Matthew James Posts

PDD Geoguessr #10: Northern Minnesota in Atlas Obscura

Devil’s Kettle, a location featured in Atlas Obscura. Photo by the author.

This challenge provides the opportunity to go on a road trip without leaving the warmth of your house. Billing itself as “the definitive guide to the world’s hidden wonders,” the website Atlas Obscura lists user-supplied travel destinations that the standard guidebooks usually omit. The site focuses in particular on unusual museums, folk art, natural wonders and memorials to otherwise forgotten history.

PDD Geoguessr Challenge #9: Duluth, Georgia

References to Duluth in the media are a regular feature on Perfect Duluth Day. But for every reference that does not include the state name, many are left with a lingering doubt about whether the reference is really about Duluth, Minnesota, or Duluth, Georgia, a city outside of Atlanta with about one third of the Minnesota city’s population.

PDD Geoguessr Challenge #8: Midnight Mass in the Twin Ports

Cropped photo of a Christmas Eve service by Patrick Sweeney CC BY-SA 2.0

As this Sunday Geoguessr challenge is appearing on Christmas Eve, a topical theme seemed appropriate. I thought finding five local churches with midnight services would be a rather simple map to put together. It was not.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall?) of Downtown Duluth’s Fifth Avenue West

Looking down Fifth Avenue West toward Duluth’s Spalding Hotel in 1889. University of Minnesota Duluth, Kathryn A. Martin Library, Northeast Minnesota Historical Collections

A few weeks ago, David Beard wrote a post on the future of the plaza next to the Ordean Building, noting plans for it to be sold to a private developer in conjunction with a future housing project. I recently wrote a rather long post about Gunnar Birkerts, the architect of the Duluth Public Library, and because his firm also designed the plaza, I ended up with enough information about this project that I thought it might be worthy of a follow-up post on the history of the Fifth Avenue Mall, a name so forgotten that a 2015 Perfect Duluth Day post referencing the mall clarifies that the word ‘mall’ as used here is “not about a shopping mall, but instead something like the decorative median with trees that stands in the middle of the avenue today.”

Superior Street 1963/2023 – Part Two: Change

The Providence Building, 332 West Superior Street, 11:11 a.m.

The first post in this series looked at locations along Superior Street that have gone largely unchanged over the past 60 years. This set of 10 photos looks at locations where the difference between 1963 and 2023 are a bit more evident. In some cases, that is because of major developments like the Gateway Renewal Program, the Holiday Center, the Skywalk system or the I-35 extension. In other instances, it is simply because at some point the building acquired a new façade.

Superior Street 1963/2023 – Part One: Continuity

In 1963 an unknown photographer systematically photographed Superior Street, capturing downtown buildings and businesses on both sides. Ninety-five of these images have been preserved on the Minnesota Reflections website.

PDD Geoguessr Challenge #7: Downtown on the Iron Range

W.F. Cannon (USGS)

As enough people played the original Geoguessr challenge series of six games for it to continue as a regular series, new Geoguessr challenges will now appear twice a month on Sundays, at least for the time being, so if you have any ideas for what you might like to see in the future, please share in the comments. As always, an overview of how the game is played appears at the end of this post.

PDD Geoguessr Challenges #5 and #6: Bookstores and Hidden Landmarks

PDD Geoguessr Challenge #5: Independent Booksellers of Northern Minnesota

When the days get shorter and the nights get colder, curling up on the couch with a good book becomes one of the best ways to spend an afternoon. But first you have to find yourself a good book. This GeoGuessr Challenge is all about independent bookstores in Northern Minnesota. And for the purposes of this challenge, Northern Minnesota is any city or town at or above Highway 2.

PDD Geoguessr Challenges #3 and #4: North Shore State Parks and Duluth Neighborhoods

If you missed the post introducing PDD Geoguessr Challenges, the concept and rules are summarized at the end of this post. That first post had links for two somewhat standard challenges. In this second post, the challenges get a little bit more complicated just to show the different ways Geoguessr games can work.

Introducing Perfect Duluth Day Geoguessr Challenges

GeoGuessr is an online game that challenges people to locate specific places in the world based on the environmental cues of Streetview. The mechanics are rather simple — you move around a Streetview environment stripped of all its informational overlays looking for clues that indicate where you are. Once you think you know, you mark the spot of your original starting location on the inset map. The closer you are, the more points you get. A game consists of five locations.

Gunnar Birkerts and Intuitive Synthesis: The Place of the Duluth Public Library in the History of Modern Architecture

Duluth Public Library in the November 1980 issue of Architectural Record.

Last month, an article appeared in the Duluth News Tribune about the decision to demolish the Duluth Public Library and replace it with something smaller in a shared building. The reasons provided for demolition instead of restoration mostly involve challenges to reprogramming and subdivision created by structural pillars, expensive building systems like insulation in serious need of replacement, and other issues related to years of deferred maintenance.

Duluth Photos Featured on Twitter’s “Cars Destroyed Our Cities”

A friend let me know that Duluth recently appeared on Twitter’s Cars.Destroyed.Our.Cities (you might need to log in to see the Tweet; Twitter is undergoing some changes), an account that shows how the addition or removal of car infrastructure can dramatically change the urban environment.

The Remnants of Daniel Greysolon’s 17th Century Childhood

In two previous posts, I described how to get to the hometown of our city’s namesake, Daniel Greysolon Sieur Du Luth, and wrote about visiting his childhood home. This final post in the series shows some of the places Daniel Greysolon would have almost certainly been familiar with during his youth in the French town of St.-Germain-Laval. It concludes with a few of the more modern sites of the town.

Dinner at Daniel Greysolon Sieur du Luth’s House

A couple of weeks ago I posted an explanation of how to get to Saint-Germain-Laval, France, the hometown of Daniel Greysolon Sieur du Luth, the person after whom the city of Duluth is named. I was not entirely sure if my own trip there would happen. It did, and that post has now been updated with more accurate information and a few explanatory photos for anyone in the future who might be interested in visiting.

The Hometown of Daniel Greysolon Sieur du Lhut: A Travel Guide

Part 1: Background

About five years ago I came across the article Du Luth’s Birthplace: A Footnote to History. In 1966, the author visited the French village where Duluth’s namesake was born and documented the few traces of him that remained. The article is well researched (all the quotes from Sieur du Lhut used here are taken from it) but the images are low resolution scans of black and white photos taken more than 50 years ago. I wanted to see more of what the place actually looks like.