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Currently viewing the category: "Tony Dierckins: Lost Landmarks"

Lost Landmark: The Merrill House

On May 9, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The carriage house of the Merrill estate still stands at 2620 E. Superior St. and is now a private home. (Image: X-comm)
In our book, Lost Duluth, the most recently constructed building featured is Roy and Edythe Halvorson’s remarkable Modernist home designed by Harold St. Clair Starin, which stood at 2628 Branch Street from 1939 until 1994. Since the book’s publication, several readers have explained to us that the house that stood at that address prior to the Halvorson home should just as well have been included in the book. We also received a reader inquiry last [...]
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Lost Landmark: Robert E. Jefferson House

On April 8, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
ZCA_Arch_JeffersonHouse_001_DPL
Duluth pioneer Robert Emmet Jefferson didn’t spend much time in Duluth, but the house he built at what would become 430 Lake Avenue South would serve Duluth’s pioneers well beyond the memory of Jefferson himself before becoming a boarding house that was no stranger to prostitution. Jefferson had left his parent’s farm in Roseville, Minnesota, in 1855 to, in the words of Judge John Carey, “get in on the ground floor” of the metropolis he [...]
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Lost Landmark: the 1883 St Louis County Courthouse

On March 7, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The 1883 St. Louis County Courthouse, built as a temporary home for the court, but was used for almost 30 years.
As you may have read, these past weeks Maryanne Norton and I have been digging up history on today’s Shel/Don Building, whose upper level was leased as the Duluth Municipal Court for 20 years beginning in 1909. Looking into the courtroom portion of this building’s history made us realize we had omitted an important public building in our book, Lost Duluth: the 1883 St. Louis County Courthouse that stood at 611 East Second [...]
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Lost Landmark: Duluth’s “pride and joy”

On February 7, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
A (colorized) sketch of Duluth's 1883 Grand opera House by its architect, George Wirth. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
In the early 1880s, after the developing grain trade helped Duluth recover from the financial panic of 1873, pioneers and civic leaders Roger Munger and Clinton Markell felt the city’s growing population could support a major theater to attract musical, dramatic, and literary productions. They hired St. Paul architect George Wirth to design the Grand Opera House, which stood at 333 West Superior Street—the northeast corner [...]
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Lost Landmarks: the 1913 Duluth Curling Club

On January 11, 2013 By Tony Dierckins
The Duluth Curling Club depicted in a lithographic postcard made some time between 1915 and 1925. (Image: X-Comm)
On January 11, 1913—one hundred years ago—the largest curling facility on the planet opened in Duluth at 1338 London Road. It was the completion of a vision many Duluthians had shared since 1891. Beginning in the 1880s, as Duluth began another boom cycle thanks to the developing grain trade, it attracted many idealistic young men from Scotland and Canadians of Scottish ancestry. By the end of the decade, Hunter’s Park was being developed along Woodland [...]
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Lost Landmark: Ashtabula Heights

On December 27, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
A sketch showing the Bell (left) and Forbes homes along Second Street in Duluth's Ashtabula House in the late 1880s. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
Before the 1880s, Duluth had very few houses that offered more than basic shelter. Roger Munger had built a large Italianate house and carriage house at 405 Mesaba Avenue in 1870 and two years later George Sargent built a Second Empire home at what would become 4500 London Road (the property was not even part of a township  at [...]
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Lost Landmark: the 1888 Duluth Bethel

On November 26, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
The 1888 Duluth Bethel, designed by Oliver Traphagen, at the northwest corner of Lake Avenue and Sutphin Street, demolished in 1948.
Most Duluthians are aware of the Duluth Bethel Building, the V-shaped structure just above Superior Street east of Mesaba Avenue. Since it was first built in 1910 that building has acted as the home to Duluth’s Bethel Society, which serves those recovering from addiction problems. Few Duluthians living today, however, know that the Bethel operated out of a tent near the base of Minnesota Point before becoming one of the Zenith City’s most important charitable [...]
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DeWitt Prescott’s Two Lost West Duluth Landmarks

On October 22, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
Built as Marinette Iron Works in 1890, this buulding served Duluth as the home of Union Match and Chun King Foods. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
Duluth began making things out of metal about the same time it officially became a city. In 1871 J. B. Culver, Luther Mendenhall, J. D. Ray, J. C. Hunter, and W. W. Spalding formed the Duluth Blast Furnace Company and built the city’s first blast furnace on Rice’s Point to make rail cars for Jay Cooke’s great Northern Railway. That business failed along with Cooke and the rest of Duluth in 1873, but metal fabrication [...]
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Lost Landmark: Hardy Hall

On September 25, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
Hardy Hall in the 1890s. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
This month’s “Lost Landmark” continues September’s theme celebrating the early years of Woodland Avenue, including the Hunter’s Park neighborhood. Our topic, Hardy Hall— a women’s preparatory school whose supporters promised would become a feeder school for the likes of Vassar and Wellesley Colleges—was gone within fifteen years of its construction after falling victim to public scandal. In January of 1890 the Spalding Hotel hosted a reception for Miss Kate Hardy of [...]
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Lost Landmark: Duluth’s Imperial Mill

On August 27, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
A sketch of Duluth's Imperial Mill, made before the structure was built. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
Grain flowing from the Dakotas and Western Minnesota to Duluth’s and Superior’s mammoth grain elevators in the 1880s made the Twin Ports a natural spot for flour mills to flourish. In 1889 pioneer Roger Munger partnered with Bradford C. Church and T. A. Olmstead and established Imperial Mills on the east side of Rice’s Point at 600 Garfield Avenue. It would become the largest such operation on the planet. While Duluthians had been milling flour [...]
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Lost Landmark: Jimmy Oreck’s Flame Restaurant

On July 23, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
The "Sultan of the Second Cup" pours coffee refills for diners at the Flame in the late 1930s. (Image: Michelle Pearson.)
In 1946, as Jimmy Oreck was about to reopen his popular Flame restaurant at the foot of Fifth Avenue West on the harbor, the Duluth Herald ran a series of articles on the business, announcing that what began as a humble barbecue stand had evolved into the “Northwest’s most spectacular night club.” Not bad for a kid who left school after the eighth grade to sell newspapers and shine shoes. The Flame’s history goes back [...]
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Lost Landmark: Athletic Park

On June 21, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
ZCA_Arch_AthleticPark_001_DPL
When the Duluth Cardinals entered the Northern League in 1903, they needed a place to play. So that April contractors hastily built a wooden ballpark with seating for 3,000 in the shadows of the DM&I ore docks. It was a very simple affair: the seats were boards that didn’t even have cushions until 1909, and then only 500 seats were covered. The next year the team became the Duluth White Sox, winning pennants in [...]
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Lost Landmark: Duluth Beltline Railway

On May 20, 2012 By Tony Dierckins
ZCA_P&L_LBayviewIncline_001_DPL
Much like the Seventh Avenue West Incline, the Duluth Beltline Railway was built to help a developing neighborhood. First operated in 1889, the “West Duluth Incline” or “Bay View Incline” as it came to be known, ran from a station at Sixty-First Avenue West and Grand Avenue up to the newly developing neighborhood of Bayview Heights at Vinland Street and Seventy-Seventh Avenue West. Like the Seventh Avenue West Incline, a pavilion was planned for [...]
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