The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It’s the world’s largest freshwater port. But when the steel, timber, and frozen pizza industries go to hell, the city is screwed. Or maybe not. How did our favorite northern town go from being “the state’s largest white ghetto” to being its most popular destination? It’s all about converting to the post-industrial future that awaits us all—the global tourist economy.

Today, the quintessential symbol of Duluth may not be the raw beauty and power of Lake Superior, or even the beloved Aerial Lift Bridge, but instead the rather humble rust-colored ore boat afloat on Superior’s waters in the lift bridge’s shadow. The SS William A. Irvin is a retired 610-foot ore boat that sailed for U.S. Steel from 1938 to 1978, carrying iron ore and coal to Great Lakes ports. In 1986 the Irvin became a tourist attraction in the Duluth harbor, and is now visited by thousands of people every year.

The Irvin has become a figurehead of Duluth’s waterfront, but it could also be called a figurehead of Duluth’s successful conversion from a swarthy industrial port town to a diversified economy with a heavy emphasis on tourist dollars. “We’re both a tourist attraction and a working city,” says Ken Bueheler, executive director of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum at the downtown depot. “I think most people get that now. We are both.”

In order to fully appreciate the significance of the Irvin’s perennially fresh paint and long lines during the high season, you have to understand how much likelier it once seemed that any retired ore boat docked in the Duluth harbor would have rusted itself away to oblivion right along with the blighted economy and waning population of a dying city.

Back in the summer of 1974, my mother was packing my sisters and me and the family dog into the old Impala for the move from Duluth to the wild west. My dad and his sister were simultaneously dumping my great aunt’s North Shore log home (with stone fireplace on a wooded lot near the Lester River) for a paltry $15,000. They were glad to be rid of it. And around that same time—an era of scarring economic hardship for the hilly city—another fed up Duluthian was paying for the installation of a billboard that begged: “Will the last person to leave Duluth please turn out the lights?” That dismal billboard might have been my final view of the city, as the Aerial Bridge and the gritty Duluth-Superior harbor disappeared behind the rising southbound slope of Interstate 35 at the Cody Street exit.

As a West End girl, my view of Duluth was necessarily impoverished. But my mother’s weekly drives along London Road to “look at the mansions” made it clear even to a child that somewhere along the line there had been real wealth in Duluth. In the late 1800s, when the timber, steel, shipping, and railroad industries that put Duluth on the map were in their full glory, Duluth boasted the highest concentration of millionaires per capita of any city in the country. The 1970s and 80s, however, saw brutal setbacks in the steel, mining, and timber industries, and as the economy bottomed out, Duluth’s high school graduates flocked away en masse and thrust the population into deep decline.

In recent years, though, the city has been transforming itself. A tedious battle over the expansion of I-35 through downtown finally gave way to a successful freeway expansion that included the use of surplus funds to re-brick the downtown streets and build a boardwalk along the shore. These days, the dozens of new hotels, resorts, restaurants, and shops—and of course the William A. Irvin—in Canal Park and along the North Shore suggest that people really love to stay in Duluth.

And yet the city’s latest tourist attraction—the Duluth Aquarium—ran into trouble within a year of opening its doors, and is still scrambling to concoct a viable plan for reopening in the spring. Some wonder: Is this snow-belt city of ore boats, paper mills, and arctic weather really sustainable as a tourist town?At the intersection of 57th Avenue and Eighth Street in Duluth sits an elongated two-story tan building. On this crunchy winter afternoon, the small paved parking area facing Eighth Street hosts a ramshackle multi-colored pick-up and a couple of rusty cars. Jutting out of the aluminum siding over the sidewalk on 57th—right above the cracked recycling bins and overflowing dumpster—hangs a vintage 7-Up sign, its faded bubbles floating cheerfully above the words “8th Street Market.”

