Breaking new ground

Editorial | August 19th, 2016

By Tom Bixby

tom@hpr1.com

Malvina Massey kept a house of prostitution in Fargo from about 1891 to 1905. She was the main madam, the most successful, then and now the most famous. Partly because she was black and barred from other professions, she’s a monumental personage in the history of Fargo-Moorhead.

Her house, the Crystal Palace, was in the neighborhood called The Hollow, a low spot now filled in, below what used to be the City Hall parking lot, on the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Second Street North. Frequently flooded in spring, The Hollow was full of illegal swinging-door saloons and what appear as “female boarding houses” on the fire insurance maps: the Wild West in the city’s past.

Unfortunately, Massey’s house was just where they are about to excavate for the new City Hall.

The groundbreaking is scheduled for Monday, August 22.

Professors Angela Smith and Kristen Fellows of NDSU would like to excavate Massey's house's footprint and immediate surroundings. They are meeting with architect Terry Stroh this week to discuss whether they can excavate and for how long.

The meeting is closed to the public and media. We don't know the exact date and time of the meeting, only that it's this week and that as we go to press, it hasn't yet taken place.

It's construction season and the crews are very busy now. The most that Smith and Fellows can hope for is probably a couple of weeks.

The inconvenience is justified by the uniqueness of the opportunity. It's the only chance to recover part of our history. The City Historic Preservation Commission approved the planned excavation about a month ago.

Smith and Fellows would especially like to find the outhouse. A lot of things were thrown down that biffy in 15 plus years and it or they will likely be the richest source of artifacts. We say “they” because there may have been two biffies. Backyards that appear in photographs in the collection of the NDSU Institute for Regional Studies sometimes have two.

Dr. Fellows is an archaeologist; we note that although Dr. Smith is not, she is uniquely qualified to conduct such an excavation. Her background in graphic design technology suggests the high level of spatial organization the project will require.

They aren’t just going to dig. Artifacts unsealed from context will be recorded in the order they were recovered, their precise location given; and hence, from what was deposited in which order, a chronology of each context results.

We’re excited about what they’ll discover; we await the eventual publication of their results.

So we're pleading with Terry Stroh because he's the essential go-between, among his other roles the diplomat between the construction companies and the academics. Please, Mr. Stroh, think carefully about the decision you're about to make and the only chance we have to answer questions about the city's past.

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