Cool story!  It looks like the arches are still there.



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The arches are still there.

It's unfortunate that another group of kids had more of a destructive motive and ruined it for many. Let the loss be our lesson. Thanks for sharing -- I always wondered if it was haunted.

My girlfriend lived in a garden apartment in Torrance Hall, the apartment building now on that property. The ruins and creek are super neat and it's cool to know those buildings are still used.

Wow. I remember doing this exact same thing in the fall of 1992. I mean, the *exact* same thing (minus the coming back during daylight hours and minus the mix tape of scary tunes). My friend Matt lived somewhere behind Old Main and I remember the ledge, not being able to see much, feeling like I was going to fall through the floor, and the birds. Really freaky stuff.

I climbed in the second story window there, I think with the same group as Beret, around 1992 or '93 and walked around in the dark with the pigeons and the junk in there, very spooky!  It was like the opening minutes of a Scooby-Doo episode.

Fire, not file in my 4th paragraph. I cannot type worth a darn.

I attended UMD in late 80s/early 90s, and I was envious of my friends who lived in Torrance Hall during Freshman Year. The rooms were cool, and it was off campus, so everyone had a little more freedom.

Thanks for the Lincoln Hotel pics.  Back in 1983 or so, I road my motorcycle up from St. Paul in the fall without a hotel reservation (as a Duluthian now, I know better).  Anyway, after finding all the rooms booked we somehow saw the Lincoln Hotel advertised at $17.00 a night.  So, we went to check it out.  It seemed at that time it was not a real hotel anymore but permanent living space for elderly poor folk.  Since no one was at the counter and the few people in the lobby just stared at us, we walked upstairs to explore.  The bathrooms were down the hall from the rooms and full of mold. The rooms we saw were very small - barely fitting a single bed and a hotplate in the corner with sad people sitting in the corner (they left many doors open).  It was quite sad and this impression has stayed with me, so much so that even though I was 22 years old or so, I began saving for retirement.  Seriously.  Oh, and I rode back to St. Paul that night.

The actual Old-Main burner was a childhood friend of my boyfriend. He ran into him at the mall not to long after the fire. They had the usual "What's up with you" chit-chat, and then the friend randomly started asking if he heard about the Old Main fire and kept talking about how cool it was. My boyfriend wasn't surprised when he got named as the arsonist.

I wish people would continue to build buildings like this one. I love this style of architecture.

Thanks Paul and Barrett, 

The things we got up to back then in "make your own fun Duluth," before we started hitting the bars, the wargly distorted sound system was quite fun and I think we left it there and had other plans before the silly fuckers burned the place down.

The old tennis courts are under the garages built for the Torrence hall apartments.  I recall watching them build the garages right on top of the old tennis courts. I don't think they even put down any new concret or asphalt.

The Stillwater version goes a little something like this:  Back in the day, it was said the town had the choice between college or prison; they chose prison.  Why are any choices made you may ask? The answer is simple...

So the old historic prison, aside from being a place where many met their agonizing doom, was most famous for housing part of the James Gang after they had foolishly rode all the way to Northfield, MN from Liberty, Missouri on horseback where they were shot to pieces by a bunch of anticipating Swedes on rooftops who told them to 'keep the change...' 

Of course, Jesse and Frank got away.  Cole Younger had been famous, aside for his natural gifts of raiding and pillaging with the Confederacy and renegade bands under William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, for sometimes as a wager, stacking up Yankees to see how many of them he could shoot through at once.  As a convict, he also started the prison newspaper, still in print.  

The main prison building, located in a naturally enforced cove surrounded by forty foot cliffs, served as housing for some of the nastiest folk in the fledgling territory, many of them probably innocent.  Before Minnesota, in the 1820s, this valley had also been the site of a massacre whereby a party of Lakota, for revenge, had launched a volley of arrows into the teepees of sleeping Ojibwa below, killing mostly women and children.  So at night when you were walking through here, sometimes it could feel like your feet were being pulled into the ground, and we had tested this theory.  It wasn't surprising many  often reported feeling a sense of unease in this area. Einstein believed walls could retain memory, but he's been wrong before.

Rumors had it for some time, developers wanted a large makeover of the site, that even 'Dances with Wolves' had his fingers in the pie.  The only thing standing in the way, was this big old historic structure being used as bus parking. 

One hot summer night on the ten o'clock news, the anchorman announced  'the historic Stillwater prison is on fire!'  Poked my head out the front door, sure enough, 150 foot flames.   Hopped on my bike and with the aid of gravity in moments was front row to the largest fire my eyes beholden of old growth timber headed skyward the likes of which you probably never saw. That is one hell of a fire I thought. The local movie star's house had to be doused with some sort of special fire retardant to keep it from catching. Dogs were barking.  Children were crying.

Curiously, moments before, we had spotted a white S-10 pickup with three young men driving lost and frantic through the neighborhood.   It was them who'd set the fire. Young hoodlums from St. Paul lost in the outback and fueled by rumors?  Or had someone given them directions?

It didn't matter, because exonerations were swift, as was the completion of this giant condo risen from the prison ashes.  It also didn't take 'them' long to file chapter 11 when the market collapsed not long after, as Stillwater once again outstepped its boundaries attempting to maintain that thin historic veneer which so adeptly draws throngs of hungry tourists in the summer. 

Nobody really knows what happened, save for the writing on the wall. But I wouldn't want to live where cell block 327 used to be.

As an ancient chemist (who had invented reflective paint) once explained to me, "everything burns."

"Truth or fiction, the truth will always be stranger."