The view from the corner of Center Avenue and Eighth Street. (Photos/ Historical & Cultural Society of Clay County.)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Fifty years ago, heavy equipment bit into the face of the Moorhead Theater on Center Avenue. As it demolished the two-story structure and its neighbors, including Palace Clothiers, the Blackhawk Lounge and Mick’s Office, city leaders saw the beginning of their dream of booming commerce. To others, it looked more like a loss – one that many continue to mourn today, as yet another chapter of reinventing the downtown district has begun.

Mark Peihl, chief archivist of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, has studied the history of Moorhead’s urban renewal project. Indeed, he remembers witnessing it when he was a teen from Dakota Arthur High School back in 1973. “I saw downtown Moorhead soon after that demolition when my family came to town,” he remembers. “It looked like the photos I’d seen of Europe after the bombing of World War II. Callow youth that I was, I was shook by it.”

The Center Mall would open later that year where dozens of stores, bars and restaurants had stood. City offices moved into the modern four-story sugar cube that replaced the cramped old brick civic headquarters on the south side of Center Avenue, torn down to provide parking for the mall and the adjacent FM Hotel. Hopes were high that the new district, funded in part by federal urban renewal funds, would enable the city to compete with the then-new West Acres Mall and the magnetic pull of development along the new Interstate 94 corridor.

Echoes of that history reverberate today. The mall’s last tenants will be displaced at the end of 2023, and demolition is expected to begin on the ramp on the west end later this year. New day, new dreams.

In the beginning, historian Peihl recounts it, the story was all about the river. The Point – the acute angle of land on which the Hjemkomst Center stands today – marked the area on which Moorhead was born. Crowded with houses, it flanked the commercial district bounded by the Northern Pacific tracks. But there was a problem: The Red River tried to wipe it out again and again.

The problem became unavoidable in 1962. That spring and summer, four river crests – four! – swamped the by-now-rundown area.

Something clearly had to be done. Fargo had undertaken a successful urban renewal project in the 1950s, taking out the often-flooded blocks along the river and eventually clearing the east end of Main Avenue. Moorhead officials recognizes that federal fund available to replace blighted housing. Years later, that would lead to construction of the Moorhead High Rise and surrounding two-story family homes for the 172 elderly residents and families displaced by clearing The Point of housing. But in meantime, the seed of a bigger idea had also been planted … the reinvention of the city’s aging downtown, where the oldest of the sturdy brick buildings dated back to the 1800s..

Peihl picks up the tale: “In  January 1962, the publisher of the Red River Scene newspaper began promoting the idea of an urban renewal campaign for downtown redevelopment. The Planning Commission expanded the ambitious program to include nearly everything north of the Northern Pacific Railway and west of Eighth Street – all of downtown. At 96 acres, it was a huge project for a city of Moorhead’s size.” The population, which had grown 151% during the postwar years, was about half of what it is today.

“They had a hard time selling it to the public,” he reports. The original plan called for renewal of the area from Second Avenue North to the Northern Pacific tracks as phase I of the project. At its completion, phase II would commence from the tracks to Fourth Avenue South. Woodlawn Park would have been turned into a 44-acre lake.

Peihl quotes a story in the Forum by reporter Wayne Lubenow, reported that the audacious plan “made some hair stand on end and it drew gasps – but everybody loved it.”

Their gasps were prescient. The urban renewal process did not go smoothly. Expecting to be bought out, property owners deferred repairs and maintenance. The buyouts were achingly slow. For the next eight years, leaders came and went, not always of their own free will. The hoped-for developer the city expected failed to materialize. Finally, in 1970, city officials started over from scratch with a scaled-back plan featuring a smaller mall than the original dream and a new city hall – predicted at the time,to be only temporary – to anchor it.

Construction of the Center Mall began in 1972 and led to the mall’s grand opening in 1973 with 44,000 square feet of space and seven tenants. What had finally moved the project forward was an innovative approach in which store owners purchased their own spaces, owning them as condominiums. The city maintained ownership of the mall’s hallways and public areas. It was hailed as one of the first in the nation, laying the complicated groundwork for the redevelopment project now underway.

In the end, more than $29.5 million went into the urban renewal project that included the Moorhead Center Mall. The federal government provided $9.5 million , The city invested more than $5 million, and private investors, including store owners, spent more than $15 million.

Looking back, historian Peihl is of the opinion that urban renewal was largely a mistake. “Historic buildings were taken down needlessly,” he asserts. He cites substantial historic buildings that were taken down during the project – the Gletne Building at Fourth and Center, dating back to the mid-1890s; the Kiefer Block, built in the 1870s. The Moorhead Theater dated back to the 1920. “For years,” he adds, “a billboard on top of the Comstock Hotel announced ’96 acres under the hammer’ to explain why the area was so dismal.” (The landmark hotel was severely damaged by fire in 1968 and torn down in 1973.)

Looking back over the district’s history, Peihl cites one aspect he says may have been a key mistake. “The public had very, very little opportunity to have input,” he reflects, based in his research. “The problem of citizens not buying into the plan has haunted the whole development throughout its history. Now, 60 years later, it seems like some steps are being taken so they will have more.”

Looking forward, then, he sees hope for what’s to come. “In 50 years, will future citizens say tearing down the mall was crazy? Maybe, but I doubt it. I don’t think the mall will be missed by many people.”