Lost Landmark: Hardy Hall
This month’s “Lost Landmark” continues September’s theme celebrating the early years of Woodland Avenue, including the Hunter’s Park neighborhood. Our topic, Hardy Hall— a women’s preparatory school...
View ArticleDeWitt Prescott’s Two Lost West Duluth Landmarks
Duluth began making things out of metal about the same time it officially became a city. In 1871 J. B. Culver, Luther Mendenhall, J. D. Ray, J. C. Hunter, and W. W. Spalding formed the Duluth Blast...
View ArticleLost Landmark: the 1888 Duluth Bethel
Most Duluthians are aware of the Duluth Bethel Building, the V-shaped structure just above Superior Street east of Mesaba Avenue. Since it was first built in 1910 that building has acted as the home to...
View ArticleLost Landmark: Ashtabula Heights
Before the 1880s, Duluth had very few houses that offered more than basic shelter. Roger Munger had built a large Italianate house and carriage house at 405 Mesaba Avenue in 1870 and two years later...
View ArticleLost Landmarks: the 1913 Duluth Curling Club
On January 11, 1913—one hundred years ago—the largest curling facility on the planet opened in Duluth at 1338 London Road. It was the completion of a vision many Duluthians had shared since 1891....
View ArticleLost Landmark: Duluth’s “pride and joy”
In the early 1880s, after the developing grain trade helped Duluth recover from the financial panic of 1873, pioneers and civic leaders Roger Munger and Clinton Markell felt the city’s growing...
View ArticleLost Landmark: the 1883 St Louis County Courthouse
As you may have read, these past weeks Maryanne Norton and I have been digging up history on today’s Shel/Don Building, whose upper level was leased as the Duluth Municipal Court for 20 years beginning...
View ArticleLost Landmark: Robert E. Jefferson House
Duluth pioneer Robert Emmet Jefferson didn’t spend much time in Duluth, but the house he built at what would become 430 Lake Avenue South would serve Duluth’s pioneers well beyond the memory of...
View ArticleLost Landmark: The Merrill House
In our book, Lost Duluth, the most recently constructed building featured is Roy and Edythe Halvorson’s remarkable Modernist home designed by Harold St. Clair Starin, which stood at 2628 Branch Street...
View ArticleLost Landmark: Minnesota Point’s other Amusement Park
This month’s feature story describes the history of tourism here in the Zenith City, including White City, an amusement park that stood at Oatka Beach, between 39th and 40th Street on Minnesota Point,...
View ArticleLost Landmark: The American Fur Company Post
The European fur trade drove the early economy at the head of the lakes, long before Superior and Duluth became cities. The trade was dominated by the French and English. Even after the War of...
View ArticleLost Landmark: The New Grand / New Lyric Theatre
Mose and Barney Cook’s New Grand Theatre opened at 213 West Superior Street on August 20, 1914, to praise from the Duluth Herald, which called the theater “one of the finest in the state in point of...
View ArticleThe Corps of Engineers Building:How the need for bathrooms created a museum
While Duluthians financed the construction of the Duluth Ship Canal—with help from Jay Cooke’s Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad to the tune of $50,000—the federal government took control of the...
View ArticlePeople’s Brewery
Established in order to “resist the evils of capitalism,” People’s Brewery produced beer within this complex at 4230 West Second Street in 1908. Sections of the new brewery stood five stories high and...
View ArticleWest Duluth’s Incline Railway
This story originally posted May 20, 2012 Much like the Seventh Avenue West Incline, the Duluth Beltline Railway was built to help a developing neighborhood. First operated in 1889, the “West Duluth...
View ArticleJimmy Oreck’s Flame Restaurant
In 1946, as Jimmy Oreck was about to reopen his popular Flame restaurant at the foot of Fifth Avenue West on the harbor, the Duluth Herald ran a series of articles on the business, announcing that what...
View ArticlePrescott’s Lost West Duluth Legacy
Duluth began making things out of metal about the same time it officially became a city. In 1871 J. B. Culver, Luther Mendenhall, J. D. Ray, J. C. Hunter, and W. W. Spalding formed the Duluth Blast...
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