Duluth 75 Years Later

[Editor’s note: Duluth was featured in The Saturday Evening Post in a 1949 article written by Arthur W. Baum. Seventy-five years later, in 2024, Baum’s great-great nephew, Jordan Haedtler, began gathering his thoughts for an update, which appears below. Haedtler has recently printed both essays, as well as another essay about Duluth and climate change, in a book that can be ordered through Google Forms.]

The citizens of nearly every hub city or port city or twin city must look at this moment of rapid planetary warming ponderously. Many seaside cities worry anxiously at their fate amidst rising oceans, while tourist destinations fret about the damage to their core infrastructure, and bustling business hubs nervously eye the economic forecasts. This makes the case of gritty and resilient Duluth — with its aging housing stock dotting a hillside overlooking the western terminus of the Great Lakes — unique.

For Duluth has not had to wonder about its role in the climate crisis or desire outside attention on the subject since April 15, 2019. That was the day Harvard professor Jesse Keenan came to the city to deliver a lecture called “Destination Duluth,” in which Keenan emphasized the potential for Duluth, sitting as it does on the edge of all that fresh water, to rebrand itself as “Climate Proof,” attracting new residents after decades of economic stagnation.

Keenan’s lecture was the keynote address in a series of thought-provoking talks about climate change. The organizers of that series have called Keenan’s lecture a “conversation starter,” and at that, it has succeeded marvelously. Keenan’s “Destination Duluth” lecture led to impressive and enduring media hype.

Duluth is engaged in a turbulent energy transition just like the rest of the world, but the city’s old-fashioned look and feel punctuate it better than most. The romantic feelings evoked by watching a 1,000-foot laker sail under Duluth’s majestic Aerial Lift Bridge are undeniable, but the experience also evokes antiquated feelings of nostalgia, reinforced by the fact that the ships themselves are relics. The Great Lakes fleet is showing strong, rusty signs of its age. Nearly every ship that frequents Duluth was built in the 1970s or earlier, including the famous Arthur Anderson, a 1952 vessel that was the last ship to make contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald on the night it sank fifty years ago.

In his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Gordon Lightfoot memorialized that ship, known to locals simply as the Fitz, and enlivened public fascination with Great Lakes shipping through a six-and-a-half minute sea shanty that somehow became a hit single. Split Rock Lighthouse, an iconic Minnesota landmark just a short drive up the North Shore from Duluth, lights its beacon rarely, but is illuminated at least once each year to honor the anniversary of the Fitz’s sinking on Nov. 10. In May 2023, Split Rock also lit its beacon to commemorate the passing of Gordon Lightfoot.

Ships still keep the names of prominent U.S. Steel figures present in Duluth. You can talk to a former sailor who spent several months on the Fitz while aboard the William A. Irvin, an ore ship named for the former president of U.S. Steel that is now a tourist attraction. The deal creating U.S. Steel in 1901 had reverberations throughout Duluth. One immediate effect was to further agitate the militant labor organizing among Duluth’s mostly Scandinavian immigrant dock workers. In May 1901, the unionized licensed Lake Tugmen went on strike, organizing to hurl rocks and otherwise jeer the scab tugboat operators hired by U.S. Steel. Things turned violent when the captain of a steel trust tug fired a revolver up Lake Avenue at licensed Lake Tugmen who had been harassing him.

U.S. Steel’s physical presence in Duluth came to an end with the closure of a Morgan Park steel mill in the late 1980s. This was a painful period for Duluth. Things got so bad, the legend goes, that a billboard along I-35 read “Will the last one leaving Duluth please turn out the light?” Nearly every climate haven news piece uses the story to illustrate Keenan’s point about how Duluth might use its climate resilience to return its population roughly to where it stood midway through the previous century, above 100,000.

Incredibly, firm evidence that the billboard really stood in Duluth only surfaced about ten years ago, when former mayor John Fedo unearthed a photo from the billboard’s brief appearance along the side of the highway. Thought to be a prank by some employees at an outdoor advertising company, the billboard was up for roughly two hours, just long enough to serve as a lasting symbol of post-industrial decay across the Midwest.

