Here’s the latest news back from the future...

"From golf courses to highway construction, news from the future has a familiar ring."

 Written by Jim Heffernan  for the Duluth News Tribune on 7-23-21 for publication on 7-24-21.

 Here’s a potpourri of the latest Duluth news for 10 years hence — say July 2031.

 

DATELINE DULUTH — The Minnesota Department of Transportation announced yesterday that the “Can of Worms” project in the city’s recently re-renamed West End neighborhood is at least half finished and should be open to traffic by the turn of the next century.

 

The complicated junction of Interstates 35 and 535 encompassing also U.S. Highway 53 has been under construction for more than 10 years, starting circa 2020. “We’re making great progress on the project some have called the Can of Worms,” said a DOT spokesperson. “We hope drivers will be patient and observe detours leading through various neighborhoods including several alleys. Be careful in alleys where garbage cans are often placed,” he warned.

 

On a separate front, fishing advocates and others have objected to the monicker “Can of Worms,” saying it insults our worm friends. Gerhardt Clitellum, a University of Worms in Worms, Germany, worms expert noted that many birds survive entirely on a diet of worms.

 

The neighborhood and business district near the “Worm Can” was once known as Lincoln Park but reverted to be called West End in 2025 when Cadillac dealers sued, complaining the name endorsed competing Lincoln automobiles. Attempts by some craft brewers in the district to change the name to Hopside failed in a divided City Council.

 

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, local warfare between supporters of the former Lester Park Golf Course in far eastern Duluth and advocates for Enger Park Golf Course in the central part of the city continues unabated. The conflict mushroomed several years ago when advocates for reopening Lester surreptitiously bombarded Enger with a toxic chemical grass killer called “Agent Brown,” rained down from a drone.

 

After the links turned into a brown field, local contractors proposed turning the course into a mega gravel pit providing good-paying jobs, a move opposed by local environmental groups. Advocates for reopening Lester after Enger was destroyed were thwarted by lawsuits and arrests of Lester advocates suspected of waging chemical warfare on Enger.

 

City officials also pointed out that reopening Lester would likely involve razing recently constructed luxury condominium units with spectacular views of Lake Superior serving the city’s underserved upper crust,

 

The latest developments leave Duluth with no public golf courses, termed a “blessing” by environmental interests advocating returning them to what nature intended: woods.

 

City officials also have become concerned that the School Board is continuing to dicker over the sale of “old” Central High School atop the Duluth hill and “old” “old” Central High School, sometimes called “Ancient Central High School” in the downtown area.

 

Sale of both to interests hoping to develop housing were thwarted in the mid-2020s when developers chose instead to develop housing for the well heeled on the property once hosting Lester Park Golf Course.

 

The former plans to turn historic old Central High School downtown into a large apartment building changed in 2028 when the School Board accepted an offer by a Hollywood independent film company planning to film a new version of “Rapunzel” utilizing Central’s imposing clock tower from which the title character could let down her golden hair.

 

“This could mean millions for our schools,” said board member Sonja “Stormy” Weathers who beamed she has been offered a role in the movie, portraying the mother of the alluring golden-haired “Rapunzel” possibly starring middle-aged Taylor Swift. Other members of the School Board will be cast as “extras,” a spokesperson said. The superintendent will play “The King” if there is a king. Research is planned.

 

On another, unrelated, news front, progress on the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline from Canada to Superior by way of several of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes and a passel of Indian reservations has been halted due to unexpected popularity of electric cars and trucks. “Come to think of it we might not need that much oil after all,” said a company spokesman shortly before he was terminated.

 

Under construction for over a decade, it has been proposed that the section of pipeline already built be turned into the longest water slide on the planet. Entrepreneurs from Minneapolis propose running water through the pipeline instead of oil and offering tourists and locals rides on small craft designed especially for pipeline rides. “This would top Ye Olde Mill at the Minnesota State Fair,” said a backer.

 

Concerns have been expressed by environmental experts that the amount of water needed for such a project would drain at least 3,000 lakes in northern Minnesota and cause Lake Superior to rise markedly at the outlet, threatening Duluth. “Glensheen would be under water,” said Lester “Joe” Popple, a registered watershed analyst and part-time ventriloquist. “Park Point would disappear,” he mouthed.

 

Developers question that lakes would be drained, but noted that if so they would make excellent sand traps for several golf courses replacing the former Enger and Lester courses in Duluth.

 

Film at 10.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org. 

Duluth's historic western breweries: In Heaven there is no beer, but there's plenty in Duluth

By Jim Heffernan

People's Brewery: 4230 W. 2nd St. Duluth, MN

With the new craft beer operations seemingly opening on a regular basis, especially in Duluth's Lincoln Park neighborhood, I thought I'd reprint a piece I wrote for Zenith City Online in 2015.  As the column points out, Duluth has a storied past in brewing even as it moves today into the forefront of craft brewing in the Upper Midwest. 

Now that Duluth is one of the major centers for craft brewing in the Upper Midwest, perhaps it’s time to take a glance back at Duluth’s storied brewing history, together with shifting attitudes toward drinking today and in the past.

