59):
he returned to the region, moved to town in North Dakota,
opened a law practice there and back then he did
not have a law degree, but you could read the
law to get your license. He became a very, very,
very popular and successful attorney in Towner and that area
up around may Not, and by the mid teens he

(09:20):
was pressed into running for the Supreme Court in North Dakota.
There was a vacancy on the court and he was
apparently and I didn't know. I was two years old
when he died, but from all of the scrap books
and from my grandmother and obviously my dad and people
that knew him, he was a beloved figure around the
state and from the teens all the way until his
death in nineteen fifty four. He had a photographic memory,

(09:43):
so he made it. It was a great lawyer and a
great judge. But he went on the bench the Northcota
Supreme Court. During the Depression, Christiansen was chairman and state
relief administrator for the federal funds allocated to the state
in North Dakota because the Roosevelt administration did not trust
the Governor Langer's administration to administer those dollars to the state.

(10:04):
The federal relief funds from Franklin to Roosevelt. The White House, Washington,
d C. November nineteen thirty five, My dear Judge Christianson,
I have been informed by mister Hopkins of the very
excellent work which you and other employees of the State
Emergency Relief Commission Committee have carried on in behalf of
the unemployed in your state. At this time when a

(10:25):
large part of the federal program is being taken over
by the Works Progress Administration, I want to express to
you my appreciation of the very great service which you
have rendered to your state very since the early years
Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was involved nationally in the formation
of the National Youth Administration and eventually turned down President
Franklin Roosevelt's offer of a position in Washington. He served

(10:46):
as president of the North Kota Community Chest. He was
known as the father of today's United Way. It started
as a community chest and he served as president of
that for twenty one years. During World War II, he
headed the Northcota War Chest. Ultimately, he had gone to
be elected to a seat on the North Dakota Supreme
Court in nineteen twenty, nineteen twenty six, nineteen thirty two,
nineteen thirty eight, and nineteen forty eight. He took a

(11:09):
temporary leave of absence during the depression for a couple
of years to head up the relief administration. So it
was a little bit of a gap there. When he
died in nineteen fifty four, he was still in office
after having served thirty nine years. In one month, he
was known as In some of the eulogies and newspapers,
he was known as the Lincoln of North Dakota.

Speaker 6 (11:28):
My grandfather, Judge am Christiansen, died when I was six,
I believe, and so my dad moved my grandmother his
wife out, moved the big house, they're a huge house,
moved it out into the country by our house, and

(11:48):
so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother
and grew up playing Canasta and all kinds of card
games and just spending a lot of time with her.

Speaker 4 (11:59):
My dad graduated high school in from Bismark High School
in nineteen thirty six. The year ahead of him was
his best friend, Francis Register of There were a number
of Registers around here. By the late nineteen thirties. My
dad was interested in and had taken up flying as
a hobby. He had gone to the There was an
aviation school at Wapatson at the time, and both he

(12:21):
and Francis attended that. By the very late thirties, he
was instructing at what became Capital City Aviation. It was
called the Bismark Flying School. Back then, my dad was
the chief flight instructor. Actually, when it became a parent
that we were going to get involved in a war
overseas by a let's say nineteen forty, he and his

(12:42):
best friend Francis went down to Saint Paul and took
the test. They tried to enlist in the Naval fighter
Pilots program, and they both flunked it. Neither one of
them passed, So he came back here and continued with
his flying school. Operation war broke out, he was able
to enlist as a second lieutenant commissioned officer if you will.

(13:04):
He was an instructor during the war for the first
couple of years of the war in Hibbings, Montana. Himing's Minnesota,
and I think he was in buildings. Then he went
into what was called the Air Transport Command, which was
an Army There was no there was no Air Force
at the time. It was the Army Air Force. The
Air Force didn't come into being until after World War
Two as its own entity. So he flew from the

(13:26):
Air Transport Command and flew all over the world routes
including all South America and across the Atlantic ferrying people,
mostly people, probably parts whatever. He was stationed in Cairo
for a year towards the end of the war, flew
in and around Saudi Arabia, and he always said that
he never heard a gun fired in anger during the war.

