Wave goodbye to Grafton. Say "adiós" to Ada.
Towns on both sides of the Red River are being stripped of their fame on Fargo's Broadway.
As part of an ongoing street reconstruction project, Broadway's sidewalks were ripped out and rebuilt this year from Main Avenue to First Avenue North.
And with the concrete came marble stones engraved with the names of area towns, embedded in the sidewalk in 1974 as part of the Red River Mall project.
The mall tried to promote downtown by slowing car traffic and encouraging pedestrian traffic. Pillars and flower beds were placed in a winding "river" pattern on Broadway between Main Avenue and Second Avenue North.
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More than 30 pieces of marble were engraved with the names and founding years of Red River Valley towns, then installed along Broadway in their positions relative to the river.
North Dakota's towns were on the west side of the street, Minnesota's on the east.
Now, only the pavers between First and Second avenues north remain. They include Grand Forks, Minto, Grafton, Park River, Hoople Walhalla and Pembina on the west side and Crookston, Red Lake Falls, Thief River Falls, Karlstad and Hallock on the east side.
The removed stones, most of them about 2 inches thick, are being stored at the Fargo landfill and at a contractor's warehouse.
"There wasn't a great deal that we could do with them in the design," said Dave Anderson, president of the Downtown Community Partnership.
"Some of them, unfortunately, as they were taking out concrete and old paving surfaces, broke," he said.
Fargo Senior Planner Bob Stein said he doesn't know of any efforts to preserve the stones.
As former Fargo parks superintendent Bob "Goose" Johnson recalled Thursday, Hoople's stone wasn't part of the original mall project. Only towns of more than 600 people got a marker on Broadway.
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In fact, it was Johnson and a fellow Hoople native, former North Dakota State University president Laurel D. Loftsgard, who helped organize a coup of Broadway on April 13, 1975.
Eighty to 100 residents from the 330-person "Potato Capital of the World" showed up to see their town's claim to fame.
Even though the town had to pay for its own marker, Hoople Potato Products gave away 1,500 10-pound sacks of potatoes to spectators in less than half an hour.
"We made a fun thing of it," Johnson said.
Readers can reach Forum reporter Mike Nowatzki at (701) 241-5528
