Where in Duluth?

Hint: it’s somewhere near Canal Park

20 thoughts on “Where in Duluth?”

  1. That’s like posting a picture of the Washington Memorial in Washington DC and asking “Where in Washington?”

  2. That’s on the Welland Canal! Or, was it Hamilton… I know! South Chicago!

    On a serious note… the Lift Bridges crossing the Calumet River at Torrence Ave. were designed by the same Engineer as the Duluth bridge. The twin side-by-side liftbridges carrying the rail line over the Calumet just south of 95th St. may have been as well.

  3. Hunter D., I beg to disagree–or to at least take issue with syntax!

    The Duluth Aerial Bridge was designed by Claude Allen Porter Turner (based on an idea by Thomas McGilvray, based on a patent by Fernidad Arnodin) in 1899 as a transfer bridge. I was converted to a lift bridge in 1930 by the Kansas City firm of Harrington, Howard, and Ashe. Several lift-style bridges cross the Calumet; the first was built in 1938; I could not find any records regarding what firm designed and/or built any of the bridges. Still, there is a good chance that that firm did indeed design and build those bridges.

    Harrington, Howard, and Ashe built a great many lift bridges across the U.S., but they did not design Duluth’s lift bridge so much as adapt an existing bridge to work as a lift bridge. John Harrington apprenticed under John Alexander Lowell Waddell, the “father f the lift bridge”who designed the very first lift bridge in 1891 for a contest put on by the City of Duluth for a bridge over the canal; the corps of engineers rejected the steam-driven bridge because of too great a chance it would fail in the lowered position, stopping ship traffic through the canal. A few years later Waddell’s design was built over the Chicago River: the Halstead Street Bridge, the world’s very first life bridge. There’s a painting of that bridge and photos of the engineers and the whole story of Duluth’s aerial bridge in “Crossing the Canal: an Illustrated History of Duluth’s Aerial Bridge” written by some blowhard know-it-all who operates http://www.x-communication.org.

  4. Thanks for the info, Tony! I’d only heard vague Lifty details before- good to get more of the story.

  5. You beat me to it, Praslowicz… I knew I’d seen that somewhere before, must’ve been your blog!

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