(13:48):
He was not a fighter pilot, so in fact, I
think he used to say that the only time we
ever heard a gun go off was when they opened
the bars in Cairo pistol or something. It was when
they closed the bars, I don't know. After the war,
Dad moved back to Bismarck, where his wife. I should
mention a little bit about my mother. Betty Barnes was

(14:09):
her maiden name. She was also born and raised in Bismarck,
as was my dad. They were both born in the teens.
Mom was a couple of years older. Her father, Frank Barnes,
was the sheriff of Burley County in the teens and
into the twenties, at which time he was like one
of the youngest sheriffs of the United States at the time.
So she grew up in Bismarck, as did my dad.

(14:32):
She worked at the Lucas store, and I guess my
dad used to go in to try and meet her.
She was a couple of years older. Her younger sister,
Beverly Barnes, was in my dad's class and was a
friend and they never dated, but he always tried to
go over to their house that he could see Betty,
and as fate would have it, they ended up together

(14:52):
and got married during the war nineteen forty two. I
think it's when they got married. Before he went overseas,
which was pretty common. So he comes back and his
love of animals continues in that he was able to
acquire some land in northwest Bismarck, which was then out
in the country, so is before the Interstate Highway came
through and today's world, it would be out by Dan's

(15:17):
what is now Dance Supervalue, Face and Jaw Surgery Center
up off of Divide that area between there and the Interstate,
and he built and started building what was to become
It was intending it to be a mink farm. He
was going to raise minks and chinchilla's because there seemed
to be a market for that and he could make
money doing that. They he and his friends and buddies

(15:40):
and neighbors, etc. Built what became our house It was
intended to be a mink barn and never got any
bigger than a two bedrooms and a loft and a
bathroom and a living room and a kitchen, but it
worked fine. Then he segued into the poultry business. In
the early nineteen fifties, Armor Creamy opened up processing plant

(16:00):
here and he and like a lot of other people,
got talked into opening or building barns to raise chickens
and turkeys and raised them by the thousands, and they
were sold, processed and sold up and around here. By
the mid fifties, I think is when Armor pulled out
for whatever financial reasons and kind of left all these

(16:21):
guys high and dry. And he had buildings and during
all that time there was always animals around what became
known as the Christians and Farm in northwest Bismark. And
as I was a kideen in the mid fifties by
the time I was three or four, there was We
always had pet monkeys in the house. We had a
pet black bear on a chain out in front that

(16:41):
lived in a doghouse. You know, the usual. We always
you know, aquariums with fish and birds and of course
dogs and cats. He built kennels and we boarded dogs
and cats for years. We boarded horses. We had our
own horses. That was called the christians En Fartment. It
was never he never told anything, never even grew alf alfa.

(17:04):
I don't think so. It was a hobby farm for
animals is what it was. Wasn't an agricultural farm.

Speaker 7 (17:10):
A reminder for our guests that have joined us, You're
listening to a special serving of History Hot Dish on
Radio Access one or two point five FM. I'm Matt Fern,
a producer of Prairie Pioneers, and I have joined the
host of History Hot Dish, Kate Wildera in the studio
here at Dakota Media Access to discuss the Bismarck Historical

(17:31):
Society's video series titled Prairie Pioneers.

