Local lore in Canal Park, Duluth, Minnesota

• The bridge answers. Vessels sound a signal on approach and the Aerial Lift Bridge answers with its own horn pattern, day or night, all shipping season. Residents learn the sequence and stop hearing it, or they do not, and they move.
• Duluth dug the canal partly out of spite. Superior, Wisconsin went to court to stop the work, and when the dredge stalled in frozen gravel in spring 1871, townspeople finished the cut with shovels and dynamite before an injunction could land.
• The bridge started life as something else entirely. From 1905 to 1929 it was an aerial transfer bridge, carrying a hanging gondola car across the canal rather than lifting a roadway.
• The DeWitt-Seitz building made mattresses. It went up in 1909 as a furniture and mattress warehouse and factory, made things here until 1983, and reopened in 1985 as the marketplace that started Canal Park's second life.
• Grandma's Marathon starts near Two Harbors and ends at your front door. Runners come down Scenic 61 and London Road and finish in Canal Park on the third Saturday of June, and the district plans its year around it.
• Every winter the piers grow ice sculptures. Spray from a northeast gale freezes on the railings, the lighthouse, and the pier deck in formations that draw photographers from across the Midwest, and that walk out on the pier in those conditions is genuinely dangerous.

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