This Victorian trade card promotes E. Rose’s Boot and Shoe Bazaar, a Duluth retailer of Burt’s Fine Shoes. Info on the store isn’t easy to come by, but a pair of newspaper ads found after this post was initially published indicate the store was open from 1882 to 1886.
Five months before COVID-19 was labeled a pandemic, on a Saturday night back when people gathered together in public places to goof off, I drove from Duluth to Superior to attend an event called “Soup ’n’ Slides” at a place called “The Barbershop.” It might be helpful for me to explain both of the quotation-marked things.
The principal purpose of the event was for a fellow named Nik Nerburn to artistically project a bunch of 35mm slides he had found onto two screens while musicians Alan Sparhawk and Allen Killian-Moore sat nearby, collaborating to provide a live soundtrack to the slideshow. Three pots of soup simmered in the next room for anyone seeking nourishment. Put those elements together and we have “Soup ’n’ Slides.”
The event was held in an old barbershop on Belknap Street that was being used as a music and arts venue at the time simply because no one had been using the space to cut hair for profit. One room had about 20 folding chairs in it, assembled facing the performers who were set up against the back wall. The next room was about the same size, but acted as sort of a lobby. A considerable collection of phonograph records surrounded the small huddles of soup eaters engaged in casual discussion, so that they might at any moment flip through the assortment of albums and change the subject of conversation to the 1983 film D.C. Cab after gazing at the sneering Mr. T on the original motion picture soundtrack cover. And that’s what “The Barbershop” was all about.
Stanislaw Lem was born in 1921 in Lwow, Poland which is now Lviv, Ukraine. He died in 2006 in Krakow, Poland.
He was a Jew who survived the Holocaust, which in Poland was bracketed by two Soviet invasions. He went on to become one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world. His best-known work (in America) is the novella “Solaris,” which became a 2002 film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney. Lem sold more than 40 million books worldwide.
If you want to see Annmarie Geniusz’s original artwork, it’s a “right place, right time” situation. She works in chalk on the sidewalk, and the next rainstorm can carry away the masterpieces in minutes. This week in Selective Focus, Annemarie fills us in on the appeal of doing public, temporary artwork.
AG: I work in illustration, stained glass, and chalk art. This time of year (and since the start of quarantine) my main focus has been chalk art. This is a form of street art that involves drawing murals and 3D illusions with artist pastels on pavement. It is considered a performance art, and is often the focus of summertime “Chalk Art Festivals” across the country.
Take a cruise up Highway 61 in this edition of the PDD Video Lab, featuring old footage from Duluth’s Lester River, past the Loneyville Motel to the edge of Silver Creek Cliff before a tunnel was built there, and on to Gooseberry Falls State Park and Silver Bay.
For music, an excerpt of a cover version of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” by Sparklehorse & Thom Yorke from the soundtrack to the 2005 movie Lords of Dogtown.
For this report we turn to our junior news team at Raleigh Edison Charter School.
This undated postcard from the V. O. Hammon Publishing Company shows the Steamer Easton in the Duluth Harbor. The image can be roughly dated between 1905 and 1917.
Minnesota’s presidential primary is three months in the past, with Joseph Biden winning the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party nomination and Donald J. Trump unopposed as the Republican Party nominee. Other parties will field presidential candidates on the General Election ballot on Nov. 3, but the Primary Election on Aug. 11 will have no presidential candidates. There are also no city of Duluth or Duluth School Board races, although one school board candidate is running unopposed.
Duluth rapper Beyondbliss cuts a rhyme-rant ala N.W.A. in his latest video.
In this new quarantine video, members of the Duluth band Cities Never Sleep play with themselves … together.
Use the link below for a printable PDF for your drawing and coloring pleasure.
Duluth You & Me: An Art and Craft Show
Follow the Duluth You & Me subject tag to see additional pages. For background on the book see the original post on the topic.
Protests and riots in the Twin Cities spread to Duluth on Saturday. The death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer spurred the actions, which were mostly peaceful in Duluth. The notable exception was an incident at the Kwik Trip convenience store on 27th Avenue West and Superior Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
The building that has been home to the Electric Fetus music and gift store since 1987 was once a theater. From 1903 to 1911 the Bijou Theatre operated at 12 E. Superior St. until it was renamed the Empress Theatre. It burned in 1915, but the structure survived and was converted to retail.
Test your memory of May 2020 headlines and happenings with this week’s PDD Quiz!
The next quiz will be another architectural details quiz, this time highlighting buildings in Superior; it will be published on June 14. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 10.
“Duluth is a bit off-center, both literally and figuratively—something most Duluthians don’t seem to mind at all. After all, this is the city whose skyway system runs partially underground, where the West End is located in the city’s geographic center, and whose annual Christmas City of the North parade is held a week before Thanksgiving. Duluth may be a little bit off-center, but part of what makes Duluth Duluth is that here, true north isn’t always where you’d expect it to be.”
— Tony Dierckins, Duluth: An Urban Biography
Sheltering in place gives a devotee to a city even more time to learn it intimately. I read Tony Dierckins’ new biography of Duluth, which fits the bill of a pre-founding-to-present history that I pined for on my blog some while back. The biography really only left me hungry for more: it clocks in at just under 170 pages and could easily have been double that length if it were to thoroughly explore structural forces and the lives of prominent figures beyond a series of mayors and those who crossed their paths. Still, it was a welcome step beyond Tony’s previous fun vignettes and collections, most of which peter out somewhere in the middle of the 20th century. Granted, Duluth’s history becomes somewhat less romantic in that stretch; the great turn-of-the-century wealth faded, the growth stalled, and the architecture wandered away from an eclectic opulence to something much more mundane. Still, the book is a reminder that this city’s history has always been one of awkward lurches, of rises and falls, and a quest for some sort of stability in the aftermath.
