Alonzo Ward Hotel
A six-story Art Deco survivor on Aberdeen’s Main Street, its zig-zag brick cornice still tracing the skyline a century after the fire that made way for it.
At a glance
The Alonzo Ward Hotel rises six stories from the corner of Main Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota, its brick facade organized into three horizontal tiers and capped with a cornice of diagonally laid brick in the Art Deco zig-zag pattern. Designed by the Minneapolis firm Ellerbe & Co. and completed in 1928 to replace a hotel destroyed by fire the previous year, it was among the most architecturally sophisticated commercial buildings on the northern Great Plains at the time of its construction. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982 and contributing to the Aberdeen Commercial Historic District, the hotel later housed South Dakota’s first radio station on its sixth floor before being converted to residential condominiums in the 2000s.
Key facts
- Built: 1927–1928 (opened May 1928)
- Architect: Ellerbe & Co. (Minneapolis)
- Style: Art Deco with English vernacular revival elements
- Height: Six stories, steel-reinforced concrete with brick facade
- Address: 104 South Main Street, Aberdeen, SD 57401
- NRHP: ref. 82003915, added 17 June 1982
- District: Contributing property, Aberdeen Commercial Historic District (1988)
History
Aberdeen entrepreneur Alonzo Ward built the original hotel at 104 South Main Street in 1894, giving the young railroad city its first purpose-built accommodation block. The structure served the town through its early decades of growth until November 1926, when fire destroyed the building entirely. Ward’s heirs commissioned Ellerbe & Co. of Minneapolis to design a replacement, and construction began in 1927. The new hotel opened in May 1928 at a cost and quality that announced it as the city’s premier lodging address.
In 1935, a local radio entrepreneur launched KABR—the first radio station in Aberdeen—from studios on the sixth floor, making the Ward Hotel a broadcasting landmark as well as a hospitality one. The station’s presence drew regional attention to the building and connected it to the modernizing culture of the New Deal era. The National Register listed the hotel in 1982, followed by its designation as a contributing property to the Aberdeen Commercial Historic District in 1988.
By the early 2000s, hotel operations had ceased and the upper floors were ripe for reinvention. Between 2002 and 2004, 90 original guest rooms on floors three through six were converted into 15 condominium units, while the second-floor ballroom was carefully restored and returned to event use. In October 2017, a semi-truck struck and damaged an overhang on the north side, a mundane mishap that underscored the ongoing vulnerability of downtown heritage buildings to everyday commerce.
What you see
Ellerbe & Co. organized the Ward Hotel facade into three legible zones. The lowest two floors form a sturdy commercial base, separated from the middle section by a continuous horizontal belt course of brick that gives the composition its visual footing. Floors three through six read as the shaft, their regular window grid providing a calm rhythm that the decorative top then caps with energy. The crown is the building’s signature moment: brick is laid diagonally in a zig-zag pattern to form an Art Deco cornice, a motif that transforms a simple parapet into a piece of urban jewelry visible from the length of Main Street.
The material palette is steel-reinforced concrete faced with brick throughout—a combination that gave Aberdeen its first genuinely fire-resistant commercial structure of this scale after the 1926 disaster. The blend of English vernacular revival solidity in the base and shaft with the exuberant Art Deco gesture at the cornice is characteristic of Ellerbe’s work in smaller midwestern cities, where clients wanted reassurance and spectacle in the same building.
Practical information
- Access: Private residential building; exterior viewable from South Main Street
- Best view: Stand at the intersection of Main and 1st Avenue SE for the full facade including the zig-zag cornice
- Photography: Exterior from public sidewalk freely permitted
- Time needed: 10–15 minutes for exterior and streetscape context
Getting there
Aberdeen lies in north-central South Dakota at the junction of US Routes 12 and 281, approximately two and a half hours north of Sioux Falls via I-29 and SD-12, and about the same distance west of Fargo, North Dakota. The Alonzo Ward Hotel stands at 104 South Main Street in the downtown commercial core. Street parking is available along Main Street; the building is within two blocks of the Aberdeen visitors’ center.
Nearby
- Aberdeen Commercial Historic District — the Ward Hotel sits within a compact district of early-twentieth-century commercial architecture along Main Street
- Dacotah Prairie Museum — natural history and regional heritage, two blocks east on Main Street
- Wylie Park and Storybook Land — Aberdeen’s Oz-themed attraction, three miles north of downtown
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Alonzo Ward Hotel” — primary narrative source
- National Register of Historic Places, ref. 82003915 (17 June 1982)
- National Register of Historic Places, Aberdeen Commercial Historic District nomination (1988)
- Wikimedia Commons, SD-Aberdeen-Alonzo-Ward-Hotel.JPG (Joel Bradshaw, CC0)
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