Howie: Downtown Duluth embraces for another long winter
You can’t police despair. You can shuffle people from doorway to doorway, but that’s optics, not safety. The folks drifting between shelters and liquor stores aren’t statistics.
Downtown Duluth
Howie: Essentia’s tower is the beating heart of a rebuilding downtown
The Benedictine Sisters weren’t chasing miracles — they were building them. Standing on Superior Street at sunrise and looking east toward that glass tower, you can still hear their rhythm beneath the city’s heartbeat. The heart of downtown is beating again. And it carries a Benedictine rhythm.
Howie: Downtown Duluth plan isn’t the problem, the roadblocks are
Duluth has a plan. The question now is whether it has the guts — and the will — to knock down the roadblocks standing in the way.
Howie: Downtown Duluth won’t revive until it faces its hardest truth
Downtown won’t be saved by consultants, binders or cheerleaders. It will be saved when Duluth faces its most challenging problem — the needles, the psychotic breaks, the encampments in doorways — and chooses to act rather than avert its eyes.
Howie: Can Duluth finally execute?
The Imagine Downtown Duluth plan admits that downtowns are not guaranteed. Across the Midwest, cities are racing to reinvent themselves, and Duluth risks falling behind.
Howie: Nearly 9,000 new Duluth housing units needed by 2035
“The senior population is expected to increase by nearly 24 percent by 2035. Duluth will need 1,437 new senior units by 2030 and nearly 2,500 by 2035.” – 2025 Comprehensive Housing Needs Analysis
Howie: Vision for live-work housing targets wide range of residents
Advocates describe the proposal as part of a broader trend in U.S. cities adapting to hybrid work and shifting housing needs. For Duluth, they say, it may offer both a solution to a tight housing market and a strategy for long-term downtown revitalization.
Howie: Duluth Haunted Ship marks 30 years with new scares
Last year, Forbes Media “secret shopped” the event and named it one of the Seven World’s Scariest Haunted Houses. For longtime organizers, the recognition confirmed what locals already knew: the Irvin is no ordinary Halloween gimmick.
Howie: Consultant’s plan aims to redefine Duluth’s downtown
On Superior Street, the contrast remains: laughter spilling from one door, papered windows a few steps away. The Imagine Downtown plan will not erase that reality overnight. But it offers a vision, backed by community and guided by outside expertise, that says decline is not destiny.
Howie: ‘Imagine Downtown’ looks to reshape Duluth’s core
The outcome will depend on whether Duluth can move from vision to action. “Only in working together will we make this happen. No one is going to do it for us,” said Shaun Floerke, president and CEO of Boreal Waters Community Foundation.
Weaving ancestry through sculptural basketry at the Nordic Center
Bird, a Twin Cities–based studio artist, uses basketry techniques as the foundation for contemporary sculptural forms that push past utilitarian design. Her work is in the Minnesota Historical Society collection and private collections in New York, Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania.
Duluth Playhouse opens season with rock ‘n’ roll smash ‘Million Dollar Quartet’
The cast features Trevor Lindley Craft as Elvis Presley, Wyatt Andrew Brownell as Jerry Lee Lewis, Davis Wood as Johnny Cash and Drew Black as Carl Perkins. Tyler Railey plays Dyanne, the sharp-witted singer, while Dan Prevette takes on Sun Records founder Sam Phillips.
Howie: 2025 Spirit of Duluth tourney the first without Bill Oswald
This December, Bill Oswald's seat at the table will be empty, but his fingerprints will be on every shift, every goal, every frazzled parent clutching a cup of bad coffee. The Spirit of Duluth is back. It never really left. And he wouldn’t want it any other way.
Howie: Downtown Duluth doesn’t need another study. It needs a pulse
In Milwaukee, people struggling with addiction or mental illness weren’t being cycled through ERs or dumped onto downtown sidewalks. Instead, they had real places to go, real people to meet them, real pathways to stability. That shift gave residents confidence to come back.
Howie: Downtown Duluth’s longtime concrete embarrassment finally meets its fate
For now, give Reinert his due. The Auto Shoppers Ramp is finally going away, brick by stubborn brick, because he made it a priority. And if you squint past the dust, you can almost see a downtown Duluth that isn’t held together by plywood, nostalgia, and wishful thinking. Almost.