Duluth during this time must have felt a far cry from the bustling moment when the city’s status as a large inland port made it critical to fighting World War II. Duluth’s centrality to the war effort also led the city to have a footnote in baseball history. During the Great Depression, the city’s minor league baseball team, the Duluth Dukes, had its facilities deemed inadequate. Duluth voters approved a bond to build a new stadium, and with assistance from the Works Progress Administration, the Duluth Municipal Sports Stadium was opened in 1941. The Dukes suspended play at the height of World War II. But for a brief period during the summer of 1943, the workers of Duluth’s war factories and dockyards formed the Twin Ports League, the only baseball league ever classified as Class E.

The term “rust belt” was coined by Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, who enjoyed dining at Joe Huey’s Cafe, a now-defunct restaurant renowned for its giant butterfly shrimp. Joe Huey’s was once one of the few businesses open in Duluth’s Canal Park area. During Mondale’s time, Canal Park was rather infamously surrounded by a junkyard. Mayor Fedo tried to start a tourism renaissance in Duluth by urging an association of regional mayors to “turn ourselves around” to face “the most magnificent system of lakes and rivers in the world.” The junkyards around Canal Park were cleaned up, and a gorgeous eight-mile Lakewalk path was eventually built in its place. Today, the Canal Park business district hosts a gleaming array of tourist shops and restaurants, anchored by Grandma’s Saloon, best known for sponsoring a marathon that draws about 17,000 runners every June.

Fedo’s encouragement to turn to the lake was smart advice. Duluthians still worship the fluid deity of Lake Superior to a person, though the rituals of worship today take the more modern forms of tattoos, fire pits, earrings, cribbage boards, and creative uses of the lake’s image in every storefront logo from a weed dispensary to a dance studio, where an outline of Lake Superior forms the flowy skirt of a ball gown.

Duluth has been gesturing toward a comeback ever since those dreary 1980s. Though the city’s population has been flat (“86,000 since ‘86,” in the words of a local historian), new residents and businesses — from the trendy cider houses in Lincoln Park to several fashionable eateries owned by restaurateur Tom Hanson — have breathed new vibrancy into the city.

Duluth’s many comeback attempts have been framed around the rediscovery of things that never really went away. Duluth prizes its many hiking trails, diving and surf shops, and outdoorsy offerings. There has been brewing, which briefly ceased along Lake Superior in 1972, only to be reborn through the opening of operations like Fitger’s Brewhouse, Bent Paddle, and Ursa Minor. There is tourism, increasingly aimed at summer heat wave escapists who gravitate toward Duluth’s cooler temperatures like the hay fever sufferers of a century earlier.

There are sports and games, as when members of Duluth’s Curling Club pulled off the “miracurl on ice” to win Team USA’s first Olympic gold medal in the event in 2018. Duluth Municipal Sports Stadium is now called Wade Stadium, and many Duluthians spend summer evenings at the Wade, where Ila Borders became the first female pitcher to win a men’s professional baseball game in 1998. The University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs hockey teams are perennial championship contenders, and they play to big crowds at an arena sponsored by the Superior-based petroleum company AMSOIL. And there is still a special fondness for cribbage, which Duluthians gather to play at Dovetail Cafe every Wednesday night.

Then there is live music, celebrated through an annual festival called Homegrown, which features only regional talent and underscores how much Duluth punches above its weight through its booking of a week’s worth of versatile musical acts. Dovetail Cafe also plays host to the Duluth Folk School, where Duluth’s crafty, do-it-yourself culture is on display through artisan classes on subjects like how to build a canoe. Each August, Ursa Minor hosts Agate Fest, where the area’s many rock hounders get together to marvel at their collections from combing the shores of Lake Superior, home to some of the oldest rock on Earth. Many of the innovators in these fields are not original Duluthians, and it has been said that Duluth’s modern reinventions could only be carried out by individuals who had no memory of the despair associated with the 1980s.

Homegrown is one of several celebrations that have received funding from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, a grant program approved by Minnesota voters through a 2008 ballot measure. Evidence of those grants can be seen around the state through many festivals and historical exhibits, including the Hjemkomst Viking Ship Center in Moorhead, where visitors learn about a modern day Viking ship that a Minnesota family built and sailed from Duluth all the way to Oslo in 1982. For years, Duluth’s Leif Erikson Park was also home to a Viking ship that had sailed to the city from Norway. That ship, called the Leif Erikson, was donated to the city for display by Norwegian immigrant and businessman Bert Enger, an urban park champion for whom an 80-foot observation tower in the city is named.