Duluth has a rich history of beer brewing going back to its earliest settlement in the 1850s, with small breweries popping up and fading in the last half of the 19th century before what I’ll call the “big three” established themselves here in large brick edifices, two of them in the city’s western neighborhoods.

About a century later, by the mid-1950s, Duluth was the only city in Minnesota hosting three major breweries, but their days were numbered.

The best remembered today—Fitger’s—was not in a western neighborhood. Major portions of that brewing company’s imposing structure at 600 East Superior Street remain as a hotel and shopping and dining facility including Fitger’s Brewhouse Brewery and Grille, an operation befitting the complex’s 135-year history. 

Fitgers Brewery, Duluth, MN

Major brewing elsewhere in the city was located in West End (now Lincoln Park) and West Duluth (now Spirit Valley), where hardly any traces of their operations exist today. Duluth Brewing and Malting stood at 231 South 29th Avenue West (adjacent to today’s Clyde Iron/Heritage Sports Center facility) and the People’s Brewery operated out of 4230 West Second Street, a block south of Grand Avenue.

Like Fitger’s, both were housed in imposing castle-like buildings, with Duluth Brewing and Malting

operating in a six-story brick building a stone’s throw from today’s path of Interstate 35 through that part of Duluth. According to Lost Duluth, Duluth Brewing and Malting’s headquarters had at least three towers and was trimmed with stone quarried at Fond du Lac.

I remember the building, usually called the “Royal Brewery” (after one of its popular brands) in my lifetime. It contained a taproom where parties and wedding receptions were held well into the 1960s. Royal went out of business in 1966, with most of the property purchased by the Minnesota Department of Transportation for Interstate 35 construction.

Royal’s West Duluth neighbor, the People’s Brewery, was established in 1908 by socialist entrepreneurs (a seeming oxymoron) “to avoid having to buy beer from Fitger’s and large national breweries and so they could…resist the evils of capitalism,” according to Lost Duluth. That didn’t stop them from erecting a five-story, castle-like structure for their brewing operation. 

And for socialists, the People’s people seemed pretty impressed with European royalty, as were their competitors a few block eastward at Duluth Brewing and Malting. The People’s Brewery’s best known beer was named “Regal Supreme” while Duluth Brewing and Malting produced a popular product called “Royal Bohemian” which later became “Royal 58.” That brewery also developed the “Rex” trademark, which later was sold to Fitger’s where it became one of the brewery's most popular beers. Rex has a strong royalty association as well—“Rex” is Latin for “king;” The beer’s full name was “Rex ImperialDry Beer.”

Portions of these huge complexes remain today. Carlson Duluth Plumbing is housed in what was once the offices of Duluth Malt and Brewing, and Brock-White Landscape Products and Serv-Pro operate out of remnants of the former People’s facilities. In fact, the brewery’s tanks are still inside the building Serv-Pro owns, as the walls would need to be partially demolished to remove them.

With modern brewing methods, it no longer takes multi-story, rambling factory-like buildings with scores of employees to produce beer. Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood alone houses two of the many craft beer producers that have cropped up in the Zenith City over the past several years: Lake Superior Brewing Co. at 2711 West Superior St., which bills itself as Minnesota’s oldest microbrewer, and Bent Paddlebrewing at 1912 West Michigan Street. Several other microbreweries—including the Brewhouse, Carmody Irish Pub & Brewing, Blacklist Brewing, and Canal Park Brewing Company—operate out of brewpubs found downtown and in the Canal Park business district, where you will also find a microdistillery.

Beer, beer everywhere, and plenty of varieties to drink, unlike those days of yore when there were just three breweries in the city, housed in massive buildings. They were three too many, though, as far as folks clinging to temperance attitudes were concerned.

Prohibition, the American experiment that likely spawned more beer brewing than we have even today—but undercover—ended in 1933 after 14 dry years, but the attitudes it promulgated lasted well into mid-century and beyond. Protestant (but not Catholic) churches, in particular, condemned “demon rum” (as all drinking alcohol was often called) and Duluth had an active chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union until well after World War II.

In the Lutheran environment I was reared in, any drinking of alcohol was soundly condemned from the pulpit, with card playing and dancing not far behind. And while that message received lip service by many congregants, plenty of booze rendered its own lip service in the confines of people’s homes. And of course, for those less concerned about the religious attitudes toward drinking, the city’s West End offered plenty of taverns for open defiance of drinking strictures laid down in the churches.

Even in the 1960s, when, as a young newspaper reporter in Duluth I would cover meetings of the city’s Alcoholic Beverage Board, its members—led at the time by a Lutheran minister—tried to keep a tight lid on all purveyors of malt beverages and spirits.

Today, thanks to the most recent session of the Minnesota Legislature, you can even buy a growler of beer to take home on a Sunday, a move that remained controversial due partly to those blue-nosed attitudes of the past, which continue to prohibit, in Minnesota, off-sale beer and liquor sales on the Sabbath.

Those attitudes are fading fast, though, as more and more small brewing operations compete for a public that today views beer drinking in moderation as an innocent libation and not a ticket to eternal damnation.

