City of Hustle, page 21
Though the Queen Bee Mill is probably the most noteworthy building in Falls Park, there were other business ventures as well. In 1883, the Drake Polishing Works was established by James H. Drake, a friend of Pettigrew. The Polishing Works was most notable for polishing petrified wood obtained from Arizona. The company gained notoriety for having several works in the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Some of this polished petrified wood can even be seen in the entrance to Woodlawn Cemetery in Sioux Falls. Drake Polishing Works lasted until the 1940s, when it ceased production. The current visitor center in Falls Park now stands in its place.
Drake also built the smaller Cascade Mill at the falls in 1883, which was fitted with an electrical generator in 1887—a precursor to the larger Sioux Falls Light and Power Building, which was built in 1908—which powered the city’s electric streetcars and streetlights. The Cascade Mill is gone, but the pink quartzite of the Sioux Falls Light and Power building is still intact and now houses the charming Falls Overlook Café, a prominent feature of the park.
The construction of so much industry was not without cost. Seney Island was one of these casualties. The former island was a popular place for picnickers and was filled with trees. Seney Island could very well have been the site where Joseph Nicollet viewed and described the falls, which helped lead to the city’s development. This “birthplace” of the city became a dumping ground for trash (encouraged by the railyard) until an entire channel was filled in and the island became part of the shoreline. Afterward, the rail companies built tracks on the new shore. While the Minnehaha County Historical Society tried to save the island with an appeal to the mayor, he scoffed and said, “It would be a hangout for bums.”
Ironically, Falls Park would later become entirely a hangout spot for outcasts. While the city owned the land, the park fell into disuse and became overgrown in the late 1960s when it acquired the name “Hobo Road.” It’s hard to stand at the foot of the falls now and imagine them overgrown and surging with pollution, but that was the reality until the mid-1990s when the restoration of the park began on the orders of Mayor Gary Hanson. The sidewalks and visitor center were constructed in 1999, and the park was mostly transformed into its current appearance. Now there are current talks of a makeover, and not unlike the historical competitions by developers, companies are once again competing for designs and bids, though this time to win the contract for the makeover.
Anyone who has spent time in Sioux Falls has an anecdote they remember with fondness, whether it be graduation photos, marriage proposals, or family drives through the park when it glows with Christmas lights. My favorite memory of the park will always be crossing the bridge with my wife on a cold day in January. When the temperature turns subarctic, the park is almost always empty, and that day, we were alone. I always carry a hat and gloves with me tucked away in my winter coat, but my wife had neither. I offered both, but she said no, so I cupped my gloved hands over her ears and we moved slowly over the bridge—our little bridge—looking at our little frozen trickle on the Big Sioux, at least for this moment, until the air started to sting our lungs and we made it back to the car. The entire visit lasted ten minutes, and she asked me later in the car why I’d even bothered. I gave her my canned midwestern answer that it was “something to do” but that I’ve also always loved watching the falls.
The Big Sioux and the river of time have made Falls Park a place of constant change. From their carving by the glaciers in prehistory, to the mound-building hunters, the agricultural Oneota, the Lakota, the European explorers, the developers, the industrialists, the displaced, and now the tourists and citizens seeking respite on a pleasant day, the falls can be seen as the cascading heart of the community, its blood being both the waters of the Big Sioux and the visitors here. Its presence in Sioux Falls cannot be denied as it is the city’s namesake, and the pink quartzite here can be found throughout the city in buildings on Phillips Avenue, in the Old Courthouse Museum, and in the prison walls, which were quarried by the prisoners themselves. The river is no longer thickly wooded, but it is thickly peopled, and a pleasant day in this heart of the city will never fail to lure visitors.
Sources
Bragstad, Reuben. Sioux Falls in Retrospect. Privately printed, 1967.
“Falls Park: A KELOLAND.com Original.” KELOLAND.com, 2021.
Milton, John. South Dakota: A Bicentennial History. W.W. Norton, 1977.