This sign has been hanging here for more than 30 years. It was my landmark when I was four years old, living in one of the second-floor apartments above the store. This bubbly beacon dangling above helped me find my way back home after playing outside. And it bore witness on the winter afternoon when I licked the irresistible frost on the store’s metal door. I remember having my tongue pried loose with a steak knife, but that could be an adrenaline-soaked distortion, since my mother insists more reasonably that she used warm water to set me free. Either way, I lost a piece of skin, and either way, it’s the consolation of the orange popsicle tinged with blood that I remember most vividly.

That metal door has disappeared, completely sided over as a solid wall. The Eighth Street Market itself is long gone, closed years ago and revamped, it seems, as another apartment. Yet the sign hangs on, a bleached out and anomalous vestige of the past in a town where despite undeniable change and progress in certain quarters, time seems to stand still.

The short path from Eighth Street to Lincoln Park, my last home in Duluth, is haunted by similar ghosts: the Rexall Drug where my bad-boy cousin taught me how to use slugs in the vending machine, the white storefront that was once a dusty pharmacy and now appears abandoned, the humble but wildly successful A & Dubs, boarded up for the winter, and the countless dilapidated homes in yards strewn with torn vinyl kitchen chairs and discarded toys. These are the places my mother referred to disdainfully as “tar paper shacks.” It’s all strung together by a criss-cross of hilly streets and dead-end dirt roads ending abruptly in patches of wild brush, jutting rock, and tangled birches, and intersected here and there by any one of the 38 unruly creeks that cut through the city.

This is Duluth’s dingy West End—what one Minneapolitan referred to as “the largest white ghetto in the state”—and here you get the feeling that nothing ever changes, and no one wants it to. “The near West End will never be revitalized,” sighs Patrick Cross, owner of the successful Lake Avenue Cafe in Canal Park. “You’d pretty much have to tear it all down and start over.” Cross himself recently sold his West End home, purchased in the 70s for $500 cash, for about $90,000 and purchased a Victorian in posh East Duluth. And yet, ironically, it was in the West End that Duluth’s transformation to a tourist town was born.

John Fedo, mayor of Duluth from 1980 to 1992, would have been my West End neighbor if my family had stuck around past my sixth birthday. Our houses were only four blocks apart. Fedo, who now lives in Side Lake, about an hour and a half north of Duluth, is the man many credit for the diversification and revitalization of Duluth’s economy.

“When I started as mayor in 1980, tourism was not considered a legitimate element of the economy,” he says. “To get folks to think in terms of promoting Duluth as a tourist destination was a major breakthrough.”

This claim seems incredible against the hum of three million cars motoring past the intersection of I-35 and Lake Avenue each year. With that kind of traffic and the inherent advantages of a stunning natural setting, why would such a place not develop itself as a center of tourism? While Duluth has always been the gateway to the North Shore and the north woods—the launch point for outdoorsy tourism, winter and summer—most motorists tended to drive straight through without stopping.

After all, prior to the mid 1980s, Duluth didn’t see itself as a beautiful port town. It saw itself as it was—a tough city with its sleeves rolled up for dirty work, a city with sweat stains and ring-around-the-collar, an industrial town with the sweet stench of the fiber board manufacturing plant reeking up the harbor and the unromantic habit of dumping its trash on the shores of the lake that made the economy go round.

And Duluth still wears its sweat stains like a badge of honor—not surprisingly, considering the city’s hardworking history, unrelenting climate, and stark, rugged terrain. Things trendy and shallow are suspect here. Barton Sutter, Duluthian author of Cold Comfort, wrote of a time when the city distributed bumper stickers that said, “We’re Duluth and proud of it.” Sutter happened upon one that was adulterated to say, “We’re Dull and out of it.”

Tom Holden, director of the Duluth Corps of Engineers Maritime Visitor’s Center—known locally as the Marine Museum, the most visited free attraction in Northern Minnesota—captures the lack of glamour perfectly: “Duluth is a bulk-cargo trans-shipment port. That’s the essence of what we do.”

