‘First-tier city’: Sioux Falls featured as ‘City of Hustle’ in new book

Sioux Falls isn’t just flyover country, but a city with a history worth documenting and a future worth envisioning.

A new book hitting shelves this fall, “City of Hustle: A Sioux Falls Anthology,” tackles just that through several essays from South Dakotans and Sioux Falls residents.

The book is part of an anthology series with a mission to tell overlooked stories, originally the overlooked histories of cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest. The series, which also features cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, resonate with people who live in the region but also offer intimate access to complicated histories of the region to outsiders.

Jon Lauck, an established South Dakota author and an editor for the book, reached out to Beltway Publishing to pitch Sioux Falls as a worthy city to document. They agreed.

Patrick Hicks, who is an Augustana University professor, established poet and author, co-edited the book with Lauck.

Patrick Hicks

“City of Hustle” covers topics ranging from the Big Sioux River to how Sioux Falls became a financial center, a health care center and how Sudanese refugees, including the Lost Boys, have helped shape Sioux Falls into the thriving city it is today.

“Sioux Falls is a booming city that has seen a lot of success, and nobody has ever really tried to explain it to the world and describe who is here and what the rhythms and vibrations of the city are,” Lauck said. “We’re drawing on some of the most articulate voices in the city.”

Jon Lauck

Contributors include well-known writers such as Stu Whitney, April White, Jonathan Ellis, Beth Jensen and Patrick Lalley and experts such as George Shurr, Evan Nolte and Doug Hajek. There are 51 contributors in all.

Hajek writes how Sioux Falls became a “City of Banks” in the book, covering the state’s historic change in usury laws in 1979 and how it shaped the city and state.

Because of the change, Sioux Falls is now on the national financial stage as home to two of the top four banks in the nation, Citibank and Wells Fargo, and South Dakota has received billions of dollars in revenue from the banking industry in the past four decades.

Some of the biggest projects in Sioux Falls and South Dakota are tied to the banking industry in Sioux Falls — whether that’s Denny Sanford’s billions in philanthropic endeavors in Sioux Falls, Dana Dykhouse’s contributions to South Dakota State athletics, Miles Beacom’s contributions that have shaped Dakota State University or more.

Hajek, a lawyer at Davenport Evans, witnessed the creation of the South Dakota legislation that ushered in the financial wave in the state in 1979. He also had close interactions with Citibank as it moved to Sioux Falls in the ’80s, and then held presentations about such history starting in 2015.

“It really changed the course of the town, I think, in a very positive way,” Hajek said. “What started with the state legislation has changed the Sioux Fall business community’s outlook on what was possible and the role that Sioux Falls could play in the world.”

“Sioux Falls has advanced in so many ways because of what happened 42 years ago,” Hajek added. “There have been many quality-of-place advances here — public facilities, education, services and programs — that would not have been possible without the resources directly attributable to our state’s success in financial services.”

Such history has made Sioux Falls a “first-tier city” and helped it stand out from other cities like Grand Forks, North Dakota, or Sioux City, Iowa, Lauck said.

The book will be available for purchase starting Oct. 11 at Zandbroz Variety, Full Circle Book Co-op and Barnes & Noble. It is currently available for pre-order on Amazon.

A launch party will be Nov. 10 in downtown Sioux Falls. A location has not yet been determined, Lauck said.

“Every place has an identity, and it’s important to know that identity so other people aren’t defining you in ways that are incorrect,” Lauck said. “We need to take charge of our own story, embrace it and make it an even better city because it’s becoming a prominent and popular destination for people hundreds of miles away. And we don’t know how to make the place better unless we know our heritage and history and where we’ve been.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect a correct list of contributors.