Video Archive: Police training film from 1978 featuring DPD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_aRh5gbK4o
Police & Violence: Domestic Disturbances Officer Safety Calming Techniques. Filmed in Duluth, featuring officers John Campbell and Scott Lyons of the Duluth Police Department.
Pressroom Podcast: PDD on the DNT
Click the lil’ triangle above to hear a 37-minute podcast about Perfect Duluth Day on the eve of its 14th anniversary.
Duluth News Tribune Pressroom Podcast hosts Christa Lawler and Brady Slater talk with PDD grand poobah Paul Lundgren, food and drink reporter Lissa Maki, and PDD co-founder Barrett Chase (who left PDD in 2015 to become a web editor at the DNT).
Perfect Duluth Day’s 14th birthday party is Thursday, June 29, from 5-7 p.m. at Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake. Free coleslaw while supplies last!
Undesirable customers in Duluth
This postcard hit the mail 110 years ago today, sent by Hazel Britts to Capt. Luther Haleto of Provincetown, Cape Cod, Mass. The card is hand-dated June 27 and postmarked June 28, 1907. The illustration shows a banker closing his doors to “undesirable customers,” two black bear. (more…)
Sinclair Lewis’ Perfect Duluth Day
Excerpt of a letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, included in the book Minnesota Diaries:
What a day — the first in Duluth this year completely of the type known to meteorologists as a p.d., or “absolutely perfect day” — cool, the air sweet, sky ringing blue except for lovely lazy clouds, as idyllic and indolent as a Grecian glade, yet full of energy for people from Chicago … the lake a mirror of many kinds of blue and gray glass, some sleek, some delicately wrinkled … (more…)
Coffee and … beer? In Lakeside?
Last week I bicycled to Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood with a friend — to Amity Coffee and BEER?
Today is the one-year anniversary since the law was revised. The Duluth City Council repealed a more than 125-year-old Lakeside liquor ban on June 27, 2016. Amity Coffee became the neighborhood’s first seller of alcoholic beverages four months later. (more…)
Dylan musical set in Duluth
Perfect Duluth Day reported in early May that a new musical play written and directed by Conor McPherson with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan was scheduled to open at the Vic Theater in London in July. What wasn’t known at the time is the play is set in Duluth.
Audio clips of two tracks recorded as part of a workshop for Girl from the North Country can be heard in the PDD post from May. Three reports verifying the setting of the play are listed below.
From the BBC New story “Bob Dylan: Conor McPherson on writing the musical“:
Conor McPherson has set the play in a guesthouse in Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth in Minnesota. It is called Girl from the North Country, after a track Dylan wrote in 1963.
Postcards from the Viking Motel
The Viking Motel operated at 2511 London Road from 1961 to 2000, and was demolished in 2001. The two-story, 30-room motel overlooking Lake Superior listed these amenities on its postcard: “Room Phones. Free Color TV. Coffee. Air Conditioned. Bridal Suites. Water Beds.” (more…)
Vintage photo: Aerial Lift Bridge under construction
Circa 1905. Photographer unknown.
Hoops Brewing opens June 27
A year and a half of planning and hard work has come to fruition. Hoops Brewing is set to open on Tuesday, June 27. (more…)
PDD Quiz: June 2017
Summer is here and another month has flown by. How many local headlines did you retain? Take the quiz and see what you remember!
Twin Ports diner breakfasts will be the topic of the next quiz on July 15. E-mail question suggestions to Alison Klawiter at [email protected] by July 12.
Lost and Found
It started to drizzle with the kind of fine mist that slicks the pavement into a mirror and seeps steadily through each layer of clothing. Almost simultaneously, the boy and I lifted up our collars, buried our shoulders to our ears, and started to walk without speaking. There was a deserted bridge in front of us. It was a massive steel thing, born of sinewy cables and bulging beams and it perched over the city reservoir. He led us on our way over it, placing himself between me and the edge as we squinted into the idea of the water below. We could hear its agitated turning, but the darkness was so swollen that we saw nothing but an inky black void.
We were so fucking lost.
The boy and I had been introduced to each other hours earlier. Our mothers talked over us with teasing voices while we both stood mutely by, shrinking into our 14-year-old selves and consenting to eye contact in short, apologetic glances as if to say, I know, I’m disappointed with me, too. (more…)
Summer 2017 Duluth-area Beer Festival Primer
There’s nothing quite like kicking back to quaff a cold beer in the summertime. The warmest season ushers in plenty of chances for those craving craft brews to get outside, sit back and sample suds. We’ve done the legwork for you and compiled a list of some of the top tasting events and beer festivals in the Twin Ports area. (more…)
Video Archive: 2007 Fire at True North Cedar on Duluth Harbor
At around 8 a.m. on June 22, 2007, a fire started in a waste conveyor machine at True North Cedar‘s manufacturing building on the Duluth Harbor. Employees attempted to fight the fire, but it was fed by sawdust and spread quickly. The warehouse, several boats and various equipment was quickly consumed in a huge smokey blaze.