A New South Dakota History, Second Edition. Harry F. Thompson, editor. The Center for Western Studies, 2009.
Rambow, Dave. The Falls of the Big Sioux River. Siouxland Heritage Museums, 1999.
Smith, Charles A. Minnehaha County History. Educator Supply Company, 1949.
South Dakota’s Main Street
John Kennedy Claussen Sr.
Some people are fortunate to have been raised in an intriguing setting. It may be near an ocean, on the prairie with waving grains, or perhaps in the mountains. For me, it was just a few blocks from County Highway 148, which over time became Forty-First Street and the new heart of Sioux Falls as shopping downtown waned.
It’s an area Jesse James, Charles Lindbergh, and John Dillinger all once graced. Perhaps these men were signs of things to come with this street’s importance. Jesse James and his band held up a stagecoach on the Yankton Trail where it traversed what is now Jefferson Park—just a few hundred feet north of Forty-First. In August 1927, Lindbergh landed his plane at the Soo Skyways Airport on the south side of Forty-First—between what are Western and Kiwanis Avenues today. Seven years later, John Dillinger crossed Forty-First after he and his gang robbed a Sioux Falls bank of $46,000 and headed south in a green Packard.
All of this history I learned later in life, while as a child I thought about the Natives and buffalo that once traversed my home’s yard. What I really didn’t understand was the growth I was witnessing as a child just south of my home on Elmwood Avenue—that was just two blocks north of Forty-First—would shape my life as well as the city I grew up in.
One of my first true memories of Forty-First Street would have been in the summer of 1966, when heavy rain flooded that street’s ditches. Yes, Forty-First once had ditches. I remember a hoard of people walking down to the county road to see the standing water, and we even watched a boy canoe the future Forty-First along the ditches. I also witnessed the last harvest along Forty-First as a farmer gathered his last bounty. My mother informed me that it would be the last gathering of crops because a new shopping center called the Western Mall would soon be built there—the Park Ridge of its time. In just a few years, the canoe, rain, and crops would give way to traffic due to the Western Mall and complementing places like one of the very first Here’s Johnny restaurants (founded by Johnny Carson), an A&W with its iconic dome, a Bonanza Steakhouse, an Earl May’s Garden Center, new car dealerships, the Western Mall Theaters, a Shakey’s Pizza where you could watch them flip the dough, and one of the first 7-Elevens in town with an adjoining Coney Island hot dog shop. Big elm trees and a chicken coup on Forty-First were replaced by Village Inn Pizza, which became my first job in high school. There was a malt shop, too, whose name eludes me, but I remember walking the ditches to that shop with my older sister who had a friend that worked there.
There were gas stations like Standard Oil, Phillips 66, DX, and Husky. The first tacos came to Sioux Falls in 1971 with the arrival of Taco John’s on Forty-First. The Western Mall had an actual firetruck on display at Lavergne’s Junior Shoes. Church’s Chicken made a brief appearance, although most don’t remember it, where Sheldon Avenue and Plaza Forty-One are now. Montgomery Ward in the Western Mall became a mecca for me as a nine-year-old checking out the latest mini-bikes on sale. Incidentally, the old MW door handles can still be found on what is now Graham Tires. One of the twin apartment complexes, one with a Monopoly-piece quality, still stands on Forty-First near Jefferson Avenue. Streets north of Forty-First were still gravel in the late 1960s but with curbs and gutters already installed. I guess they were signs of things to come. As a kid, I also remember buying my first forty-five record at MusicLand in the Western Mall. I believe it was “In the Ghetto” by Elvis. Of course, there was the candy shop, Hubbard’s Kupboard, in the mall, too, where I bought not only strings of red licorice but also football and baseball cards of such greats as Namath, Unitas, Crew, and Killebrew. The Del Farm grocery store was where a sixteen-ounce glass bottle Pepsi was either fourteen or sixteen cents (depending upon which clerk rang you up). The liquor store next to the candy shop had a public bottle opener where a kid like me could get their pop opened. I remember summer nights, lying in bed without air-conditioning and listening to the Dan Dugan trucks shift through their gears as they left their station—where Costco is now—as they headed out for I-29. In 1972, Tempo, the Walmart of its day with a Target “red” marketing scheme, had a major fire, which caused them to have a half-off fire sale during the Christmas season. The 7-Eleven during blizzards became the nerve center of survival for cars that could make it there and lines of snowmobiles too.
