The Fire That Remade Broadway

At about three in the afternoon on June seventh, eighteen ninety-three, someone threw ashes out the back of the Little Gem Restaurant on Front Street in downtown Fargo. The ashes caught. The fire found the rear of Herzman's Dry Goods Store next door. A thirty-mile-per-hour wind was blowing that afternoon.

What followed was the worst fire in Fargo's history. The buildings along downtown were almost all wood, cheaply and quickly built, as frontier boomtowns tended to be, and they caught and passed the fire from block to block. A fire alarm box was nearby, but no one could locate the key to open it. The delay cost critical minutes.

By the time the fire burned itself out, more than one hundred sixty acres were in ash. Thirty-one blocks had been reduced to rubble. The destroyed properties included one hundred forty residences and two hundred nineteen businesses, along with Fargo's city hall. The population of Fargo at that moment was roughly six thousand people. Nearly all of them had lost something.

What happened next is the part Fargo remembers. The city rebuilt with extraordinary speed and with a clear intention: it would not be a wood city again. New building codes required brick and stone. A businessman named Alexander Stern led what amounted to a reconstruction campaign, replacing nearly two hundred fifty structures at a cost of close to one million dollars. Within a year, two hundred forty-six new buildings had gone up.

The fire had taken a rough boomtown and turned it into a brick city. The building stock that resulted, the late Victorian commercial architecture that still lines Broadway today, came directly out of that catastrophe. The ruins were the beginning of the city Fargo still inhabits.