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Currently viewing the category: "Features"

Duluth’s Most Endangered Buildings, Part 5: St. Peter’s Catholic Church

On May 13, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
St. Peter's Church. (Image Robin Mainella)
In light of May’s status as “Preservation Month,” we want to introduce you to some Duluth buildings whose futures are currently in jeopardy. This is the 5th installment in the series. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 include the Minnesota Point Lighthouse Ruins, the upper 100 block of West 4th Street, the Temple Opera Block, and the Carter Hotel. If you would like to read the entire piece now, click here. __________________ St. Peter’s [...]
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Duluth’s Most Endangered Buildings, Part 4: Carter Hotel

On May 8, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The Carter Hotel, photographed in February, 2013. (Image: X-Comm)
In light of May’s status as “Preservation Month,” we want to introduce you to some Duluth buildings whose futures are currently in jeopardy. This is the 4th installment in the series. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 include the Minnesota Point Lighthouse Ruins, the upper 100 block of West 4th Street, the Temple Opera Block, and St. Peter’s Catholic Church. If you would like to read the entire piece now, click here. __________________ The [...]
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Duluth’s Most Endangered Buildings, Part 3: Temple Opera Block

On May 7, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
In light of May’s status as “Preservation Month,” we want to introduce you to some Duluth buildings whose futures are currently in jeopardy. This is the third installment in the series. Parts 1, 2, 4, and 5 include the Minnesota Point Lighthouse Ruins, the upper 100 block of West 4th Street, the Carter Hotel, and St. Peter’s Catholic Church. If you would like to read the entire piece now, click here. __________________ Temple Opera [...]
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Duluth’s Most Endangered Buildings, Part 2: 4th Street Buildings

On May 2, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The buildings at 101–103 W. 4th St. (Photo: Deb Kellner)
In light of May’s status as “Preservation Month,” we want to introduce you to some Duluth buildings whose futures are currently in jeopardy. This is the second installment in the series. Parts 1, 3, 4, and 5 include the Minnesota Point Lighthouse Ruins, the Temple Opera Block, the Carter Hotel, and St. Peter’s Catholic Church. If you would like to read the entire piece now, click here. __________________ Upper 100 Block of West 4th [...]
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Duluth’s Most Endangered Buildings, Part 1: Minnesota Point Lighthouse

On May 1, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
Ruins of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse, photographed in 2009 by Dennis O'Hara.
In light of May’s status as “Preservation Month,” we want to introduce you to some Duluth buildings whose futures are currently in jeopardy. We start today with one of the oldest structures in Duluth, the Minnesota Point Lighthouse. Over the next two weeks we will post stories about the upper 100 block of West 4th Street, the Temple Opera Block, the Carter Hotel, and St. Peter’s Catholic Church. If you would like to read the [...]
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Duluth: the Homecroft City

On April 1, 2013 By Nancy Nelson
George Maxwell, the man behind the nationwide Homecrofting movement of the 20th century's second decade. (Image: Arizona State Library)
Entrepreneurs of the late 1890s expected the fast-growing city of Duluth to become a commercial metropolis as important as Chicago. The city was already a major transportation center where railroads and ships distributed the region’s natural resources of iron ore and timber throughout the nation. But the cost of living was unacceptably high, mainly due to the expense of bringing in food from far away. Duluth civic leaders set out to eliminate this problem by [...]
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February feature: Jay Cooke in Duluth, Part II

On February 1, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The Jay Cooke statue in Duluth, located along Superior Street at the foot of Ninth Avenue East. (Image: flickr, poster unnamed)
Note: This is the second of a two-part story on Jay Cooke and Duluth. The first installment, published January 1, 2013, can be found here. In 1872, while  Duluth’s future looked secured, there was trouble brewing for Jay Cooke and his associates. Cooke was having trouble financing the construction of the Northern Pacific railroad. An 1869 trip to England [...]
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Jay Cooke: Rare Visits by the Man who Resurrected the “Lifeless Corpse” of Duluth

