Wabegon bar and grill has new owner
A tavern, off-sale liquor outlet and supper club in Superior Township is under new ownership. John Hartwick purchased the 85-year-old Wabegon bar and grill on April 28 and hit the ground running, only shutting down for half a day to inventory the place. Paul Vernon, who owned the Wabegon for 10 years, held a going away pig roast party the week prior.
The Wabegon is a bit of a geographical oddity. Though it’s located in Wisconsin, roads leading in are through Minnesota, and the vibe of the business is Minnesota through and through. For residents of Duluth’s Fond du Lac neighborhood, it’s the primary gathering place for food and revelry; Superior residents, on the other hand, are barely aware it exists. (more…)
Accordion repair school plans return to Duluth
Th
e world’s largest accordion museum and education center has started plans to restore and reopen a building that served as its home more than a decade ago in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
A World of Accordions Museum Director Helmi Harrington said earlier this week the organization will relocate an accordion repair school from current museum headquarters in Superior to its former site at 2801 W. First Street in Duluth. Harrington recently repurchased the historic church building and its adjacent parsonage out of St. Louis County foreclosure and started a tax payment plan for the property.
“Anyone who has visited our museum in Superior knows it’s crowded and our spacious building is no longer spacious,” said Harrington. “The idea for moving just the repair school to Duluth is not inexpensive, but it’s something we need to explore.”
A World of Accordions Museum is located in the Harrington Arts Center and features more than 1,300 instruments, an extensive recording library and art collection and thousands of accordion-related artifacts. Its nine-month accordion repair program accepts about 20 students annually from all over the world. (more…)
Are we going to let the blades of perpendicular platitudes cut through the footwear applications?
Toby Thomas Churchill summits all over the now.
Video Montage: UW-Superior Spring Commencement 2017
The University of Wisconsin-Superior conducted its 121st Spring Commencement on May 20. Carl Crawford, a 2008 graduate who serves as the human rights officer for the city of Duluth, delivered the keynote address. The student speaker was Anthony “Scott” McNorton.
Sussex sex tower echoes West Duluth nards
The wacky news story of the week is out of the Village of Sussex in southeast Wisconsin. A contractor painted over the first three letters on a water tower and then decided it was break time. It turns out, the same thing happened at the same water tower in 1996.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinal: Village of Sussex residents have heard this water tower sex joke before
Prior to either of the sex tower situations, Duluth had its own temporarily bawdy sign. When the original West Duluth Kmart location at 503 N. 50th Ave. W. was converted to become a Menards store in 1991, workers put up five letters on the side of the building before knocking off for the night. Anyone driving down 46th Avenue West or Mike Colalillo Drive could plainly see “nards” hanging high on the store’s eastern side. To my knowledge, this was never reported by media and no photos exist. But then again, someone must have taken a picture. And it’s time for that person to come forward.
Decline Porn, Duluth, and Love Amid the Ruins
J.D. Vance, in a review of Janesville: An American Story in Commentary magazine:
Having grown up in a blue-collar family that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, I have an unusually high tolerance for the many profiles of Trump voters in struggling industrial towns. Lately, however, even I have grown weary of what Noah Rothman calls “decline porn.” There are only so many words in the English language, and nearly all of them seem to have been used at least three times to help the denizens of Williamsburg and Dupont understand red-state voters and dying factory towns. Enough already.
Vance penned the most orgiastic piece of decline porn in recent memory, Hillbilly Elegy — apologies for my juvenile enjoyment of this metaphor — but there has been no shortage of titles in this genre, and a survey of my past reading list will find me devouring much of it, from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, from George Packer’s The Unwinding to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Brian Alexander’s Glass House. It need not even be American; I could carry on with examples for a while. Decline porn is a fertile ground in contemporary non-fiction, and its best works tell haunting tales of realities that anyone vaguely involved in the shaping of political or economic trends must wrestle with. They also tap into a lament for things lost that speaks to a certain part of the human psyche and permeates my own writing at times. Someone who knows me well can probably psychoanalyze this wistfulness easily enough, but I come back to it for reasons that are philosophical as well as personal, and I could devote a lot of words to defending it in those terms. Meditations on loss go back to Eden and the early creation myths, as Paz so masterfully explains in the last chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude. It’s a near universal human trait. (more…)
Red Herring Lounge serving up food with tunes
Anna Hanson and Paul Wold
The Red Herring Lounge has made a name for itself as a music venue in Duluth and beyond. Since its inception three years ago, the bar has been serving up inventive cocktails along with a respectable list of wines and craft brews. Now it’s adding snacks and small plates to the menu. (more…)
Duluthian Phillip Merritt and the Manhattan Project
A new posting at the Vintage Duluth / Duluth Public Library blog (formerly Reference @ Duluth) is about “Duluthian Phillip Merritt and the Manhattan Project.”
