Patterson Hotel

For over 65 of Bismarck's 103 years of existence, the central business district of the city has been dominated by the Patterson Hotel, which at the time it was erected was the tallest building in North Dakota. It was the first project in the state to exploit the technology of steel-reinforced concrete and thus represents an innovative feat of structural engineering. As first executed, it was also identified as an adaptation of the late nineteenth-century skyscraper form refined by Louis Sullivan. In proportions (length greater than height) and curved projecting corner, the original configuration of the Patterson bore a resemblance to Sullivan's Schlesinger and Mayer Building (Carson, Pirie, Scott, and Company), Chicago, 1894. The hotel also illustrated Sullivan's early analogy of the skyscraper as a free-standing classical column composed of a base (lobby and shops); shaft (stacked offices); and capital (embellished attic story). Sullivan's emphasis on the architectural ornament was detectable in the dolphin panels and cornice of the hotel, although the bizarre aspects of these elements and their lack of organic, structural validity derived not from Sullivan but presumably were attributable to Edward G. Patterson and his architect, Herman Kretz of St. Paul.

The Patterson Hotel survives as a monument to the ambitions of its builder, one of North Dakota's most active pioneer entrepreneurs and political figures, and to the social and governmental practices of a past era. Edward G. Patterson (18661954), a native of Cleveland, Ohio, came to Bismarck in 1882, working first as a barber and later engaging in real estate activities. In 1893 he leased the Sheridan House, then Bismarck's principal hotel and its unofficial political headquarters since 1883, when the city was made the capital of Dakota Territory. In 1900, in order to make way for a new Northern Pacific Railway depot, the Sheridan House was moved from its location on the southwest corner of Main Avenue and Fifth Street to the southeast corner of the same intersection (and diagonally across from the future site of the Patterson Hotel). The 1877 frame building was then brick-veneered and opened by Patterson as the Northwest Hotel. It served as the headquarters of the Nonpartisan League (a product of the agrarian reform movement) from 1917 until it was destroyed by fire in 1921. In 1906 Patterson built the Soo Hotel (then the only 4-story structure in Bismarck) on the west side of Fifth Street between Main Avenue and Broadway; it is still a property of the Patterson estate, now operated as the Dakotan Hotel.