The Lamplighter in Souptown is under new ownership and is re-opening this week! Remember the L-shaped pool table? It could be yours to win! Just come in and register for the free raffle before midnight! The lucky winner will have five days to haul it to it’s new home! Oh, the stories that it could tell.
The main personality split in Duluth occurs about where an interfering spine of rocks comes down from the hill to Superior Street just a few blocks west of midtown. West of this point of rocks Duluth is politically left, east of it it is politically right. But there is a certain uniting force in cold weather, of which Duluth has its share.
–From “Duluth,” an essay by Arthur W. Baum
in the April 16, 1949, Saturday Evening Post
The Peerless Auto Body Fire post on PDD sparked some discussion of the former Peerless location near Point of Rocks, which led to some interest in the history of Point of Rocks.
So, here we go …
I got one for the Duluth History Detectives. Where was the J.J. Summers Agency located?
I just received an art book of the famous photographer Stephen Shore, and it was the following photo.
Caption reads: J.J. Summers Agency, First Street, Duluth, Minnesota, July 11, 1973.
I enjoy the rare opportunity to track down the locations of old famous photographs in the area to rephotograph and want to find this one. A quick cruise through Google Street view show a could of store fronts which still looks similar (Glenwood Signs) that I’ll go inspect, but any first hand accounts of the location, or records of an actual address would be great. Visual identification may be hopeless if it has been tore down or remodeled in the past 37 years.
Regular folks getting drunk used to be front page news. Ah, the good ol’ days.
From the first issue of the Duluth Herald, April 9, 1883:
James Clark got drunk yesterday and was run in by Officer Turcotte. He was taxed $8.50 this morning by Justice Martin.
A. Lonquest was drunk and disorderly at Rice’s Point last night and Officer Peloski found considerable difficulty in arresting him. He had an infernal machine called a self cocking revolver on his person besides a dangerous looking knife. He contributed $10 to the city treasury this morning.
P. Peck was a plain drunk who was picked up by Tom McLaughlin yesterday. He paid the customary $8.50 this morning.
Mary McGraw got beastly drunk yesterday and fell into the clutches of the police. This morning she woke up financially embarrassed and the result was she was sentenced to ten days confinement in the county jail.
These are our people; this is our heritage.
Among the random things to show up in my e-mail today (thanks Jake and Wendy) is this photo of an old (and awesome) ashtray from the Merry Inn Tavern. The address, 917 W. Michigan St., would have been roughly where Mesaba Avenue meets I-35 today.
The Merry Inn Tavern and Michelizzi’s Italian Food grocery store were part of the Terminal Hotel throughout the 1960s. The whole works was operated by Michael Michelizzi until about 1973, which is probably when the building was torn down.
The name “Terminal Hotel” goes back at least as far as 1930, although city directories in the 1930s and ’40s often refer to the property simply as “furnished rooms.”
Michelizzi’s reign at the Terminal seems to have begun in the early 1930s. In the 1920s there is a listing for two blocks away, 1131 W. Michigan St., for Mike Michelizzi & Co., a store handling “Fancy and Staple groceries cigars tobaccos and fancy Italian imported goods Macamoni and Soft Drinks.” I’m not sure if there’s a fancy, little-known Italian item called “Macamoni” or if that’s supposed to be macaroni.
In the early 1900s, the Cholette Hotel was at 917 W. Michigan St. During Prohibition, it had a “soft drink parlor” at which, obviously, bootlegging took place. For some of the sordid details regarding that, read the comments to this post.
Photo by William Mittendorff
The removal of the Pine Knot Cabin on Minnesota Point raised a lot of questions and caused a good deal of speculation among Duluthians. To clear up some of the facts, Perfect Duluth Day interviewed Steve Wilson, regional Scientific and Natural Area specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Why was the cabin removed and what’s the deal with the DNR’s SNAs? The answers are below.
First, some background on the Pine Knot cabin:
The part of Minnesota Point just southeast of Sky Harbor airport was known as Peabody’s Landing in the early 1900s, and there were numerous cabins there. The name Peabody’s Landing comes from the ferry service run by Charlotte and John Harry Peabody, who lived on the point. Most of the cabins were owned by people from Superior, and the Peabody’s ferry crossed the harbor to transport them.
Pine Knot is said to have been built in 1900 by Superior Mayor Charles O’Hehir and sold to the Pollock family in 1927. It is not known for certain if the structure that was removed in 2010 dates all the way back to the turn of the century; some believe the original Pine Knot was destroyed by fire and replaced.
Ed Pollock, great-grandson of the Pollocks who acquired the cabin, commented on PDD in July. “Please do what you can to save Pine Knot,” he wrote. “It was never added onto during the years we owned it. I have a picture of my dad’s family sitting 4 feet from the front porch with their feet in the bay. You see, the bay was dredged during the depression and that is why all the front yard there. Pine Knot used to be just a few feet from the bay.”
The Pollock family donated the cabin to the city in 1999.
What parts of Minnesota Point are part of the Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources Scientific & Natural Areas program?
It’s basically the 18-acre area southeast of the Sky Harbor Airport. It does not include the area of the historic Minnesota Point Lighthouse. The border isn’t easy to describe, but perhaps the map below will help. The areas inside the red line are part of the SNA. The lower left corner shows part of the airport runway.
How long has this part of Minnesota Point been part of the DNR’s SNA program?
Since April 2002.
Why was the cabin removed, and why did it happen now?
“We’ve actually been working on it since before (the DNR) owned it,” Wilson said. The land was donated by Superior Water, Light and Power Co., a subsidiary of Allete, to the Minnesota Land Trust in 1998, which placed a conservation easement on it and transferred it to the Minnesota DNR.
