This photo from Detroit Publishing Company is a similar perspective to a shot previously posted on PDD. It shows Downtown Duluth at Superior Street and Fifth Avenue West at the turn of the 20th century, with the Spalding Hotel at right and the Lyceum Theatre at left.
The traveling Vietnam Wall was on display in Chisholm recently. WDSE-TV Producer Megan McGarvey visited the wall and produced an emotional report for Almanac North on the importance of the memorial in remembering those who paid the ultimate price during the war.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been, three years ago I survived an assassination attempt on the Blatnik Bridge. Locally called “the High Bridge,” it is in fact 120 feet high over the St. Louis Bay. It is co-owned by Minnesota and Wisconsin, and when you cross the state line, you have a bird’s eye view of the bay, Park Point, and Lake Superior. For a moment, I thought it would be my final view.
Earlier that morning, I swam through the ruins off of Washburn, the tiny Wisconsin town with big secrets. On the way back to Minnesota in my blue 1976 Lotus Esprit S1 — the Aquamobile — I stopped at the Anchor Bar in Superior. Time: 11 a.m. The streets were quiet, church was still in session. I parked across the avenue and went inside. Joining my confidential informant for a burger in a booth, he slipped me a list of every crooked cop in Wisconsin. I put it in my shark-themed backpack, returned to the Aquamobile, and put the backpack in the passenger seat next to the speargun. I got in and rolled my window down. Now for a little drive to the U.S. Marshals office in the Federal Building at the Duluth Civic Center.
Yes, more mystery fake cowboys from Duluth. Previous cowboy mystery photos were presented in the post “Mystery Photos: Wide Awake and Green Dragon Studios.” Cowboy nostalgia was apparently all the rage in the early 1900s, even though the Old West wasn’t quite that old at the time, because the photos featured here are from yet a third photography enterprise in Duluth, Owl Studio.
A specific date hasn’t been set, but WDIO-TV reports that Lake Superior Brewing will open soon. It will initially be just a restaurant and bar, however. The brewery’s beer won’t be ready until September. “Hopefully by Labor Day,” co-owner Sarah Maxim told WDIO.
This postcard was mailed 100 years ago today — July 7, 1922. The illustration presents an aggrandized version of the Rex Hotel, which later became the Curtis Hotel, then Milner Hotel, then Seaway Hotel, and then briefly the Esmond Building. It was actually a three-story building, not four like the postcard shows, and the ground floor wasn’t so ridiculously tall as to dwarf any people or automobiles in front of it.
Built in 1896, the SS Meteor is the last surviving above-water whaleback ship in the world. It operated until 1969 and is now a museum ship on Barker’s Island in Superior. The documentary embedded above was created by Duluth Film Company, a division of GOV Productions.
It was a busy weekend in Duluth, despite the rain that postponed the Fourth of July events.
Saturday I missed the Rhizomes, who played in Two Harbors. Crankily, I have decided that I will only be indoors in places with cavernous, flowing air, until the pandemic has subsided. (For more information about the pandemic that is still going on, no matter how many people you see walking around without masks, visit the Minnesota Dashboard. We’re doing okay — COVID hospitalizations are definitely flat, but variants are increasingly resistant to the vaccine.)
It’s been nearly 10 years since the pink Aerial Lift Bridge dollhouse toilet was first mentioned on Perfect Duluth Day — back when it was listed for sale on eBay. Since the reference to it was just a brief mention in a comment to the PDD Gift Guide 2012, perhaps it is time the Duluthy commode is revisited and given its own separate post, if for no other purpose than for speculating on its origin.
Duluth’s Charlie Parr performed songs from his 2021 album Last of the Better Days Ahead at the Rail River Folk School in Bemidji for an episode of the Lakeland PBS program Backroads.
For your flag-waving Independence Day viewing pleasure Perfect Duluth Day presents the “Gonzo USA Theme” from Jim Richardson’s public access television show circa 2001. The music is by Craig Minowa of Cloud Cult fame; Richardson, of course, is now alternatively known as Lake Superior Aquaman.
In Herbster, Wis., near the southern shore of Lake Superior, sits a 40-acre farm that uses sustainable methods to help build a stronger local economy. The farm is home to American guinea hogs, Icelandic chickens and a lush variety of produce including (but not limited to) apples, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, tomatoes, elderberries, raspberries, gooseberries, garlic, potatoes, saskatoons, pears and even a greenhouse with a lime tree.
Elsewhere Farm is tended by Chicago-native Clare Hintz, who came north for college and fell in love. Hintz was interviewed for this article on a particularly snowy winter day, but even then she lit up when describing the Arrowhead region.
Raptors: The sight of a bald eagle stirs a person. I used to live in more southerly climes where they were less common, so it has been a treat to see one every now and then up here. I saw them a lot after my divorce, when I had to drive halfway through Minnesota every two weeks to exchange my daughter like a prisoner. I pointed out bald eagles to my child on these drives, barely able to contain my excitement, while she did that kid act of being bored with everything. Later I visited her at her mom’s house in a rural Winona valley. There was a field of tilled earth on the dirt road to their home, and it was positively overrun with bald eagles. As I drove past, I saw fifty of them together walking around in the mud with their dirty talons. I said to my daughter, “Now I understand why you’re never excited to see a bald eagle — you see so many of them every day, they’re like rats here.” She said, “Yup.”
Hawk Ridge overruns with bird nerds. Hawks soar over the city alone or in twos and threes, or by the dozen during migration. Cold air off the lake hits the warm hillside, a clash of airmasses creating lift — they love that. Unimaginably high with laser vision watching for unwary pigeons or rabbits, eating them on the roofs on people’s houses. I saw feathers raining past my window one day. By the time I figured out a hawk was eating a pigeon on my roof, it was gone.
The annual Northern Lights Music Festival on Minnesota’s Iron Range is a three-week event that includes an opera production. Documentary directors Mike Scholtz and Marius Anderson captured the process and stories leading up to the 2021 festival for the WDSE-TV feature embedded above. Iron Opera is the story of concert pianist Veda Zuponcic and a cast of talent plucked around the world and around da Range.
Thirty years ago today nearly 30,000 residents of Superior and neighboring areas were evacuated after a Burlington Northern train derailed on a bridge over the Nemadji River, causing a benzene leak from a derailed car.
The video clip above is from KBJR-TV’s News 6 Nightside with anchor Michelle Lee and reports from KBJR’s Heather Filkins and Laura Bergan and KARE-11 reporter Rick Kupchella on the catastrophe that came to be known as “Toxic Tuesday.”
