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Our friendly staff at the Infomercantile assemble data under the watchful eye of quality control debutantes.

Welcome to the Infomercantile

When you get information for free, you can't expect to walk away with much. However, I've got the most cost-effective zero-value information available on the internet. My ideas, while malformed and without support, should be at least interesting. Just don't forget, you get what you pay for.

What I'm working on

• A place I didn't know existed, even though I probably passed it a million times when I was a kid: The New Palace Hotel. Like oh-so-many 'second floor' flophouse hotels that existed in Fargo through the 1970s and 1980s, it lived hidden-away above retail storefronts. in 1990, it burned down; arson is the prime suspect. I found a number of clippings about it in a box of ephemera from The Rage, one of the stores destroyed in the fire.

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  The big sign on the Pioneer Mutual Building came down on Thursday and I was there; new pictures on the PML building page.
• New Category: advertising. We all love classy, old ads, even if we 'tune out' today's prompts for consumption.

• On a walkabout in Downtown Fargo on a quiet Sunday morning, we found ourselves in the midst of a half dozen interesting little buildings: the Marjorie Schlossman Roberts Street Chaplet Project.

• A new category, given the number of such objects I'm interested in scanning: Maps. Most are extremely large 300-dpi files, so that their information can remain useful.

• Uploading and annotating a collection of photos documenting the construction of the wastewater treatment plant at the now-defunct Armour Meat-Packing Plant in West Fargo, North Dakota.

• A variety of local print media: Forum, Howard Binford's Guide, Valley Midweek Marketplace, The FM Extra.

• A list of obscure musicians, who may have recorded an album or performed, but are otherwise unrepresented on the internet.

• The Category List allows you to view most/all content, and browse topically.