Perfect Duluth Day is six years old today! The photos above are from the first year.
Stop by the Wine Bar at Chester Creek Cafe tonight and raise a toast to PDD. We’ll be there from 9ish to 10ish. Door prize: Two tickets to Suzanne Vega at Big Top Chautauqua on Aug. 29.
A dud shell fell into a pile of unspent shells, and ka-pow! There were six minor injuries and zero fatalities.
There’s an ad in today’s paper about a “salvage stone sale” this weekend on Park Point, at 3101 Minnesota Ave.
The ad refers to a Web site. The site says:
“Own a piece of history: Brownstone, limestone, slate, marble, granite… An incredible collection of historic building elements including benches, capitals, finials, etc.”
Does anyone know if someone is pulling apart an old house out there? Is this someone’s collection of garden decorations? Just a vacant lot these sellers had access to? Are these things from old buildings here in Duluth?
The “Beloved Character” thread made me curious about people’s experiences at Emerson School. Any stories?
(+trivia question: What best-selling author went to school at Emerson as a boy?)
Ten years ago, cartoonist Israel Malachi poked fun at Duluth City Councilor Marcia Hales for pushing an ordinance that made it a ticketable offense to play a car stereo loud enough to be heard 50 feet away.
Bain News Service photo c. 1913
Pretty sporty. Reminiscent of Soviet combat snowmobiles in basic concept.
I have some questions about various “Howards” in the Duluth area, and I’m hoping someone on PDD can provide the answers:
1. What is/was the “Old Howard Mill” referred to in Old Howard Mill Road?
2. Why does Old Howard Mill Road have two parts so far apart (see Google map excerpt above)? One segment is north of Glenwood Street, and the other is across the Northland Country Club and a bit farther, in what would be… the Congdon neighborhood? Hunters Park? Not quite sure. In any case, why the gap? They don’t even seem to line up.
3. Howard Gnesen Road: It goes up to Gnesen Township, so that half makes sense (Gnesen Township was named for a city in Poland, by the way). But what does the Howard refer to? Is there a connection to the Old Howard Mill?
I think that exhausts my Howard question file. Can anyone out there provide some info?
A couple years ago I was out for a walk and noticed this section of sidewalk at the corner of Grand View Avenue and 17th Avenue East. I liked the nice touch of stamping the street name in the sidewalk, and I was impressed at the “1926” date – meaning this concrete had survived (with a crack, but still survived) more than 80 cold winters, hot summers and annual freeze-and-thaw cycles in Duluth.
Just want to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the “mystery barrels”. The Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa out of Bayfield, WI have secured over $1 million from the Department of Defense to remove about 70 of the barrels for testing. PDF here of the 2008 MN DOH “Health Consultation” regarding the barrels. Link here to Nukewatch’s compendium on barrel research including a full collection of local news releases on the subject.
Please share this info with friends and neighbors.
I don’t know if anyone has ever seen/read this or not (I imagine there might be a copy at one of our libraries), but I stumbled on it on archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/details/climateofduluthm00richrich
note the pre-lift bridge on the cover, plus there’s a few other neat old photos inside, plus some interesting reading, and some interesting old data…
So Homegrown has begun, and you kids and your crazy cameras will undoubtedly be shooting everything in sight and posting the photos to Flickr. By the power vested in me by being the person who’s declared it without authority in the past (though it seemed to work — 2007 slideshow | 2008 slideshow) I declare the official Homegrown Flickr tag to be homegrownmusicfestival2009. If everyone simply tags their photos, we’ll be able to easily find cool shots of all the stuff we missed. I’ll post a slideshow here on PDD on Sunday so we can all recall the memories.
But the question that’s up for grabs is: What will the official Homegrown Twitter hash-tag be? #duluthhomegrown? #homegrownduluth? Simply #homegrown? Something else? Discuss.
One more thing: I stole this photo from Rich Narum. He’s a kickass photographer.
Lake View Store – Morgan Park – Duluth, MN
Minnesota has had a long history of firsts for shopping malls. It must be the long, cold winters keeping us on the forefront of the indoor shopping experience. Duluth’s Morgan Park Lake View Store being noted as one of the first indoor malls, Southdale Mall in Edina the first post-war enclosed mall and, of course, the Mall of America the United States’ largest and most visited mall in the world.
The Lake View Store in Morgan Park was built in 1915 and had two levels and a basement. There was a butcher shop, clothing, hardware, furniture, a pharmacy and a department store with groceries, and a general store. The top floor had a bank, dentist office, barber shop, hair salon, hat shop, billiard room and auditorium. The basement had an ice-making plant which made eight tons of ice per day for the mall and for Morgan Park residents and a shoe store. Wiki has more info.
Images courtesy of Wolfsonian – Florida International University
Tonight is your last chance to make your voice heard to those who will make the decision: the Duluth City Council.
The Duluth Heritage Preservation Commission has denied a permit to St. Louis County to demolish the Jail, which is protected from demolition under Duluth law as a landmark building. The County is appealing this decision, and the only way for the Council to overturn it is to essentially break Duluth law, which would establish a precedent that puts all of our historic assets at risk.
The appeal is on tonight’s City Council agenda. If you have something to say about the building’s demolition (on either side of the issue), you get three minutes to make your point.
I am biased to the Jail’s preservation (I write and publish Duluth history books and sit on the HPC), so I also encourage those who don’t wish to speak but who want to see the Jail saved simply show up to show support.
You can learn more about the issue in a letter to the Editor in today’s DNT penned by Richard Moe, a Duluth native and the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/118713/.