As Forty-First Street expanded westward beyond the Oxbow area, I remember watching earth movers on a hot and windy June day in 1974. They were gouging out the land for the new Sioux Empire Mall, which would soon dwarf the Western Mall. I also recall a tragic accident in the summer of 1978 between a fire truck and a dump truck during a downpour—it symbolized the hurried pace of growth at all costs. In my lifetime, two new bridges have been built over the Sioux River, and I’ve seen O’Gorman High School rise on the corner of Forty-First and Kiwanis. In fact, I’ve watched Forty-First Street become the busiest street in the entire state. In time, the Empire Mall would become more popular than Mt. Rushmore in terms of visitors. I worked in the Empire Mall, and I remember managers saying that one would have to be “brain dead” not to have a growth in sales due to Forty-First Street and the malls people came to visit from a five state region. But I’ve also seen—in both May of 1993 and August 2015—the mighty street of my youth narrowed to just a single lane due to torrential rains.
Further west of the Empire Mall was the Penny Addition on the west side of I-29, where an abandoned gas station and restaurant once stood for many years. Let us also not forget the growth of perpendicular streets on Forty-First with names like Louise, Carolyn, Shirley, Madelyn, Terry, and Marion. They are said to have been named for the developer’s old girlfriends, but who can know? As growth continued in the 1980s, southwestern Sioux Falls began to experience power outages from time to time. The western part of Forty-First was called Western Heights and later became home to Roosevelt High School and continual growth at the intersection of Tea and Ellis Road.
As Forty-First Street matured, new challenges and changes came to this street. One of the oldest commercial buildings still stands just south of it, on Louise Avenue. Through the years it has been a veterinary clinic, a health clinic for woman, and it is now a sub sandwich shop. In September of 2019, a tornado roared down Forty-First Street and caused substantial damage to the Western Mall region. Protests and even riots at the Empire Mall erupted in the summer of 2020. Ironically, the protesters who walked down Forty-First were unknowingly passing the former sites of such politically incorrect restaurants like Smitty’s Pancake House and Sambo’s—both places are now long gone. So Forty-First Street has a history of progress and social change as well.
Many of the avenues in my childhood neighborhood were plotted by Senator Richard Pettigrew, and I’ve heard it explained that because Jefferson, Lincoln, and Garfield were his favorite presidents, that’s how the streets got their names. Kiwanis was once called Harvard Street, and Elmwood was once known as New York Avenue. Thus, it was a perfect world for a kid like me, who was named after JFK, to grow up in. In some ways, my innocence was lost on a tragic night in the early 1970s when a horse got lost—yes, there used to be horses and a corral on Forty-First Street—and I remember hearing the echo of a gunshot fired by a police officer. He had to take the animal out of its final agony. Just shortly before this, it was running wild through my neighborhood while I was riding my blue Schwinn Stingray bike. And thus, that terrible echoing ushered in the realities of a new world for me.
Today, Forty-First Street is a path to success for the city. But that old county road of my youth, which is now a busy avenue of progress and growth for a modern Sioux Falls, is still there if you look for it.