So today we can celebrate this new era of Duluth’s brewing history by raising a glass of local brew without fear of the afterlife—and we should do it while we can, for as the song says, “In heaven there is no beer.”

Originally appeared on August 16, 2015 in Zenith City Online

A light that will never fail–by Jim Heffernan...

Deep in December it’s nice to remember, although you know the snow will follow. Deep in December it’s nice to remember, without a hurt, the heart is hollow.
— A stanza from the song “Try to Remember”

Bethany Lutheran Church at 2308 West Third Street. (Image: Google)

It’s not too deep in December yet, but it is far enough into the holiday season to, well, to remember yuletide seasons of the past, as most adults tend to do when thinking of the joy of childhood Christmases.

Before I do that, though, I want to note that this is my final monthly column for Zenith City Online, as it shifts to a more relaxed publishing schedule. I’ve been Zenith City’s western Duluth correspondent since the beginning, designated that because it is the neighborhood of my childhood and youth, my upbringing and education. I’m a Denfeld Boy.

It’s been an interesting ride, writing monthly about some aspect of western Duluth over the years, the columns weighted heavily to the West End, the actual neighborhood of my past. Duluthians of today know the West End is now officially called Lincoln Park, and, to some, West Duluth is known as Spirit Valley.

I’ve learned some things I didn’t know about the history of the neighborhood where I spent the formative years of my life…many things, come to think of it. But today I will revert to a bit of personal history with a reminiscence of the Christmas season in the West End church in which I grew up.

The West End and West Duluth are replete with churches of most Christian denominations. Each one, I know, had Christmas traditions fondly recalled by those who experienced them as children.

What follows here is my own reminiscence of Christmas in the West End’s Bethany Lutheran, 23rd Avenue West and Third Street, where my family worshiped. This column first ran in the Duluth News Tribune in 2001, and was included in the book of 52 of my newspaper columns, Cooler Near the Lake, published in 2008. (You can find the book here.)

Before attaching that column, let me say I’ve enjoyed writing for Zenith City Online these past several years, and appreciate having been included. I continue to operate a blog—jimheffernan.org—on which I write on a variety of subjects from time to time.

Now, here is that column, titled  “A Light That Will Never Fail.”

~~~~~~~~~~

(The previous writing was my introduction to my final monthly post on Zenith City Online. 

Read "The Light that will Never Fail" HERE and in my book.)

A farewell to Goosetown...

By Jim Heffernan

I drove up the winding new road to the low-slung middle school they’re building on Duluth’s western hillside, near where the ore-train tracks morph onto the massive ore docks, and realized: Goosetown is no more.

Up the grade at the end of such West End streets as Wellington, Restormel, Vernon, and others, where Goostown once was, there now will be an imposing middle school, the name of which I don’t know. Goosetown Middle School has a ring to it, though, don’t you think? Their teams could be the Ganders.

I lived about a mile east of Goosetown when I was growing up and didn’t get there much, the great divide of Lincoln Park with its Miller Creek serving as a line of demarcation between my part of the West End and their part of the West End, which included Goosetown.

We had Goat Hill (to be saved for another time), but they had Goosetown, called that – I’m not sure intended as a compliment – because it was an enclave of Polish immigrants and their immediate descendants who, we were told in our part of the West End, kept geese agriculturally.

Duluth used to be more ethnically defined than it is today, if it is at all today. Polish in Goosetown, Italians in Little Italy, my Swedish mother was brought up on Goat Hill, although I don’t know if they were all Swedes. It was named, I think, because it is so steep that only mountain goats could live there – mountain goats and Swedes (at least a few).

The workers constructing the new middle school up in Goosetown are not eager to have the public visit yet – the building looks about two thirds done – and post their objections on a large “do not enter” sign at the entrance to the property, but the gate was open so I drove up there anyway, on a new blacktop roadway that winds along the terrain like a mountain road.

This was all new terrain to me, having only visited the heart of Goosetown once as a child when a relative was engaged to marry a Goosetown woman, but it didn’t work out. She did not keep geese, so that wasn’t the problem.

So for me, driving up there is not so much a nostalgic visit as one of curiosity. The panoramic view of the St. Louis River estuary and harbor is breathtaking, with the Blatnik and Bong bridges seeming to be just blocks apart. It will be a beautiful place for middle schoolers to attend classes, but they won’t appreciate the view until they are much older.

And I expect that in their geography or history classes they won’t be told they are in the heart of a place formerly known as Goosetown, where once geese were kept, for whatever reasons geese are kept, by people said to be originally from Poland and their children, born in America. The future students won’t be told because so few people, including their teachers, know about what went before the school on that property.

That’s why I wrote this. Pass it on.

Duluth's boundaries defined at last...

I wanted to call your attention to my letter to the editor in today's Duluth News Tribune. (Click HERE to read the letter.) A woman reader wrote in to finally define once and for all the true boundaries for Duluth's "West End" (Lincoln Park is today's teminology) and "West Duluth." So many newcomers to Duluth mistakenly mix up the two geographical areas... and also misname our main downtown streets.