It is fitting that the Homegrown Music Festival takes place during the first week of May. Thus, Duluthians get to celebrate the passing of what is usually regarded as Duluth’s least favorite month, April. Duluth becomes a mudhole, making the city’s many steep hill pathways impassable and closing the city’s many beloved park trails. Conditions no longer support cross country skiing and other popular winter sports, but aren’t yet favorable enough to enjoy summer activities either. And there are numerous false dawns, with days of warmer spring weather interrupted by blustery late winter snowstorms. T.S. Eliot’s assertion that “April is the cruelest month” is never far from Duluthians’ tongues during this time period.

Duluth’s most famous musical export is Bob Dylan, whose birthday each May is commemorated with a weeklong series of concerts. Dylan lived only his first six years in a modest house on Third Avenue East in the Central Hillside neighborhood. Dylan has given the city a nod through mentions in his memoirs and in his song “Something There is About You.” Dylan has also referenced Duluth in two significant and tragic ways. Once when accepting a Grammy Award in the 1990s, Dylan attributed his ambitions to become a musician to seeing Buddy Holly play at Duluth’s Armory just a couple nights before the Day the Music Died.

Another Duluth allusion made by Dylan is far more shameful. It comes through his song “Desolation Row,” which begins with the lyrics “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” believed to be a reference to the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie in Central Hillside.

The atrocity, which took place in 1920, was the result of a false accusation of rape by a white woman. Duluth’s Black population, already small, fell to nearly zero, and the Duluth chapter of the NAACP was formed by a man named William Ray. Ray’s daughter, Ethel Ray Nance, became the first Black secretary to the Minnesota legislature in 1923, and spent many years as the secretary to W.E.B. Du Bois. Nance was one of the hosts of a popular Harlem Renaissance spot called the Harlem West Side Literary Salon, and contributed to the creation of Black history month.

Until his retirement a few years ago, Duluth’s police chief was the grand nephew of the woman whose false claim led to the lynchings. After the George Floyd uprisings shook Minnesota in 2020, the police chief described how his family had dealt with this troubling aspect of its history. It took Duluth a long time to really grapple with the lynchings as well. It wasn’t until 1991 that the graves of Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie were finally identified in Park Hill Cemetery and given a proper gravestone. A memorial plaza to the three lynching victims was built, but not until 2003.

Not far from where Clayton, Jackson, and McGhee are buried lies another notable grave, that of Albert Woolson, the last living soldier who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Woolson’s death in 1956 at the age of 106 led to the formal disbandment of the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization created for Union Army veterans. Duluth News Tribune columnist Jim Heffernan recalled his memories of seeing Woolson speak every Memorial Day, when his reward for addressing Duluth’s schoolchildren was a box of cigars from the elementary school principal. Woolson’s funeral was the largest ever held in Duluth, and photos ran in an August 1956 edition of Life magazine.

Also buried in an adjacent old Duluth cemetery is industrialist and rowing trophy namesake Julius Barnes, who by 1949 was president of the St. Lawrence Seaway Association. Barnes’ career was shaped by a decades-long struggle to satisfy Duluth’s passionate yearning to connect its economy to the world. Barnes died just a few weeks before the Seaway finally opened in 1959, with thousands of Duluthians huddled near the Lift Bridge to watch the first ocean-going freight ship (a ‘saltie’) come in from the Atlantic. The Seaway was an engineering marvel but an economic flop, bringing many invasive species to the Great Lakes, but never quite delivering on its promise to convert Duluth and other Midwestern economies into trading behemoths.

Duluthians love their lake and their city dearly, but zealously guard against word of its hidden charms spreading too widely. Duluth is the length of a marathon, but just two-and-a-half miles in width. These physical constraints likely prevent Duluth from ever reaching the fabled potential size of Chicago or other metropolises. And most Duluthians seem to cherish the easy transition between urban and rural life that Duluth’s unique landscape affords.