Selective Focus: Goodiel Beads
After the Vinyl Cave record store in Superior closed, Goodiel Beads moved in. Goodiel sells beads and supplies, and hires employees with disabilities who might not be able to find employment at other businesses. The store also has space for local crafters to sell their items on a consignment basis.
G.B.: Goodiel Beads is a locally owned bead store that was opened April 2017 by a local bead worker, Jamie Goodiel, and her best friend, Matt Hill. (more…)
Mystery mural found during NorShor Theatre renovation
At a May 31 news conference, Duluth Playhouse Executive & Artistic Director Christine Gradl Seitz showed off a canvas painting discovered by workers busy renovating the NorShor Theatre. The Duluth News Tribune reports the painting was “behind a suspended ceiling that was installed in 1941 when the existing Orpheum Theatre was converted into the NorShor. The grand theater’s original balcony had been concealed and transformed into a makeshift attic. But Gradl Seitz said a careful exploration of the space revealed ‘this beautiful mural, which we believe dates back to 1910, and the original Orpheum.'”
The NorShor is expected to open in early 2018; the Playhouse has a run of the musical Mamma Mia scheduled for Feb. 8-24. Renovation work is about 60 percent complete.
The theater was purchased by the Duluth Economic Development Authority in June 2010 for $2.6 million. The $30.5-million renovation began in summer 2016. It is a partnership between Sherman Associates and DEDA. The 750+ seat theater will serve as an arts center managed by the Duluth Playhouse. (more…)
Piedmont Plunge
Often helmet-cam videos of mountain bike runs have a music soundtrack. This one by Baylor Litsey, shot on the Piedmont Mountain Bike Trails in Duluth, sticks with the natural sounds for a more realistic glimpse of the trail-riding experience.
Gaelynn Lea on The PlayList
The May 25 episode of WDSE-TV‘s The Playlist is a documentary about Duluth musician Gaelynn Lea, with performance segments shot at the Red Herring Lounge and First Avenue’s 7th St. Entry.
Memorial Day Northern Lights Real Time Video
Richard Hoeg captures the sights of the Northern Lights and sounds of loons in the distance in this video shot over Little Stone Lake, about 40 miles northeast of Duluth. The video was taken on Hoeg’s Sony A6000 with an ISO setting of 3,200.
Postcard from Brindos’ London Road Court
Marketed as “Duluth’s finest auto court,” located “on the shore of beautiful Lake Superior,” Brindos’ London Road Court boasted 14 “all modern” units. Amenities included housekeeping facilities, electric refrigeration, gas range, shower baths, lavatories, automatic gas heat and hot water. (more…)
PDD Quiz: May 2017
As May draws to a close, we inch closer to a Perfect Duluth Summer. Test your memory of this month’s events in the May 2017 PDD Quiz!
The next PDD Quiz, on Duluth parks, will be published on June 11. E-mail question suggestions to Alison Klawiter at [email protected] by June 8.
Cats and Dogs
My old neighbor — we’ll call her Tonya — verbally abused her pets. It was like living next door to a David Lynch biopic of Joan Crawford.
