This uncredited photo, presumably shot by Paul B. Gaylord, shows the 100 block of West Superior Street in Downtown Duluth looking northeast. The Clark House Hotel, in the foreground at left, was Duluth’s second hotel, opening in July 1870.
This undated postcard, published by Gallagher’s Studio of Photography, shows the London Manor Motel, one of several lodging businesses that comprised London Road’s old “Motel Row.”
London Manor was built in 1955 and later became the Chalet Motel, which was torn down in 2011. A Sherwin-Williams paint store was built at the location in 2019.
This undated postcard, published by E. C. Kropp Co. of Milwaukee, highlights some of the features of the Hotel Lenox in Downtown Duluth. The hotel was torn down in the 1960s.
This undated postcard photo of two conductors standing next to a trolley car comes with a few details. The trolley car has a destination sign that reads: “W. Dul. & Aerial Bridge.” And the word “Duluth” is handwritten on the back of the card.
The video below is from a 1960 French TV interview about Michele Bernstein’s subversive novel “All the King’s Horses”. Yes this is in French, which I cannot follow. The auto-translation isn’t much better. It’s sort of a friendly verbal chess match. At around 2:30 the interviewer asks her something about having respect for her literary forebears. She replies: “We each import our own small stone to the cathedral.” Asked what novel she can compare hers to, she replies, “I don’t know; if it is simply a novel we can compare it to all that exist.”
Photographers William Caswell and William Henry Davy ran a studio in Duluth circa 1870-75 and were responsible for many of the stereographs circulated during the era. The image above shows boats docked somewhere in the Duluth Harbor.
Based on the postmark and the last line of the scrawled message on the back, we might presume this image is of a Duluth house in 1910. What is the address? Is it still standing? Let the mystery solving begin.
Oh, those wacky puns. This postcards was mailed from Duluth 115 years ago today — Dec. 26, 1905. It arrived in Newark, N.J. three days later, and eventually at the home of Mr. L. Volland.
This image of Duluth’s Aerial Bridge, from Detroit Publishing Company, appears to have been shot during one of the first ferry-car transfers across the canal. The Library of Congress dates the images as 1905 … with a question mark.
On the edge of Birchwood Park, a small playground park at 222 W. Heard St. in the New Duluth neighborhood, is an old stairway down to a ravine that I’m guessing runs into Sargent Creek. The existence of this stairway is probably common knowledge in New Duluth, but it is kind of tucked away so that others visiting the park are unlikely to notice. And it raises the question of what used to be down there.
Often we don’t know who is the subject of these old studio photos, but this time it’s written on the back. So we know this is Marie Victoria Benson of 2801 W. Second St. in Duluth’s friendly West End. (Or is it 2301?) She later became Mrs. Edward Cluett.
In this edition of the PDD Video Lab we’ve taken mid-20th Century Duluth footage from the National Archive and set it to the title track from the 2017 Ingeborg von Agassiz album O Giver of Dreams.