“Scientific & Natural Areas are there to protect the best of Minnesota’s remaining natural heritage and features, like rare plants and animals (specifically the old-growth forest on Minnesota Point), significant geological features (like the portion of the Minnesota Point sandbar within the SNA) and so on and so forth,” Wilson said. “A building smack-dab in the middle of one of the most unique old-growth pine forests in the state is just not consistent with the reason we are protecting and managing the area.”
Wilson said there were efforts to preserve the building before the decision was made to demolish it. In 1999 a former Duluth city planner, Jill Fisher, proposed moving the cabin and its outhouse to the Park Point Recreation Area parking lot and converting it into an interpretive center. The DNR even offered the city $5,000 to move the cabin at the time, but the cost of running a new interpretive center was not appealing to the city council, and the idea was cast aside.
In recent years, Steve Sola and Matt Kampf, owners of the Duluth Harbor Inner South Breakwater Lighthouse, were also interested in moving the cabin, but Wilson said that plan never developed.
“If (the cabin) had been shown to be a historically significant structure I think we could have found another option than demolishing and recycling it,” Wilson said. Its lineage is very murky, and we could never find any definitive evidence that it extended back to the original Peabody Landing community around the turn of the century.”
Wilson said moving the cabin probably would have required floating it across the bay, which would have been problematic. And there was no money available to maintain the cabin, which was deteriorating.
“The building just wasn’t that sound,” he said. “It was a ramshackle thing that had been constructed in pieces, so it didn’t hold together very well. It didn’t have a regular foundation.”
Wilson also had an ongoing battle with people breaking into the cabin.
“They’d cut off our lock and put their lock on it,” he said. “So I’d have to cut their lock off and put our lock on it, and that happened several times. So we had a liability issue with it.”
It appears the equipment that was involved in the demolition and removal might have damaged soil in the area. How was this project handled?
Watters & Sons Excavating of Duluth was the contractor that carried out the project on Nov. 30. Wilson conducted the final site inspection on Dec. 7.
“They came in on an old road, and there was some minor soil disturbance on the road,” Wilson said. “It looked like when they left the site they swung wide on the trail and exposed some soil on what already had been an exposed bank from when the road/trail was originally put in.”
Wilson said the contractors did a good job minimizing the damage, but it could have went better.
“If I had it to do over again,” he said, “I would probably specify that the largest machine have been one to two feet narrower than what they used.”
Wilson said the damage looks worse than it is.
“I would counsel people to be patient,” he said. “After one season of pine needles falling on top of the site it’s going to look more like it did before we removed the cabin. After several years, when a little of the grass that was growing there before comes back I’m fairly certain it will look remarkably like it did before … just absent the building.”
Because the layer of pine needles was removed, Wilson said the DNR will be monitoring the exposed soil to prevent non-native invasive species from popping up.
“There was some tansy growing right next to that cabin that is on our list to go out and remove – and that becomes more urgent now that we’ve got exposed soil next to it.
Are people still allowed to walk dogs and ride bicycles on the trail?
Yes.
Typically people are not allowed to bring pets or bicycle on trails within SNAs, but the DNR has not been enforcing those rules on Minnesota Point and has no plans to start.
“Our intent always has been to allow those pre-existing uses,” Wilson said. He notes, however, that those uses were not specified in the DNR commissioner’s designation order and therefore were not technically grandfathered in, though that was supposed to be the case. So walking pets or biking on the trail is technically illegal, but the DNR is not enforcing it.
“The only reason we haven’t made those uses legal is we have to hold a public hearing,” he said. “It simply hasn’t been a high priority, but it’s on my list of things to do.”
A crew from the PBS series History Detectives will be shooting in Duluth this week, attempting to solve the mystery behind a small watercolor painting that may have become a Tiffany window.
On Thursday, Dec. 9, host Gwendolyn Wright and the crew will be shooting at First Presbyterian Church and Duluth’s Historic Union Depot.
The story will air with History Detectives ninth season during the summer of 2011.
The album Duluth Does Dylan was first played for the public on Nov. 30, 2000, during the Starfire Lounge at Fitger’s Brewhouse. There was a big bus trip to St. Paul for a release party at the Turf Club, but no one remembers the details of that, I’m sure. The Ripsaw published the recording session photos below, shot by Linda Cadotte.
Perhaps in another century people will pass around photos of you and try to piece together the details.
Who were these West Duluth guys? Did they all go fishing, or just the ones with their hats raised? Did they catch these 40+ fish on the St. Louis River or somewhere else? Did they have a boat?
Maybe none of that matters. What we know is that on one day in 1916 there was a mighty jubilant feast on Raleigh Street.
Tugs try to free the freighter Socrates from the sandy shallows of Park Point on Nov. 22, 1985. The ship had run aground several days earlier during a strong storm. Crowds of onlookers flocked to Park Point to watch in the days after the ship got stuck. (Photo by Charles Curtis / News-Tribune)
From KBJR-TV, Oct. 25, 1990.
[Note: This video was removed by the YouTube user.]
You’ll notice the headlines from 20 years ago seem to mirror those of today. Before Barbara Reyelts’ piece on Lake Place Park, which starts 2 minutes into the video, you’ll see the president refusing to raise taxes, gas prices rising and ramp closures on local freeways.
Among the commercials at the end of the video is one for the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who back then was campaigning to replace Rudy Boschwitz.
One summer night in 1992, when I was 19 years old, I came home from doing something forgettable and found three of my friends waiting for me. They said I should grab a flashlight and come with them on an adventure.
This video appears to be from the early 1970s. Watch the high-pressure air send Denny’s hairpiece flying! (Plus bonus footage: A Jack McKenna forecast.)