One summer, I was digging a fire pit in my back yard. It was the middle of a nice, warm day, probably in June. Suddenly, over the fence that encloses my back yard, I heard a woman’s voice talking reasonably to what sounded, inferring from what she was saying, like a small child: “Autumn, remember what we talked about? You promised to play on this side of the yard, away from Callie’s sandbox. If you don’t do what you promised, we’ll have to go inside.” Huh. I must have neighbor kids. Cool. I kept digging my fire pit. Three feet in diameter? Four? I tabulated the number of edging stones I would need. The voice from over the fence started up again. “Autumn! You stay away from Callie’s sandbox, like we talked about!” I had hardly dumped my shovelful of dirt before she started up again, this time plaintively, “Autumn! You are ruining this for both of us! I said NO!” And not even five seconds later, crazy time. Full scream. “AUTUMN! Come back here right now! I told you to stay away from that fence! I TOLD YOU TO STAY!! AWAY!! FROM!!! THE!!! F#*KING!!! FENCE!!!” She was almost roaring now, she was screaming so hard.
“AUTUMN! YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING! YOU RUIN EVERYTHING! WE CAN’T EVEN BE OUT IN THE G%$DAMMED YARD FOR FIVE G%$DAMMED MINUTES BEFORE YOU F#*K IT ALL UP! WE’RE GOING INSIDE! INSIDE AUTUMN! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? ARE YOU? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW???!!!???” (more…)
Duluth Foreign Trade Zone
I had no idea there was land in Duluth that was (kind of) not part of the United States.
The comic book Threadbare, collecting comics from truth-out.org, talks about Foreign Trade Zones in the garment industry. But many industries use FTZs. According to mnftz.com:
Products moving through U.S. FTZs include electronics, computers, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, food products, office equipment, sporting goods, manufacturing components and more. Manufacturers, distributors and suppliers are all candidates for FTZ Subzones. (more…)
Selective Focus: Like He
Inspired by other landscape photographers, Like He went from snapping family photos to composing stunning landscapes of our area.
L.H.: My earliest exposure to digital photography started in 2004, when I purchased my first digital camera, a Canon A95 to take photos of my 2 year old daughter. I didn’t become serious until almost 10 years later, when by accident I became a member of a photo competition website, 500px.com, where I was shocked and awed by the beautiful landscape photos posted by the talented photographers throughout the world. I wanted to be one of them. I started to learn how to use my DSLR camera, ND filters, long exposures, Lightroom and Photoshop. (more…)
Exploring the Superior Entry Lighthouse on Wisconsin Point
The latest adventure on the Substreet website takes readers inside the Superior Entry Lighthouse, where every step “happens with an echoing crunch.”
As for the view from the top: “For 180 degrees, there is nothing but water, clouds, and a beautiful sandy beach backgrounded by pine trees and dune grass.”
Radiophiles and Sportphiles
Fill me in; educate me. Local FM sports station, 92.1 WWAX, a KFAN affiliate known as “The Fan,” recently sold. Before and after the sale the station’s Duluth airspace remains stale with on-air talent imaging bites that are very old. After sale, IDs are played saying the station is owned by Red Rock Radio Corporation … but it was sold. Finally, too many dead, off-air minutes or hours. What gives? I wrote to both owners when they were in charge, no responses. I like radio, I’m a dinosaur in that respect. Even dinosaurs don’t like listening to “old-time radio” imaging bites over and over and over again.
Remains of James J. Hubert finally coming home to Duluth
U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant James Joseph Hubert, a Duluthian who fought and died during the Battle of Tarawa Island in the Pacific Theater of World War II, is finally coming home. He was killed in action and buried in 1943, but when the war was over his remains were not found … until more than seven decades later.
Sgt. Hubert will be returned to Duluth this summer with full military honors. A formal funeral and burial will be held at Calvary Cemetery on July 15.
The full story is available on jamesjosephhubert.com and will likely be heavily featured in Duluth media over Memorial Day weekend.
A detailed interview with Jay Hagen, nephew of Sgt. Hubert, was broadcast in March on WDSM radio’s Sound Off! with Brad Bennett program. The interview is available for listening and downloading at wdsm710.com.
Goodbye, Peter Pestalozzi
[arve url=”https://youtu.be/e8qj6adcLPs”]
Peter Pestalozzi lived outside Ely, but his art was often seen in the Duluth Art Institute and in local galleries. Peter passed away, and I lost someone who was distant but important to me. (more…)