The Minnesota Streetcar Museum presents this rare collection of Duluth streetcar footage from the 1930s — much of it in color — including scenes from West Duluth, Woodland and Downtown. The video was written, produced, narrated and directed by historian Aaron Isaacs, with production assistance from Bill Olexy.
Duluth’s streetcars were replaced by buses in 1939.
Grab your field guide and start getting (cautiously) excited about the return of the Duluth Homegrown Music Festival with this week’s quiz!
The next PDD quiz rolls your way on April 24; it will cover this month’s headlines. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by April 21.
There is a Medieval legend of the honey mummy: holy men consuming nothing but honey until their excreta and fluids turn to honey, whereupon they die and are sealed in honey-filled stone caskets for a hundred years. Bites of their candied flesh are said to have curative powers, mystically evading definitions of cannibalism.
When I am 75, I will stop eating and drinking anything except hot sauce. After a month, my bodily fluids will become hot sauce. I will poop fiery chili paste like a sambal. The endorphins released with every bowel movement will keep me high as a kite. I will pee siracha sauce squirting like a squeeze bottle. My seminal fluid will be an organic salsa verde. My salivary glands will secrete tabasco. Weeping serrano tears from cayenne eyes, everything I see will have an apocalyptic tint. The interstitial fluid between my cells will run with fermented habanero. Since an all-out hot sauce diet is unsustainable, I will die. Fill a stone coffin with artisan ghost peppers, pureed scotch bonnets, Trinidad scorpions, jalapenos aged in wooden casks, vinegar, salt, lime, onions, and garlic. Place my body inside. Then seal it for 100 years.
Left: Photograph of Emily Koch. Right: “Self Portrait” 20×28. Oil on wood panel.
Emily Koch is a surrealist painter from Duluth. She studied fine art at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, graduating in 2020 and has worked as a freelance artist since then. She is drawn to all things queer, feminine and counterculture.
The building at 1923 W. Superior St. was constructed in 1899 and houses the Hotel Pikku and Hemlock Leather works. (Photo: gregfollmer.com)
A small, stylish boutique hotel that opened in a renovated historic building and helped transform Lincoln Park into a hip, trendy neighborhood is now for sale.
The three-suite, second-floor Hotel Pikku, 1923 W. Superior St., opened after owners Chelsy Whittington and Andy Matson purchased the building in 2016 and spent more than a year remodeling it. Hemlock Leatherworks, a custom shoemaker, is located on the ground floor.
The 24th annual Homegrown Music Festival is less than a month away. The 100-page Field Guide is off the presses and will be available at Duluth-area bars, restaurants and other businesses over the course of the next few days.
Zlata Chochieva? 311? Trampled by Turtles? Weird Al? The only reliable tool to help weigh the upcoming concert options is the PDD Calendar.
Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
Red: Whiteface Reservoir. Orange: French River. Yellow: French River. Green: Lake Superior. Blue: Lake Superior
Wild Cam North — a production of Duluth’s Brian Luoma — presents this classic mixed martial arts backyard squirrel battle. It’s a no-holds-barred contest in which Crazy Carl defends his championship against Buster the Beast.
Duluth Urbex recently took an icy trudge through Minnesota’s longest train tunnel. The Cramer Tunnel, about 70 miles northeast of Duluth, connected the former LTV Steel Hoyt Lakes taconite plant with its ore dock at Taconite Harbor.
The Cranberry Bay Pack of Wolves at Voyageurs National Park strolled past a trail camera about two weeks ago during a snowstorm.
Duluth-based electro-folk artist Ingeborg von Agassiz performs a new original song. Catch her at Clyde Iron Works on May 4 during the Homegrown Music Festival.
There was a brief minute at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when I thought I might never shake another person’s hand again. And I was fine with that. If we could take just one positive thing out of the widespread death, illness and cultural disturbance that began in 2020, it might be ridding ourselves once and for all of the compulsion to rub our palms together.
But even when I was in the middle of a long no-handshake stretch, full of wishful thinking about the future, I knew deep down that the germ clutch would soon return. And of course it did.
My prejudicial prediction was that most people wouldn’t want to return to handshaking, but a bunch of insistent jackasses would refuse to let it die. Then it would slowly become normal again and we’d all live with it. I was wrong. Pretty much everyone started extending their hands the moment lockdowns and mandates were eased. There was no resistance.
Detroit Public TV produces Great Lakes Now. The show speaks to me of what we share with other Great Lakes residents and how we should quit fighting about whether or not Lake Superior is the Greatest Lake. This episode focuses on ice sailing, and lake surfing (specifically the Surfistas): “It’s about stoke.”
Former Duluthian Mary Bue released “Bones and the Marrow” today, a track that will appear on her forthcoming full-length album The Wildness of Living and Dying. Bue is marking the song release with a livestream on Sunday at 3 p.m. CDT on YouTube and Facebook!
Quoth the artist: “The song is a reflection on the quest for finding love not only in a pandemic, but also in a wild and brutal post-divorce dating jungle. Ultimately it’s a healing journey of the broken heart — to slowly, gingerly allow the light to stream in.”