Speaker 6 (17:34):
We had gotten a mountain lion, an adult mountain lion
who was wild. She was not raised as a baby,
wasn't people friendly. Her name was Maja. Got her home
and she had a malignant tumor on her nose. Well.
Doctor Tom Orchard was our vet and also very close

(17:56):
personal family friend. And he and doctor Mike Oftener, who
was a surgeon and happened to be our family physician
both did the operation on this mountain lion out in
our building the monkey barn. Big cats are very very
sensitive to anesthesia, particularly the anesthesias they were using in

(18:18):
those days, and they gave her a test dose. Well,
the test dose knocked her out so far that they
went ahead and did the surgery. Well, then they were
worried about her recovery, so Dad brought her in the
house later on the couch and hooked up ivs over
our rafters. I barricaded my door just in case she

(18:40):
woke up. That was in those days. I don't think
we even had locks on our doors. I know we didn't.
The milkman would come and, you know, literally come in
the house and put the milk and refrigerator and they
were in bottles in those days. And I remember waking
up hearing a crash when the milkman came came in

(19:00):
and the mountain lion stirred at that point, moved around,
and there was a crash, and he walked out backwards
and never brought milk in the house again. He just
left it on the front porch. So there and Dad
got the mountain lion out before she was fully awake.
Certainly wasn't a danger to anyone, but he certain the

(19:20):
milkman did not know that.

Speaker 4 (19:22):
Kfire had a TV show called The Marshall Bill Show
in the mid to the late fifties, and my brother
started taking a monkey on that show and it was like,
I think it was a sarity show, was live and
there were always kids in the studio and Mark, my
brother shows up with this monkey, and it's the hit.
So he gets asked back a lot. And by then

(19:43):
my brother's like twelve or thirteen years old, totally fearless,
he didn't mind going on TV. And little old ladies
from there on the area would start knitting costumes for
the monkey and send them in. They addressed the monkey
up and it was a very very popular thing for
the show. Well. The Christians and farm also be came
a destination for grade school school buses in the spring

(20:05):
right for trips where they go, let's go see all
the animals. And we would have sometimes been a large
expansive front lawn out in front of our house and
my mom would come out and there'd be like people
pulling up in their station wagon setting out a blanket,
opening up their coolers to have a picnic and then knock, knock, knock,
can we see the animals? Right? So at some point

(20:26):
in the late fifties, because the zoo, the Dakota Zoo
opened to the public in nineteen sixty one, so it
took a couple of years of work and planning. But
in the late fifties my parents decided, I think my
mom decided that Bismarck needed a zoo. So Betty never
had and she loved animals as much as my dad.
There was not a problem there. We never had a

(20:47):
piece of new furniture in the house because they all
got chewed up by My sister had a pet timberwolf,
and I had a bobcat, and on and on it goes.
So but nobody minded. I mean it was you know,
I thought it was normal. I jokingly tell people when
I addressed groups that I was raised with wolves, not
by wolves, which is true. My sister had two pet timberwolves.

(21:09):
In fact, I used to play with the Dakota Zoo.
Dad was smart enough to know that he needed the
support of the community to do something like this, And
again he was very well known and he had a
lot of connections in the community that range from Harold Schaeffer,
who was a longtime family friend of both my parents,

(21:30):
and Bill Eckberg who was the head of kfy R
TV and KFYR Radio. Glenn Soorley, who was the publisher
of the Bismarck Tribune. I can name more names, the
bank presidents, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The head of Prominent Life
was a friend Conklin, George Schomberg. And these are names

(21:50):
that people recognize. Oh, the Schomberg Ice Arena or whatever.
You know, these people are long gone. He was the
head of the parks department. And there was this old
hay meadow down near the river by Sertoma Park that
was just sitting there and I got flooded every year
until the dam was built. And when Garrison Dam was built,
it no longer flooded. And Dad thought that would make
a nice place for a zoo. And so he goes

(22:12):
to talk to George Schomberg and I was like, sure, Mark,
but we'll probably you know, we'll take it to the board.
What are you thinking, Well, we'll lease it for a
dollar a year for ninety nine years. Okay, we'll probably
need some indemnity that if the zoo fails. You know,
all the fencing, all that stuff's going to have to
be removed. So he goes to talk to Conkline, the