On January 1, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
Jay Cooke, photographed in 1874. (Image: Duluth Public Library)
Note: This is the first of a two-part story on Jay Cooke and Duluth. The second installment will be published as the February, 2013 feature story. A photo archived at the Duluth Public Library purportedly shows Jay Cooke meeting with Duluth business leaders inside Duluth’s Clark House hotel in the early 1870s. While Cooke had a great deal to do with the Clark House—he paid for its construction, and its [...]
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The Saga of the Garfield Avenue Neighborhood, aka “Swede Town”

On December 1, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
This overly romanticized view of Rice's Point was created in 1887 by Henry Wellge, about the same time Garfield Avenue was becoming known as "Swede Town." (Image: X-comm.)
Rice’s Point, like Minnesota Point, is a large sandbar created by silt carried toward the lake by the St. Louis River. It had been a summer home to some local Ojibwe—and the location of at least one native burial site—for at least 100 years before Superior pioneer Orin Rice moved his family across the bay in the spring of 1854. Soon after he filed a claim on the peninsula that jutted into the [...]
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Frank Wade’s Legacy: Beyond the Brick Walls

On October 1, 2012 By Anthony Bush
Wade Stadium, 2012. (Image: Anthony Bush.)
When Miles Wolff first saw Wade Stadium in April, 1991, he envisioned it as the crown jewel in his dream to revive professional baseball in the upper Midwest. His vision may have been blurred by optimism. Author Stefan Fatsis described a stadium in disrepair: “The concrete flooring buckled, wiring was exposed, the roof leaked, holes dotted the backstop, (and) the stands were covered with pigeon dung.” It had been over 20 years since professional baseball [...]
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Duluth’s Woodland Neighborhood: Shaped by Streetcars

On September 1, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
When the land around Woodland Avenue, from Hunter's Park up to Woodland Park, was first developed, it was still heavily forested, and encounters with wild animals were common, as this humorous postcard from 1905 illustrates. (Image: X-Comm.)
Duluth’s neighborhoods each have their distinct histories and personalities borne out of the developers who carved them out of the wilderness, the settlers who lived there, and the circumstances that shaped what they became. Duluth’s Woodland neighborhood was no exception, and its developers relied heavily on the Motor Line Improvement Company—and later the Duluth Street Railway Company—to make the community accessible. In the process, these elements created Duluth’s premier “streetcar [...]
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“The Cribs” a reminder of Duluth’s original waterfront

On August 1, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
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The recent drowning of a young man in Lake Superior set off renewed interest in “Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum,” also known as “The Cribs,” a derelict concrete structure about thirty yards into Lake Superior just off the Lakewalk behind some of Canal Park’s hotels. The young man had was swimming to shore from that structure when he struggled and went under. Those ruins stand as a reminder that the very corner of Lake Superior wasn’t always [...]
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Duluth’s long, rich history of jumping in the “Norseman’s Shoes”

On June 1, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
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Ski jumping in Duluth can trace its way back to January 1, 1905, when the Duluth News Tribune called on Duluthians to organize a ski club to participate in the “Norwegian sport” of skiing. That year the National Ski Association was organized by the Ishpeming Ski Club of Ishpeming, Michigan, for competition in ski jumping and “ski running,” what we would today call Nordic or cross-country skiing. Nordic skiing and ski jumping as sports was [...]
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Featured: The Sad, Troubled Life of Wm. K. Rogers

On May 1, 2012 By Administrator
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[By Mark Ryan] One bright morning in the fall of 1871, William K. Rogers, designer of Duluth’s park system, started out from his home in Oneota on a hike into the woods and up the bluff on what he later called “the roughest tramp I ever made.” Armed with a township map and a compass, and cutting his way through the thick tangle of underbrush covering the hillside, Rogers eventually reached his destination: a [...]
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    • “The Cribs” a reminder of Duluth’s original waterfront
    • The Saga of the Garfield Avenue Neighborhood, aka “Swede Town”
    • What’s in a Name: Who the heck was Jean Duluth?
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    • Last Day for Bridge Boss Beamer
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