Midwesterners are generally known for our chapped hands and hard work ethic, but there’s something downright tenacious in Duluth’s definition of itself as a city of old-fashioned manual labor. “This town isn’t sustainable as a tourist town,” snaps Ray Skelton of the Duluth Seaway Port Authority. “You can’t compare a $4 an hour job to a $30 an hour job. This is an active, working port. Without the ships, it’s nothing. Just remember, it’s the people who come to see the ships, not the other way around.”

And people do come to see the ships, which still, according to Holden at the Marine Museum, pass through the harbor at the rate of four or five a day, moving about 40 million tons of cargo each year. Where else can you see an ocean-going ship up close and personal? Lake Superior is not only the largest, but also the most mythical of the Great Lakes, inspiring artists and outdoor enthusiasts alike with its fury and drama, its moody beauty. According to John Fedo, Canal Park is currently the most visited destination in Minnesota. But this was not always so. It took the desperation wrought of economic crisis to convince Duluth to clean itself up for company.When Duluth’s major industries collapsed, they did so with speedy brutality. The steel mill shut down and the Air Force picked up and left. The timber and fishing industries suffered, and manufacturing’s success was stunted by the excessive costs associated with shipping things to and from a place as remote as Duluth. Labor was more expensive, too, due to Duluth’s heavy unionization, and aging factories were losing their efficiency. Storefronts were boarded up, schools closed down. The bustling port became a bleak, post-industrial wasteland.

Duluth’s sleeves were still rolled up—but now it was for the long wait in unemployment lines, since up to 20 percent of Duluthians were jobless through the 80s. Population fell from 100,000 in 1960 to about 85,000 in 1984. The city needed a new strategy, and fast.

John Fedo, mayor at the time, was imploring city planners to regroup and consider options, including tourism, to diversify the economy—and it was tough going. After all, if a grimy, booming industrial port full of bustling factories is off-putting to tourists, a grimy, desolate, failing port full of boarded up factories is far less so.

Promotion of tourism had to go hand in hand with revitalization of the waterfront industry. “A working port is critical to the history and the future of the city of Duluth,” says Fedo. “For a number of years, Duluth’s city fathers simply didn’t understand how industry and tourism could work together as complementary components of a healthy economy.” But in Duluth, this juxtaposition of industry and natural beauty is exactly the unlikely recipe for attracting visitors. This understanding made the Canal Park waterfront absolutely central to the effort to reinvent Duluth for itself and the outside world.

My grandmother Adelle LaBrec lived in Duluth all her life. Her parents came from the small farming village of Lampton, near Quebec City. Nana was in her late 30s by the time she married Henry Ouellette, who, as Nana tells it, dropped dead of a heart attack when he was barely sixty.

Not terribly long after that, the city knocked on her door to say they were about to tear down her house on the hill to build a freeway. Nana never got over that blow. As a widow whose two children had both long since departed Duluth—as the vast majority of Duluth children do—Nana found her best option to be a 13th floor apartment in a downtown senior high-rise on Superior Street, overlooking Canal Park. She lived happily there for 20 years among the “old hens.”

It was in that apartment that I learned the importance of 7-Up as a medical treatment. After you have gorged yourself on baked chicken heavily seasoned with Lawry’s, chased by an enormous dish of soft vanilla ice cream with outlandishly delicious homemade hot fudge, and you are writhing with stomachache, you then force yourself to swallow a small glass of 7-Up to help it “settle.”

It was also in Nana’s apartment that I absorbed from her the mythic importance of the ships that passed through the port. Her living room and bedroom windows both looked straight out over the harbor, down on what is now Canal Park and what was then little more than a junkyard. If Nana could see what the city of Duluth has now done for her view, she would finally forgive them for tearing down her house on the hill.
Under Fedo’s leadership, an aggressive renovation blew in like a spring cleaning, beginning with the removal of many decades’ worth of industrial debris that had been dumped along the lakeshore. It also spelled demolition or renovation for scads of historic brick warehouses, factories, and breweries along the harbor front.