(22:33):
head of Provident Life. Sure, Mark will write an indemnity
policy for that, don't worry about it. And he runs
up all these other people to be on his board
of directors, the heavy hitters of the community at the time.
And so he kind of built in some fail safe,
if you will, or a fool proof in theess. But
it still needed to be built, and it needed to
be funded and to operate. And in spite of whatever

(22:56):
other feelings he had politically or otherwise, which he wasn't
a politician at all, but he was fiscally conservative, my dad,
wasn't he. His mantra was that this zoo is always
going to be self supporting. It's not going to rely
on tax dollars from the city, the state, or the
federal government, because as soon as you start taking those dollars,
you have strings attached and they start telling you what

(23:16):
to do. So the zoo is one of the very
few in the United States that is not supported by
tax revenues, never has been. The Dakota Zoo has been
and is to this day, supported by its membership. There's
typically two thousand paid annual members or more, which is
way more than some of the baker Zoo's in the country.
Of animal sales makes a small portion of it the

(23:39):
gate receipts. They'll run one hundred and fifty thousand people
through the gates. It's next to the Dakota Zu and
Medora are typically like the two largest tourist tractions in
the state.

Speaker 6 (23:49):
And again they had volunteers that you put up all
the fencing, help build buildings, donated material, lumber, et cetera,
and then gradually kept dadding. They had built a train.
I think Dad and friends built that at our house
in the barn, along with the.

Speaker 4 (24:10):
You know, the.

Speaker 6 (24:11):
Carriages that go with it that would go around. Not
on a track, it was on tires. But it expanded
and I think today continues to expand.

Speaker 4 (24:22):
It's grown a lot since my dad passed away in
two thousand and three. But again, it was because of
the support of the community that it grew. He never
took that for granted, but people loved to come down there,
roll up their sleeves, help build fences, clearbrush, do whatever
it needed. It was a true community effort really was
for the rest of his natural life. My father ran

(24:45):
the zoo. He was the director of the zoo by
the late sixties, I'm kind of stepping around here a
little bit. Early seventies. Bismarck was growing. The Interstate had
come through in nineteen sixty three sixty four, which kind
of hemmed our land, and we were on the south
side of the Interstate Highway. And Dad had sold off

(25:05):
chunks of the land that he had acquired in nineteen
forty seven or whatever for fifty bucks an acre. By
the mid sixties it was worth I don't know, one
thousand and acre, let's say whatever.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
So he was not a.

Speaker 4 (25:16):
Developer, but housing developers wanted that land. The streets, water sewer,
the city was growing, and eventually it came time for
the home place, if you will, to go, and that
happened in the very early seventies. And then he and
my mom moved into a home in the woods south
of the zoo. And actually there's two homes for the
director and today there are the director and the assistant

(25:39):
director that were actually both built by the carpentry program
at Desmark State College, so another community involvement there. So
they lived down there until he retired from the zoo.
In nineteen eighty seven. He retired, and one week after
he retired, Clyde, the world's largest podiac alascan brown bear

(26:01):
in captivity, died, So everybody said that Clyde died of
a broken heart.

Speaker 5 (26:06):
So helped tell the stories of Bismarck's past and become
a financial sponsor of this program. Contact info at Bismarckistory
dot org to learn more.

Speaker 4 (26:25):
By the late seventies, I needed to move on and
was approached by some friends and folks that I knew
that were operating a marketing company selling organic fertilizer. Lonardite
actually is the name of the product, and they were
officing in the Patterson Hotel. And this is now in
nineteen seventy eight. By then the Patterson Hotel had fallen

(26:46):
on pretty tough times. Missus Patterson Rose was ed Patterson's
second wife. She had passed away in nineteen seventy six.
Ed Patterson passed away at the end of World War Two,
so she continued to run the hotel. It was a
downtown hotel with new parking. No future things had moved
out to the suburbs. Malls were built, Interstate highways were built,

