The Waldorf was built on the site of the old Sherman House, diagonally across Front Street from the new Northern Pacific depot. It rose four stories above a stone basement, with walls of pink pressed brick trimmed in Portland stone. The lobby floor was mosaic tile. The wainscoting, counter, and front desk were carved from white and grey marble. A broad staircase of steel and marble led to upper floors, but the hotel's signature feature was its electric elevator -- the first in any North Dakota hotel. The 108 rooms included 40 suites with private baths and 15 rooms with hot and cold running water. Every room had a return call bell; several of the leading suites had telephone connections to the front desk. Steam heat warmed the entire building. The furniture, which cost upwards of $19,000, was solid mahogany and oak, with a few suites fitted in bird's-eye maple. Brass bedsteads gleamed on the second floor; the floors above featured iron frames with brass trimmings.

The Waldorf's dining room announced its ambitions through every detail. Arched windows were draped with curtains, and the ceiling above was tinted and frescoed in floral designs. Two alcoves at one end of the room were entered through carved arches, offering semi-private dining for distinguished guests. The furniture included an ornate sideboard. The china was decorated, the silverware was of modern design, and the floor was polished maple. Behind the scenes, a modern kitchen supplied the meals, while a laundry and ice house occupied the basement. Quarters for the help were housed in a separate annex. Off the lobby, near the Seventh Street entrance, a ladies' waiting room contained a writing desk and an Oriental rug. West of the front office, a drug store opened directly into the lobby, and beyond that, a jewelry store completed the commercial ecosystem. The Waldorf was not merely a place to sleep; it was the social center of turn-of-the-century Fargo.

For its first decades, the Waldorf Hotel defined Fargo hospitality. Presidents and railroad magnates passed through its lobby. But like many grand hotels of the era, it could not outrun the economics of aging. By the 1940s, the building's best years were behind it. In 1948, Earle Milner purchased the property and renamed it the Earle Hotel. The rebrand did not reverse the decline. The Waldorf's original grandeur -- its frescoed ceilings, its marble wainscoting -- had faded under layers of wear and deferred maintenance. The hotel had also previously been known as the Milner Hotel, each name change a marker of shifting fortunes. What had opened as the finest accommodation in the northern plains was, by its final years, a tired building on a cold street corner, its electric elevator no longer a marvel but a relic.

At 7:09 a.m. on December 13, 1951, with the temperature at minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, the fire alarm sounded from 700 Front Street. The Earle Hotel was burning. The blaze consumed the building and the adjacent Waldorf Tavern. Three people died: Mrs. J. H. Sampson; W. S. Hooper, a former Fargo postmaster; and Catherine Morton, an eighty-year-old retired school teacher whose body was not recovered for eleven days. It had been the hotel's second fire that year -- a May blaze had caused an estimated $30,000 in damage. Fire Chief Fred J. Wells estimated the December loss at more than $225,000. The bitter cold turned the firefighting water to ice as it hit the ruins, leaving a frozen shell of pink brick and twisted iron where the lobby had been. In 1958, the Fargo National Bank purchased the site and built a new bank. Nothing of the Waldorf remains above ground today -- only the memory of marble floors and brass bedsteads, and the echo of a president's voice carrying across a crowd on Front Street.