Developers built hotels and resorts, and a slew of new restaurants and shops sprang up along with tender saplings and replica streetlamps to line the district’s new brick streets. Up the hill in downtown, the city had the site of the old downtown Sears store designated as federal land so that the Fon-du-Luth casino could be opened in its place. And the freeway renovation made it all more accessible to passersby.

Now, more than 3.5 million visitors are attracted to Duluth each year. Tourism results in a $400 million total annual economic impact for the city, and in 2001 Duluth tourism achieved its 13th consecutive year of record growth. As the top destination for vacationing Minnesotans, Duluth is home to 8,000 tourism-related jobs with an average wage of $11.20 per hour. Duluth was host to 48 major conventions in 2001 with a total economic impact of $36 million. And in addition to providing amenities to the locals, the benefits of tourism save every Duluth homeowner an estimated $400 annually on property taxes.

“It’s been incredible,” says Patrick Cross from across the booth at Lake Avenue Cafe, one block from the Aerial Bridge in Canal Park. While Cross has seen countless restaurants come and go during his 13 years in Canal Park, his own business has seen 10-15 percent growth each year until 2002, a departure for which he credits 9/11 and its impact on travel and the national economy. “We were real spoiled for so long, it’s going to be a struggle for the next few months.”

Cross looks around and raises his palms at the surrounding shops, hotels, and restaurants, and says, “Our whole economy here is based on tourism. That’s always been one of the complaints of people trying to create jobs in this town. These chains come in and they create jobs, but they’re not paying living wages.”

“You have to have balance,” says Fedo, who points to major strides in economic development in the health care and education industries in Duluth, as well. He stresses diversification as the key. “Clearly the approach has to be exactly that. You can’t exist on industry alone, or tourism alone.”

Our biggest problem in Duluth for the past 40 years or so is that people between 20 and 30 all leave the area,” says Cross. “Every year a new crop of graduates flees the city. So there are definitely challenges.” Winter is one of them. “In this business, in order to survive winter, you have to get yourself established and develop a local following,” says Cross. “That’s what kills the chains—when they can’t handle the winters.”

Cross’ cafe is one of only two independently owned restaurants in Canal Park, and certainly the only one that makes hot fudge sauce that tastes identical to Nana’s. “It’s Granny Rouse’s recipe,” says Cross. “You can have it.” He disappears into the kitchen to fetch an overstuffed recipe binder. “It’s real simple: 4 ounces bittersweet Callebaut chocolate, 1 ounce baking chocolate, 3 ounces mini marshmallows, and a cup of half and half. Melt it down in a double boiler. We don’t have any secrets, there’s no need to be so snooty.”

Indeed. And that very attitude may lie at the core of Duluth’s unlikely renaissance. “It’s Lake Superior, stupid,” jokes Ken Bueheler of the Railroad Museum, offering another simple recipe: “You take this half slummy, half bowery of Canal Park and turn it into a new downtown. Lake Superior comes to an end there, the farthest western point of the lake. Link it all together with a lake walk, and take a new attitude that welcomes people to the city.”

Despite certain signs to the contrary, Fedo maintains that those efforts at welcoming improvements went beyond downtown and Canal Park, and in fact reached all the way to the dreary West End. “We spent a considerable amount of time, dollars, and energy improving Lincoln Park in the early 80s,” he reassures me. “There was crime, there was vandalism. People didn’t feel comfortable taking a walk. That’s changed for the better now.”

But what about that aquarium? “You have to wonder if the admission wasn’t a bit high,” muses Holden, who of course can’t help but point out that his museum, which is free, attracts 400,000 visitors a year—visitors who spend money at the surrounding restaurants and attractions. “That’s the goal,” says Fedo. “To take advantage of the vast number of folks that are heading by Duluth—and to say, how many can we get to stop?”