Since 1949, Duluth has fallen from Minnesota’s third largest city to fourth, but its history of economic almosts has enabled it to play host to more historic sites and cultural gems than its humble size might suggest. Daniel Burnham, the famed architect of New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington’s Union Station, designed Duluth’s St. Louis County Courthouse, government seat for the largest geographic county east of the Mississippi.

There is a jarring juxtaposition to Duluth, a city full of stunning natural features that’s often economically dependent on brutally extractive industries. The confusing hybrid of industrial might and scenic beauty does lend itself to more animal run-ins than the average municipality, although there have not been any quite so frightening as the black bear that dropped in to the Hotel Duluth for breakfast in 1929, whose taxidermied body is on display at Grandma’s Saloon.

The most high-profile animal encounter to take place in Duluth since 1949 was the case of Mr. Magoo, a tea-drinking mongoose that came from overseas to Duluth on a saltie in the fall of 1962. When the federal government threatened to seize Mr. Magoo, the city rose up in furious protest, and the lyrics to a song called “The Ballad of Mr. Magoo” purportedly became as familiar to Duluthians as the national anthem. Bowing to the pressure, the U.S. Interior Secretary used a clever interpretation of federal law to spare Mr. Magoo, and he lived the rest of his life at the Lake Superior Zoo, where his stuffed remains can still be seen today.

Duluth’s cultural and economic relevance make it easy to find something to do, but its outdoor offerings also make it possible to escape city life. Dave Simonett, lead singer for the bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles, which formed in Duluth, concluded his song “Duluth” with the lyrics “Still I like the quiet / Of Duluth in the winter / In the sacred bond / There’s no place like home.”

Previewing that song for an audience at a downtown performance in December 2023, Simonett explained the “unpopular opinion” that his favorite season in Duluth is winter, since the isolation can give the sense that one is at the edge of the world. Simonett was speaking at the beginning of an abnormally warm winter, one that would ultimately set a new record low for snowfall, a new record for longest shipping season (and, correspondingly, a new record low for Great Lakes sea ice extent), and witness the cancellation of regional winter events like the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.

One member of the crowd grumbled that Duluth hadn’t yet experienced the desolate winter conditions Simonett was describing, and several other audience members nodded in discontented agreement. As it turned out, Duluth would essentially miss out on winter, potentially signaling the fleeting nature of a cozy solitude that Duluthians in their own gloomy way seem to love.

Beginning in the early 2000s, buzz marketing around Duluth’s ‘cool factor’ began to proliferate. Playing off Duluth’s notoriety for frigid winters, a clothing store on Superior Street began to sell T-shirts reading “Duluth is a cool city.” Some in Duluth reacted with scorn toward this and other tacky efforts to promote the city as a burgeoning cultural hub.

Duluthians seem to bristle at any and all efforts to depict their city as an ‘up and coming’ destination akin to Austin, Texas or Bend, Oregon in years past. The glitzy New York Times pieces about “climate-proof Duluth” have prompted a discernible backlash. It seems not totally coincidental that Duluth ousted a common character in all of the media buzz: Mayor Emily Larson, who compared the city’s progress to a slow, steady ore ship and touted her accomplishments reducing fossil fuel pollution in her unsuccessful bid for a third term in 2023. Duluth’s new mayor, Roger Reinert, is also a Democrat, but a more moderate one. His campaign against Larson promised to fill potholes and focus a bit less on existential concerns like climate change.

One journalist wrote that being known as a climate refuge is sort of like being told by a lover that they’ll marry you if you’re the last person on Earth. And Duluthians have a sensitive, territorial attitude about the climate refugee phenomenon. At least as they’ve been popularly portrayed, climate refugees are wealthy outsiders coming to Duluth from more conventionally hospitable climates, swooping in to enjoy all the spoils of Duluth’s natural beauty at the very moment that the harsh winters Duluthians have endured are becoming gradually less harsh.

Duluth’s climate activists are especially disdainful of the “climate proof” moniker, eager to point out how the extreme precipitation of 2023 caused the roof of Duluth’s mall to collapse, or how wildfire smoke now envelopes the city’s skies every summer. Even the New York Times was forced to concede that it may be time to dispense with the term “climate haven,” quoting Keenan in a story about how Hurricane Helene’s devastating affect on Asheville, North Carolina — another city on his shortlist — shows that nowhere is safe.