City of Hospitals
Margaret Preston
During the late nineteenth century, as emigrants ventured further west, doctors came with them who wanted to set up their own medical practice.217 What these doctors found was a place where one’s reputation and survival could rise or fall on being quick-witted and resourceful.218 Many of these doctors spent their time trying to convince residents of the benefits of various sanitary practices, including proper waste disposal and the importance of clean water. As immigrants settled on the prairies, doctors would first use horse and buggy and then cars to make house calls; however, as technology improved, doctors would increasingly send their most challenging cases to hospitals. While hospitals were once seen as places for those who could not afford a house call, with improved medical technology, enhanced understanding of sterilization, and increasing knowledge of germ theory and vaccination, the hospital became the center for health care.219
In the late nineteenth century, a group of Sioux Falls businessmen, clergy, and doctors met to discuss the creation of a hospital for the city. In the summer of 1894, and with subscriptions from locals of over $3,000, a hospital opened in a house located near Terrace Park. The Argus Leader described that all the subscribers and stockholders were Scandinavian but that the hospital would welcome all patients. While South Dakota had only become a state in 1889, Fort Dakota (now downtown Sioux Falls) had been established in 1865, and the Argus Leader noted that there had been a “crying need for years for such an institution as this in Sioux Falls.” However, the building quickly became too small, and the hospital soon relocated to the larger Cameron House which sat at Tenth and Dakota Avenues.220
The hospital continued to grow, and plans to build a new structure were hatched; in 1900, the hospital’s directors purchased land near Nineteenth Street and Minnesota Avenue. Construction began immediately, and that year, Sioux Falls Lutheran Hospital, South Dakota’s first community hospital, opened. While the hospital was not formally supported by the Lutheran Church, the name chosen was “to acknowledge the church affiliation of the original organizers, the deaconesses who provided early nursing service and the majority of shareholders.”221 The completed structure could house twenty patients and contained a room that could act both as a surgical or delivery room. However, by 1906, Sioux Falls Lutheran Hospital was still too small for the growing city, and a local woman provided the funding for another hospital.
When Helen McKennan peered out of the window of her Sioux Falls mansion, she viewed the eighty acres that surrounded her home, scenery that Edwin A. Sherman, executor of McKennan’s will, described as “unsurpassed.”222 The Argus Leader’s article was headlined “A Good Woman Gone,” and it described her funeral held on October 2, 1906, where Reverend Frank Fox, pastor of First Congregational Church, presided. Fox next described how McKennan wished to leave all that she had to others. First, she desired to offer to Sioux Falls “a place where tired mothers could come with their babies and rest,” and thus she left twenty acres for the park. While today McKennan Park still offers shade to all visitors, in the twentieth century, the park was home to the city’s first public baseball diamond, pool, and zoo.223 Ultimately, once distributed, fully half of Helen McKennan’s estate, valued at nearly $50,000, went in various ways toward the “betterment” of Sioux Falls, including toward establishing an institution that would provide medical care to the city’s neediest citizens.224
Over the next few years, there began a search for an organization to establish the hospital. Finally, Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas O’Gorman wrote to Mother Joseph Butler, leader of Aberdeen’s Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, despite the fact that the order was already running hospitals in Aberdeen, Mitchell, and Miles City, Montana, consented for the presentation order to open a fourth hospital in Sioux Falls. The hospital slowly became a reality, and by early 1911, there was great anticipation as the building took shape upon the city’s landscape.
The newspaper was able to supply a picture of how the inner workings of the hospital reflected the increasing trend throughout the country to improve the safety and sanitary nature of municipal services. The Argus Leader noted that “the building will also be absolutely fireproof and as sanitary as modern ingenuity will make it.”225 The modern amenities included electricity throughout, telephone service, an elevator, a silent signal, and a dumb waiter. All of this would provide Sioux Falls, as the paper noted, with an institution that “will compare with [those in] even larger cities.” McKennan Hospital’s dedication was set for Sunday, December 17, 1911, and in his opening remarks, Bishop O’Gorman made clear that the hospital would be a place where patients of all faiths and the ministers of those faiths would be welcomed.226
Despite another hospital, the need for medical care in Sioux Falls continued to increase, and in response, in 1925, Sioux Falls Lutheran added a three-story addition, which raised the hospital’s capacity by another thirty beds. The following year, Sioux Falls Lutheran, which was renamed Sioux Valley Hospital, purchased land near Eighteenth and Grange Avenues and completed its first building in 1930.227 And yet the demand continued; in response, other facilities opened.
