Duluth has a polo club left over from the days when it was one of the richest cities in America. Old Italian men still play bocce ball in the city’s West End. The Coney Island hot dog stand is the same one my dad went to in 1922, and the menu boards are still up from those days. If you walk in the woods you find, in the middle of the wild, a lilac bush that once stood by someone’s front door, and sometimes the stones of that doorsill, too—an archaeology of the mundane. There used to be more people here, not less. The green is sprawling back over the built land (which is the opposite of what happens farther south, where stone and asphalt spread in a ceaseless glaciation).
Skyline Parkway is part of this—Duluth’s future receding into the past. It’s an almost-continuous route that lies along the crest of the basalt hills like a stone boa, running parallel to the lakeshore through the entire city. The views from almost anywhere along its length are spectacular, except when it disappears into the scruffy forest that replaced the original white pines. The road has a long and interesting history, tied up with the abortive dream of Duluth becoming the “largest city in the nation.”
The parkway was built piecemeal from 1889 on, initially pushed forward by William Rogers, the first head of Duluth’s parks board. Rogers had been President Rutherford B. Hayes’s private secretary, and later, as a real estate developer, acted as the agent for property Hayes owned in Duluth.
Rogers seems to have been pathologically optimistic. His estimate for building the first five miles of the parkway was five thousand dollars; it cost three hundred thousand. In a letter to Hayes, his statement regarding the future of the city was equally wide of the mark: “It is easy to read its future now, standing on the upper terrace of the bluff overlooking the City … [no one can] doubt that one of the great cities of the world is here in the making—one of the largest if not the largest on the continent.”
In those early days, tallyho parties in horse-drawn coaches rode the Parkway, which was to have served as the spine for an elaborate system of greenways and parks that would lace the hill to the shores of Lake Superior. These, sadly, were never built.
The Parkway, though, eventually extended east to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve, and on to Seven Bridges Road, named for the stone bridges that were Mayor Snively’s legacy (this stretch of road was his gift to the city, and in the 1920s, Snively used to show up there in overalls to put in time with the work crews before heading to City Hall). To the southwest, it pushed on all the way to Jay Cooke State Park, though this segment is now in ruins.
Now, you can pick up Skyline Parkway at Beck’s Road, just west of the city. Intermittently graveled and paved, it runs up Spirit Mountain and along the ridge above the city, passing Enger Tower above and the old industrial landscape of Gary and West Duluth below, ’til it finally starts snaking into the city streets. It takes some persistence to follow the Parkway through this stretch, as it appears and disappears into the city grid, occasionally adopting other names in its circuitous route through the neighborhoods. But if you make it to Hawk Ridge, you’re back on Skyline proper. From there, the parkway goes unplowed in the winter and can be pretty rough any time of year, but its ridge offers the best place for watching migrating birds and thunderstorms.
From Seven Bridges Road, the parkway winds down through boreal forest and crosses Amity Creek, with its little rapids and waterfalls, seven times until it emerges onto Superior Street just past Sixtieth Avenue East, some thirty miles from where it began.
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