he Minnesota Humanities Center, an independent nonprofit that is an affiliate with the National Endowment for the Humanities, has recently received funding from the Minnesota Legislature to provide grants to individuals, museums and organizations. I love it when state money flows from the Twin Cities to Duluth. Apply!
Co-written with Allen Richardson
The Duluth Inside Duluth
In 1963, on 14th Avenue East overlooking Chester Creek, seven houses installed their own sewer rather than hook up to the city system. To do so, they took advantage of the experimentation sweeping the nation regarding public services. New forms of neighborhood government had emerged as housing associations. These seven houses applied for a federal grant as an independent municipal corporation. Technically they seceded from Duluth and became an autonomous township inside the city limits.
A democratic sub-society, the citizen-residents named the township “Duluth” by unanimous vote. After all, they felt they should not have to change the name of where they lived; in fact they were the real Duluth. Their right to name themselves was blessed by an appellate court ruling in 1968, hence “the Duluth inside Duluth.”
This book, by some undercelebrated authors from Duluth, looks really promising. They have cranked out six books together, I think.
These youth I know spent the afternoon with PJ’s Rescue at the Lincoln Park Resource Center & Garden. It was a kind of life-saving joy.
“Get out of the lake right now, or I will fucking shoot you,” he hollers, staring down an invisible sight and into my eyes, his finger threatening to pull the trigger — a notched branch on the stick rifle he has cocked and rested on his shoulder.
None of us respond, but if heart rates were words, we’d be babbling.
Our silence exasperates him. “I am not fucking kidding. You get out of the lake right now” — he sweeps a dictatorial finger from the lake where seven of us are circled in the water and toward the pebbled beach where he’s tantruming — “… or I will fucking shoot you.”
A few of us turn our backs to him, attempting to pick up the conversation we’d been having before this agitated teen and his friend, high on unaccustomed warmth in the air and whatever’s in that vape pen tucked into that pocket, stumbled into our orbit. The gun-pointer, initially aided by his sidekick, has been yelling at us for five minutes now, a genuinely unnerving bundle of aggression in green shorts. But if there’s one thing this group of grown-ups — parents, partners, queers, professionals, grieving, recovering, regulating, growing — knows how to do, it’s ignore the todderlistic foot stamping of a heckler.
This image from a 35mm Kodachrome slide shows Northern Pacific Dock No. 4 on Duluth’s waterfront in 1953 — 70 years ago. The location is where Bayfront Park is today.
The first edition of Perfect Duluth Day’s weekly email newsletter, the PDD Transmission, will be sent out June 29. It’s free, but to receive it you must spend roughly 20 seconds entering your name and email address into a form. We hope you are up to the task.
Whether you need additional inspiration or not, a prize is dangling in front of you.
Here is another advert from my collection of now-recycled magazines from the Duluth Public Library’s Nostalgic Newsstand Sale.
Here is another advert from my collection of now-recycled magazines from the Duluth Public Library’s Nostalgic Newsstand Sale. The sale is in the rearview mirror, but the Library Sale will be here faster than you think.
Northern Expressions Arts Collective leader paints cool rocks in the hot sun.
I attended the event held Saturday at the Urban Farm at Lake Superior College. It was a blast, bringing together vistas from Eco3 and volunteers from Northern Expressions Arts Collective. NEAC is an amazing organization that blends creativity, community, nutrition, and health for families.
Previous coverage of this weekly event is wdio.com. The Eco3 Urban Farm was also very alive during Earth Week. Maybe I’ll see you there on a coming Saturday?
The Commonwealth Fund spotlights Two Harbors’ Wilderness Health in its recent feature on “How Regional Partnerships Bolster Rural Hospitals.”
Katya Gordon of Two Harbors is in the new Minnesota Women’s Press.
The 2023 Half-Moon wolf pack has seven pups and all appear to be in good shape.
The Voyageurs Wolf Project is focused on understanding the summer ecology of wolves in Voyageurs National Park, about 100 miles north of Duluth. Donations to its annual fundraiser help study how many of these pups survive to adulthood and pays for the equipment that captures footage like this. Donations can be made via crowdfund.umn.edu.
Well, it looks like it’s finally going to be legal to smoke weed for funsies in Minnesota, which is terrific news for all of the people languishing in jail for smoking or dealing weed for funsies in Minnesota. Law is the ultimate example of the abject arbitrariness of reality: we have an entire system of rules and consequences established around the specious assertion that smoking weed, and all practices associated with it are, well, objectively bad. And not just rules and consequences, an elaborate — and until very recently, shared — ethos that avers a deep and persistent truth: using marijuana is dangerous and wrong. What a hoot.
Being a human is such absurdity, most of the time — how does anyone keep a straight face? Like so many of you, I have struggled with some of the more frittersome or idiosyncratic morae introduced as inalienable verities: men do this, women are that, and you’re either one or the other; these are the ways we cover our bodies with cloth, but these ways are terrible and wrong; these animals are great to eat, but these ones are friends … Sometimes, the whole world seems like a very elaborate game of make believe we’re all playing together. Through the right lens, even the houses we live in, with two sinks in the bathrooms, secret refrigerators, walk-in closets — it’s all like some fantastical fever dream.
Modern and fireproof, featuring the finest food and liquors, located at the center of everything and on the shore of beautiful Lake Superior, containing all possible comforts and conveniences, with lodging available for the whole family, they are the classic hotels and motels of Duluth.
This is the fourth in Perfect Duluth Day’s series of matchbook collection posts. As always, we remind everyone to please close the cover before striking.
