Duluth Legacy

Duluth Legacy. Artist: Donna Dobberfuhl, also, Medium: brick (ironstone), also, 1992. Texas artist Donna Dobberfuhl sculpted this freestanding brick relief mural as her interpretation of the history of Lake Superior's westernmost place. She chose to include historic and contemporary content, from the culture of indigenous people, through today's shipping, forest products and mining industries. Her unique brick cap for the wall represents the rolling waves of the lake. Her emphasis on water reflects Duluth's economic and social benefits from Lake Superior's physical and spiritual influence. Ms. Dobberfuhl has received numerous commissions for her unique brick bas-relief sculpture., Canal Park Drive. Canal Park Drive is the oldest thoroughfare in the city of Duluth. It was originally called St. Croix Avenue. Historians find it identified by various colorful soubriquets, but its name matters less than its important role in Duluth's beginnings., Today's Canal Park is at the base of a sandy seven-mile-long peninsula called Minnesota Point or Park Point. When European explorers, missionaries and fur traders ... in the 17th century, the Dakota (Sioux), were ... displaced by Anishinabe, later ... Chippewa people, in their ... the lake's eastern shores. These ... who lived along Minnesota Point in ... moved inland in winter. This was their ... 1854 Treaty of LaPointe ceded most of ... Arrowhead region and the Indians moved westward or to the newly established Grand Portage and Fond du Lac reservations., Canal Park was a portal for pioneer immigrants from eastern U.S. and Canada and western Europe. This was their land until the 1854 Treaty of LaPointe ceded most of the Minnesota Arrowhead region and the Indians moved westward or to newly-established reservations. Wharves, warehouses and factories were mixed with homes, boarding houses, hotels, diners, saloons and brothels., By 1910 a Finnish population dominated this part of town. They gathered on this street for weddings and funerals complete with old country music, or for gossip and trade. Spare rooms and boarding houses were filled with seamen between passages or woods workers between stints at the camps in the white pine forest. This neighborhood became a rowdy place with limited enforcement of the few laws on the books., In the depression years of the '30s, St. Croix Avenue had a random assortment of businesses trying to cope with the times, while its shanties and rooming houses, increasingly dilapidated, took in unemployed lumberjacks. Ignored by the rest of the city, it was anything but a special part of town., Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949 provided financial aid for rehabilitation of deteriorating urban areas. Duluth undertook its first renewal project here in 1955. Fortunately, the St. Croix Renewal District was limited to the lake side of Canal Park Drive, thereby retaining most of the large older buildings, which, in their new life, give us a sense of the district's history., A few businesses understood the street's potential in the '60s and '70s. The district's transformation accelerated in 1986 when the city adopted the Downtown Waterfront Plan and began making major public investments. Today we preserve waterfront areas not only for their aura and mythology, but also for their historic, social and economic value. Canal Park has always been central to the growth and development of Duluth and its main street is still a lively place, 'though some would say a bit more refine., photo: , St. Croix Avenue circa 1930