Superior Street, 1907. The image above comes from a high resolution scan of Superior Street looking east toward Fifth Avenue West. It has been shared online many times before, including on Perfect Duluth Day. For those who have wondered about the businesses visible and half-hidden in the photo and the stories behind them, this series has some answers. Using the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub to match photo elements with newspaper articles, it describes a maritime birth, a crooked pawn shop owner, and an ingenious inventor in its tales of both incredible wealth and stark poverty on Superior Street in 1907. Founded in the late 1890s, the Detroit Publishing Company hired professional photographers to create images for postcards. Its high-quality images made it one of the country’s most successful postcard firms until declining demand and cheaper competitors put it out of business in 1924. The Library of Congress holds a collection of 25,000 Detroit Publishing Company prints, including 46 photographs of Duluth from between 1890 and 1913. This ten-part series takes a closer look at just one of those photos, dividing it into eight sections to break down all of the visible elements and then concluding with a general overview. The photographer took the image while standing directly in the middle of Superior Street a few feet back from Fifth Avenue West, looking east. If taken now, the photographer would be standing between the Radisson Hotel and the Duluth Public Library. The copyright date on the photo is 1909, but several clues suggest it was taken in the fall of 1907. The most obvious is the newspaper boy, likely posed, standing in the middle of the street. He is holding a paper with the headline “Jap riot crisis.” The headline should make the exact day of the photo easy to determine, but the paper does not seem to be in the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub. The gigantic typeset of the newspaper also doesn’t match any of the digitally available newspapers from the time and suggests that it was a cheap tabloid that sensationalized the events of the day. Combining the headline with other contextual details still provides a strong indication of when the photograph was taken. The bottom left of the photograph shows a copyright date of 1909 and includes the numbers 071209 next to the location information, all of which might suggest the photo was taken on July 12, 1909. It wasn’t. Many of the photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company contain a similar six-number sequence in the same location with numbers far above 12 and 31, the highest number possible for indicating a month and a day. The patterns of the numbers in other photos strongly suggest they were used as a location tool for their catalogue, not for noting the date. Further, the 1909 copyright year seems to reflect the publication year, not the year the photo was taken. Elements in the photo suggest it was taken a couple of years earlier. As noted in the sections that follow, a fire at the Windsor Hotel in January 1909 forced many of the building tenants seen in the photo to relocate.[1] As the photo is clearly not taken in winter, the photo could not have been taken in 1909. Another business seen in the photo, Porter’s Music Company, closed in November 1907.[2] While a sign can outlive a business, the sign for a closed business wouldn’t be likely to stay up long on Duluth’s busiest commercial corridor, strongly suggesting 1907 as the latest possible year for the photo. In 1907, two incidents related to riots and people with roots in Japan would have led to front page headlines. The first instance occurred in San Francisco on May 20, 1907, when a segregationist white mob attacked Japanese and South Asian businesses. The high temperature in Duluth on May 10, 1907 was 44 degrees.[3] It had snowed the day before. The people in the photograph are not dressed for snow. The paper, therefore, is likely referring to another 1907 incident of racial violence. Another event occurred in Vancouver, Canada, on Sept. 7, 1907. The news first appeared in the morning edition of the Duluth Evening Herald on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 1907. The Duluth Evening Herald described the events as “anti-Japanese outrages” and detailed how a mob of white locals descended upon a steamship arriving into the Vancouver port with 500 Japanese passengers. Locals attacked the passengers as they exited the ship, throwing several of them into the water.[4] Wikipedia provides a longer account of a parade by the Asiatic Exclusion League that turned violent and destroyed businesses in ethnic neighborhoods throughout the city. 1907 was a shameful period in U.S. history when a strong anti-immigrant sentiment prevailed and certain news sources profited off of fears of immigrant violence. It is at least plausible that the headline focused not on the initial conflict when people from Japan were attacked by locals, but on its aftermath, when Asian people in Vancouver armed themselves and prepared to fight back. Newspaper reports on the violent attacks on Asian groups in Vancouver. (Source: Duluth News Tribune, Sept. 11, 1907; The Minneapolis Tribune, Sept. 10, 1907; St. Cloud Daily Times, Sept. 10, 1907) The paper being sold is likely an afternoon extra edition, as suggested by the time of day. Based on orientation of the street and time of year, the short but foreword projecting shadows of the buildings suggest the photo was taken around 4 p.m. The conflict in Vancouver escalated on a Saturday night and lasted for three days, when police closed off the streets and calm slowly returned. The headline, therefore, would have likely appeared within a few days of the initial incident. The next day is unlikely, as downtown is too busy for a Sunday afternoon when most businesses would have been closed. It rained on Monday and skies were still overcast on Tuesday.[5] The sky is clear in the photo and the streets are dry. On Wednesday, the Herald gave the following description of the weather: This morning, with its clear, brilliant sky, its mild and genial air, and its glorious mellowness, was almost like a return of summer. But it wasn’t summer; it was early fall, a herald of the fine weather, with its invigorating air that makes up the autumn weather of this region that has been so blessed by nature. Yesterday’s highest temperature was 60 degrees and last night’s lowest was 50 degrees. The weather man looks for good weather tonight and tomorrow. If the paper is an extra edition of a cheap tabloid agitating over the immediate aftermath of the attack on Asian people in Vancouver on the first day with clear skies after the initial incident, it would mean the photo was taken on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 1907, at around 4 p.m. In 2011, this photo was uploaded to the website Shorpy, where people discussed a few interesting elements that immediately stood out. In particular, many people had questions about the man climbing either in or out of a third story window in the Spalding Hotel. Someone else noted the number of streetcars visible at the same time on just one section of Superior Street. And another person pointed out what was not visible in the photo: women. While the street scene is dominated by men, only a few dresses can be seen amongst the suits in different parts of the photo. Surprisingly, no one noted the large amount of horse poop in the street or the man whose job it seemed to be to clean it up. As described by Eric Morris in a graphic account of the problems created by keeping a large number of horses in urban areas, dealing with excessive amounts of horse manure was one of the main urban planning challenges of the time. Upper Left: A man sweeps up horse manure in the street. Lower Right: Horse manure The Shorpy discussion covers observations derived from looking at the photo. This series of ten posts on this one image goes beyond what is immediately visible. It uses the signs along the street to match the businesses with their owners and tell their stories using articles in the newspaper archives. In some instances, the name of the business may be largely obscured or too low resolution to read in the main photo. In many instances, I used other photos taken around the same time to determine blurry or obscured elements. In one instance, the same sign was illegible in two photos, but AI was able to combine the two images and read the name. The result was confirmed by the address in the newspaper archives. The posts that follow will go down the street on both sides section by section, revealing not only substantial differences in how Superior Street once looked but in how it was experienced by those who lived, worked, and shopped there. Part two will focus on the businesses surrounding the Windsor Hotel, as shown below. Coming next month: Superior Street, Sept. 11, 1907: The Windsor Hotel and Surrounding Businesses Notes [1] Duluth Evening Herald, Jan. 16, 1909 [2] Duluth Evening Herald, Nov. 19, 1907, December 1, 1907 December 19, 1907 [3] Duluth Evening Herald, May 20, 1907 [4] Duluth Evening Herald, Sept. 10, 1907 [5] Duluth Evening Herald, Sept. 10, 1907 The post Superior Street, Sept. 11, 1907 Part 1: Introduction appeared first on Perfect Duluth Day.