A jumbled “Point of Rocks,” considered sacred by the Ojibwe people, still divides east and west Duluth. Indigenous names and traditions hold several distinctions in the region. Trails and sites throughout the area pay homage to the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, “Gichigami” or ‘great sea.’ The state of Minnesota itself derives its name from a Dakota phrase meaning “land where the waters reflect the skies.” And the Ojibwe people also hold sacred the practice of harvesting wild rice, a staple of the regional diet, which is hugely threatened by a warming climate.

Another recipient of Arts and Cultural Heritage grant funding has been one of Duluth’s quirkier events in recent years. Since 2012, Duluth’s Magic Smelt Puppet Troupe has organized the Run, Smelt, Run! Parade. Duluthians are encouraged to show up in silver attire to watch a puppet show, then to march up the Lakewalk to downtown’s Zeitgeist theater, where festivities continue with the consumption of smelt through a big fish fry. It all begins in the grassy field near the lift bridge, where a wondrous Smelt Queen is presented to a Royal Guard standing on stilts while a boisterous brass band plays “When the Smelt Come Swimming In.” There is a mama smelt pushing a baby smelt in a carriage, a pope smelt, and a Prince smelt (this smelt is not a royal relative of the Queen, but rather Minnesota’s much-adored Artist Formerly Known As).

2024’s puppet show was topically devoted to another source of major media attention in Duluth, when agribusiness billionaire Kathy Cargill abruptly and huffily declared she would be taking her largesse elsewhere after Mayor Reinert had the audacity to inquire about her purchase of 20 properties in Duluth’s Park Point neighborhood, which lines the beach along Lake Superior. The annual gross of the Cargill corporation, America’s largest privately held company, exceeds the combined yearly revenue of nineteen state governments. All that wealth is largely concentrated in the hands of about 100 members of the Cargill family.

Like the finances of Cargill, Inc. itself, Kathy Cargill had kept her intentions with the property and land secret. Cargill’s purchases likely inflated home prices in the formerly middle-class neighborhood of Park Point, and there was some speculation that Duluth’s reputation as “climate proof” had made this beachfront property an especially attractive enclave for the ultra wealthy. Duluth’s leadership had the temerity to seek clarification that Cargill intended to keep the entirety of Park Point’s beach coastline publicly accessible. Cargill was so incensed by the city’s inquiry that she withdrew her plans, haughtily remarking that Reinert had “peed in his Cheerios.”

This prompted the proud citizens of Duluth to respond with charitable mockery, as a local food bank capitalized on the publicity, raising thousands of dollars and hundreds of boxes of Cheerios. The Magic Smelt Parade’s send-up to this controversy was a farcical jaunt through the beachfront property being acquired by a fictional Kathy Cargill adorned in a bright pink wig. Cargill placed “Mine,” “Mine,” “Mine” signs throughout the theatrical beachfront. Each time, she was supported in her acquisition by a set of goons driving the luxury cars that Cargill reportedly collects. Cargill then bullied the crowd by lording over them in a “Chair-I-O,” after which a glorious Neptune god, lead puppeteer Jim Ouray, kicked off the parade by pronouncing: “I think someone doesn’t have enough smelt!”

Squint, and you can see a way in which Duluth’s next counterpunch at circumstances and events lies through some combination of Minnesota’s affection for public investment and an embrace of the city’s relevance to climate policy and industrial renewal. Turn toward the lake, and you can see the striking sight of massive wind turbine blades lined along the railroad tracks leading to the marine terminal.

This brings us back to Professor Keenan’s lecture, which spawned so much media coverage and sparked so much conversation. It is worth remembering the caveats that Kennan was careful to add when giving his notorious “Destination Duluth” lecture. Just moments before inventing the phrase “climate-proof Duluth,” Keenan acknowledged that the notion of any city being totally climate proof is a fallacy. In subsequent interviews, when challenged on the problems inherent in proclaiming any city in the world to be “climate proof,” Keenan has stressed the humorous tone of his presentation. The entire premise of the lecture has been called “tongue-in-cheek.”

It was that kind of crack that built Duluth.