100 Years of Duluth

Duluth as a tourist destination? You’ve got to be joking! That would have been my snooty attitude, had not Greyhound dumped me for a five-hour break between its St. Paul-Duluth run and the Duluth-Detroit overnight.

I decided to foot it downtown from West Duluth, Minn., where the big G has plopped its station.

Those blocks up Superior Street were an ambulatory seminar in how economic cycles deform the American cityscape. Lots of Salvation Army and Goodwill outlets, until Summit Square, a new Yuppie enclave on the best hill approaching town and overlooking St. Louis Bay.

A friendly old geezer on the bus who used to be part of a huge U.S. Steel workforce up on the Mesabi Range told me sadly how Venezuelan and Korean steel had dropped the bottom out of the taconite mines and the lake freighter business. Those city fathers are hard-bitten types, however, who aren’t going to whine through their centennial. Their indomitable spirit is itself fit for cheers.

I dropped by the News-Herald and Tribune in their new building kitty korner from the Daniel Burnham generated Civic Center, where a friendly travel editor gave me the weekly “Bulletin Board” that lists all the town’s attractions and told me that the best fish restaurant in town was the Jolly Fisher on Superior.

The fried wall-eyed pike was superior all right, but the french fries might have been fresh for the town’s namesake when he disobeyed Louis XIV by going after furs on his own hook in 1679. No matter, the view of the St. Louis Riverfront was superb, and I flipped through the cache of local blurbery I had picked up at the splendid new public library on the main drag.

There, out their window, beckoning like it always had on a farther horizon of my summers as a kid on Lake Huron, was the S.S. William Erwin, flagship of the U.S. Steel fleet at the peak of its power, and a year short of its 50th anniversary, already a museum. I would finally get to see it, from inside.

Sated with walleye, I cruised Lake Street on the way to the Corps of Engineers Canal Park (they had to penetrate Minnesota Point to reach St. Louis Bay and make it the largest interior sea in the world). I checked out Harbor Inn, facing Lake Superior, where a family should stay, close to the water, with a friendly mix of people. Canal Park has a Marine Museum which is world-class. (I even forgive the C of E for the miserable summer of 1949 when they had me stripping dirty paint with lye off the crew quarters of one of their tugs in the Detroit River.)

There are great physiographic maps which show you the relative depths of the Great Lakes, and a disaster map of the 300-plus ships that have succumbed to the Lake’s unpredictable furies—especially the mysterious fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald which went down in 1975 with all hands in a winter storm.

The Erwin is also a fascinating internal ramble, even the adversarial union politics being evident in lifeboats that didn’t work on a ship with fancy cabins for larking brass and their friends.

But the centerpiece of Duluth’s phoenix act is the recycled train station / cultural center right behind the library. It’s a joy, especially after reading the 3,000 circulation Zenith City Arts, a free monthly full of the spritz of a stricken city striking back.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, August 12, 1987