(27:07):
and it was pretty dilapidated. It was run down and
there was no capital to put back into it. She
passes in seventy six and a group of ten local
investors bought it. They were going to renovate it. They
were going to put money into it and make a
modern downtown hotel, because by the late seventies those were
kind of a thing again. They were starting to come back.
And in nineteen seventy six the building was individually listed

(27:30):
in the National Register of Historic Places. The Sea and
North got to Historical Society, did all the research on
that and submitted the nomination form to the National Park
Service and it was approved and it was in the
National Register. And then, as now, there were tax incentives
to invest in renovating or rehabilitating historic buildings. It's called

(27:52):
the Historic tax credit. So these guys were going to
take advantage of that, and more power to them, but
they just never there were ten equal partners. For whatever reason,
you can imagine. Right after a couple of years of
bickering and it just wasn't working out, we took over
management of the hotel for them. We had salesmen that
were on the road if you also, it was great.

(28:12):
We had hotel. We had a hotel with hotel rooms.
We had a bar. We took over management of the
bar for them, which was great for us. Probably didn't
work out so well for the for the you know,
I mean, we had we brought bands in, We had
a lot of fun in the bar, but the hotel
continued to backslide, if you will. And now I've got

(28:35):
to digress a lot, because when Ed Patterson first built
the building in nineteen ten, a seven story building designed
that way, it was the first example of steel reinforced
cast in place construction in the state of North Dkota,
where there's actually columns and slabs full of rebar and
poured concrete. There's no load bearing walls in the building

(28:57):
at all, and it was the first example of it
in the state in nineteen ten. Seven stories. It was
a very attractive building, very handsome building, had decorative dentaling
molding around the top and terracotta rings. It was designed
and built as a nice building. It was a fireproof hotel,
and back then they had a form. They threw mesh

(29:19):
pipe whatever, filled it with concrete when it hard and
they tilted it up into place mortared plaster quotes both
sides paint. We had sound proof, fireproof, and a lot
of dead weight on the structure, but it was designed
for that. It was okay well long comes ed Patterson
in nineteen forty or nineteen twenty six, after his first wife,

(29:39):
Agatha died in nineteen twenty three. The same year that is,
one of his best friends and confidants, Alexander Mackenzie, the
political boss of that it goas Mackenzie and Agatha Patterson,
died in the same year in nineteen twenty two or
twenty three. Patterson a couple of years later decided to
a add onto the hotel b he renamed it. It

(30:01):
was originally called the McKenzie Hotel. He renamed it after himself,
the Patterson. The reason he decided to add the upper floors,
which became eight nine and a half of ten, was
because at the time he was paying. By the end
of World War One, he was paying approximately twenty thousand
dollars a year in property taxes on the hotel. It's

(30:21):
a lot of money in nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty and
the Centric code then as now with some changes, provided
that you didn't pay taxes on a building while it
was under construction. So from the mid nineteen twenties until
nineteen forty one when they changed the law. Thanks Ded Patterson,
about fifteen years he had two men in a mule

(30:42):
up on the top of the building laying up blocks.
Every day they would lay up some blocks, and some
more blocks and more blocks, and that went on for
almost fifteen years until this eate changed the law limiting
how long you can do that. So that's why it
got added on to the eighth ninth floors were built
as apartments, not hotel rooms. And then the half, the

(31:04):
top half of the tenth floor was a party room.
It was an open tenth floor event room, if you will,
and with a roof deck out from that. Well, it's
all well and good, but the building was never designed
to carry those extra floors all that weight. So now
I got a fast forward to whing. I got involved
in the late seventies, and by nineteen eighty the City

(31:27):
of Bismarck building inspector Jack Hagatis, who was a great
guy and I got along with really well, decided that
something had to be done with this building. Some of
the columns, the structural columns in the basement were spawling.
Chunks of concrete had fallen off, and you could see
exposed rebar that was resting. The group of ten owners
who I referenced earlier, had started demolition on the seventh floor.