Firefighters arrived at 8:17 a.m., but were unable to get hoses going until 8:50. It took a little more than an hour to put the fire out once water was available.
Lyte Source: Todd Luffa
In the pilot episode of a new “musical series aiming to explore sources of inspiration and intrigue,” Minneapolis-based soft-noise artist Todd Luffa performs on the beach at Minnesota Point in Duluth.
The Lyte Source series was created by director Gordon Byrd and producer Aubree Miller of Minneapolis, who “aim to bring performances to settings too intimate or bizarre for audiences to normally inhabit. To capture a sensory experience and transform it into a unique collaboration.”
Lost incline stairway pushed as historic trail
A group of history hikers follow the old incline railway stairs down Observation Hill.
A hidden stairway, once connected to a long-gone incline rail service between Downtown Duluth and its hilltop neighborhoods, is being celebrated by an organization that would like to see it designated a historic walking trail.
The Duluth Preservation Alliance led an Observation Hill history walk on May 31 over remnants of the 126-year-old incline stairs. More than 50 people attended the event and made the steep, downhill jaunt from Skyline Drive to Superior Street. (more…)
Postcards from Duluth’s Incline Railway
The Incline Plane Railway, a tram system operated by the Duluth Street Railway Company, began service in 1891. It carried passengers from a housing development at the top of the hillside into the downtown along Seventh Avenue West.
(more…)
“Colder than the surface of Mars”
Poet Dora Malech gets all Duluthy in a poem published in the May 29 issue of The New Yorker. It’s more that a reference — the poem is basically set in Duluth.
The text of “I Now Pronounce You” is available online, along with an audio track of the poet reading it.
Malech grew up in Bethesda, Md., and now lives in Baltimore. Her connection to Duluth is unknown, unless it’s as simple as the first line of the poem: “Our friends are getting married in Duluth.”
Soul Brothers: Big Wave Dave and the Ripples
WDSE-TV‘s The Playlist has released it’s 2016 documentary on Big Wave Dave and the Ripples for internet viewing. Here it is: 49 minutes and 34 seconds of funk, soul, rhythm and blues.
Reflection, refraction, dispersion: Duluth rainbow pics
Sun showers produced a Father’s Day rainbow in Duluth. Click the thumbnails to view the images at full size.
Photographers: Jamie Merideth (Duluth Harbor), Eric Dubnicka (Old Central High School), Tim Mlodozyniec (Denfeld clock tower) and Erin Anderson (Lake Superior).
Bob Monahan Naked
Well, it was a thing for a day, but now the privates are private. Apparently this video was a limited-time Father’s Day offering.
Antique photos: Denfeld High School under construction
Jay Sonnenburg found this photo in his grandfather’s collection. It shows Denfeld High School under construction on the lower edge, which puts the year of the image around 1926. The groundbreaking ceremony for the building was held March 6, 1925; it opened for classes on Sept. 8, 1926. (more…)
The Only Right that is too Often Exercised Alone
The most diverse workplace I have ever known was a nursing home kitchen with workers from age 18 to 82 of many races and genders.
Kitchens breed a complex affection. We saw each other every day, taking two or more meals together. I developed favorite coworkers — the washers who will plow through the dishes quickly, not the washers who realize they are paid the same no matter how many plates they wash in an hour. We celebrated each other’s joys. The cook might bake a small cake to celebrate a staff wedding, or streamers might appear outside the dietitian’s office on her birthday. On Friday we might go drinking — it was a special challenge to pressure the people working the dinner shift on Friday and the breakfast shift on Saturday to do a “turn and burn.”
It was on one of those Fridays that my coworker Erin told us she was pregnant, that it was unplanned and unwanted, and that she didn’t know what to do. She was likely, she said, to have an abortion.
On another Friday, in my home, maybe a week or so later, I had friends over — friends from both the kitchen and from college. I was 21, I was broke, and I was teased mercilessly for serving Milwaukee’s Best beer. Erin drank three of them in an hour, which I know wouldn’t make a koala bear tipsy. Nonetheless, I was young, I was stupid, and so I said to her: “You’re drinking?” I wasn’t sure she was 21 even, but I was sure she was pregnant. (more…)
Selective Focus: Patricia Canelake
Patricia Canelake is a painter and teacher who creates large, colorful paintings that combine figurative drawing with the spontaneous drips, layers and other effects of paint.
P.C.: My aesthetic is an aesthetic of attraction — both obvious and mysterious. Simple figurative, and animal subjects, leashed and unleashed, are the subjects of my work. That push and pull are recognizable experiences. My painting style is a fine balance between storytelling and the rough elegance of form, line and color. (more…)
Exploring Madeline Island’s Rocky Shore
Wading/rock-hopping up Madeline Island’s beautiful bay shore of sandstone boulders. My little love letter to the island.