Then & Now: 1919 apartment house restored as home for young professionals

Our Then & Now series brings you a nostalgic look at the places and people who have built the community we love. Have some throwback photos to share? We’d love to see them! Email [email protected].

More than a century later, the newest addition to the National Register of Historic Places in Sioux Falls is still serving apartment dwellers.

The Margaret Burger Apartment House, also known as Boarding House to its current owners, joined the federal list in January.

Courtesy of the South Dakota State Historical Society

The two-and-a-half story apartment house was built in 1919 at 619 S. Main Ave. in the All Saints Neighborhood.

According to the State Historical Preservation Office, the building was listed because of its significance in the areas of architecture and social history as an example of multifamily housing developed for the city’s growing white-collar professional class in the post-World War I period.

“Of the known existing apartment houses in Sioux Falls, the Margaret Burger Apartment House retains a high level of integrity to represent this building type on the city landscape in its simplified Craftsman/Prairie style. Its character-defining features include two-and-a-half-story massing, a low-pitched hipped roof with dormers and flared boxed eaves, full-width front porches with historic wood finishes, wood clapboard siding, a stained wood staircase and one-over-one wood sash windows.”

The Margaret Burger Apartment House in the 1950s, courtesy of Siouxland Heritage Museums

Owners Rachael and Lance Meyerink, who live next door in a Queen Anne Victorian home, bought the apartment house four years ago. Restoring their home spurred an interest in saving other houses in the neighborhood, which has several multifamily buildings.

“We felt called to take care of them as a passion project,” Rachael Meyerink said. In five months’ time, they bought three houses in the neighborhood, which they now rent out.

The work to save the Margaret Burger Apartment House began with exterminating cockroaches. The couple restored the original wood floors where they could, installed vintage light fixtures that have been rewired and made several other changes.

“We try to uncover what the house was meant to be when it was built,” she said. “We try not to make too many improvements on it; we just let it be what it was supposed to be.”

Boarding House has four one-bedroom apartments, which are filled by young professionals who enjoy being close to downtown, Meyerink said.

Originally, the apartment house, which was built by Margaret Burger after her husband died, had six rented rooms, Meyerink said. That was back in the day when tenants shared bathroom and kitchen space.

“It’s not the fanciest house like you see in the Cathedral and McKennan Park neighborhoods, but it tells a story about why apartment houses were needed even back then.”