(31:52):
They went in and gutted but left cable wiring pipes rubble.
They were going to I guess they were going to
try and do one floor and see how it could
be done. But they left this mess and Jack Hagadas
brought structural engineer Doug Loose and his partner, Gents Tree Holt.
Loose and Trey Holt were pretty well known through and

(32:14):
they did an evaluation. They said, you know, they wrote
them a letter said, in their estimation it would not
be economically feasible to repair the building. It should be
torn down. By then we were in the midst of
processing paperwork with HUD Denver on a Section eight low
income elderly project whereby HUD, under the program at the time,

(32:37):
they would agree to a twenty year housing contract where
they would guarantee to pay a portion of the rent
of the apartments. We put one hundred and seventeen apartments
in the building. We were very, very very fortunate in
getting all those stars aligning for us. And I could
go into all sorts of stories about how that came about,
but it was a true bipartisan project in that Governor

(33:00):
Links administration was instrumental in making phone calls for us.
We were fortunate in that a we got the letter
from hud literally it was in the typewriter. When President
Reagan was sworn in, the first thing he did was
freeze all government actions like that, including ours, and somebody

(33:23):
and andrews or Bridick's office got a hold of hut
Denver and said get that letter out, and they did
so we got our commitment, the Section eight commitment letter.
Then we had to go for financing. And there's government
loan programs under Fanny May and Jenny May, a tandem
loan program that's funded by Congress, and it's for these
types of projects, for low income housing type projects. But

(33:46):
they have a limit. They got like the year that
we got funded, they got one point five billion, let's say,
allocated for these loans and they had like five billion
in requests. So they what would you do, Well, you
have a lottery, You throw all the names in a
hat and you pick them out. We got picked literally seriously,
It's like, this is how government works, right. So we

(34:10):
got the second eight commitment, we got the financing commitment,
and we were able to go to work. We removed
one hundred and fifty tons per floor from that building
of dead weight and then went back into steel studs
and cheat rock and knew everything. And a year later,
in the spring of eighty three, we had the grand reopening.
Senator Burdick was here for the ribbon cutting. Mayor buzz

(34:32):
Leary at the time. A lot of other folks were
here for that. Three years ago we sold the building.
My partners and I sold Patterson to the Shuitt Companies
out of Minneapolis. Guy named Tom Shuitt and his family
that done a number of similar projects over the years.
They own and manage properties in the Twin Cities and Morehead.

(34:52):
And the Shuet Companies turned around and invested what they
thought was going to be a seven and a half
million dollar renovation. It became ten million. From the rough down,
new roof, they readd the exterior, all new windows. They
went through one hundred and seventeen apartments with new kitchens,
new you know, new boilers, new everything, new mechanical and

(35:12):
it needed it, you know, all of a sudden, it's
forty year. The stuff that we did is forty years old,
so it's still there today and it's doing well.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Happy to report, Matt, thank you again for joining me today.
Please tell our audience where they can find the video
versions of each of the Prairie Pioneer programs.

Speaker 4 (35:39):
Yeah, everyone can.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
The best place to go is going to be Bismarkhistory
dot org, the Bismarck Historical Society's website. There you'll have
a link to the YouTube page, which is Bismarck Historical Society,
and there you can watch all the past episodes of
Prey Pioneers, as well as other programs produced by the
Bismarck Historical Society.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Thank you for listening to History Hot Dish. If you
like what you heard, The Bismarck Historical Society hosts programs
and events throughout the year. We welcome all those with
an interest in local history to join us. For more
information about programs or membership, visit our website Bismarkhistory dot
org or find us on Facebook. You can find History
Hot Dish on one o two point five FM, Radioaccess

(36:22):
dot org and anywhere you find great podcasts. History Hot
Dish is produced by the Bismarck Historical Society in partnership
with Dakota Media Access