The history of Central Hillside, Duluth, Minnesota

The Central Hillside is where Duluth put the people who built Duluth. The commercial core took the flat shelf by the water because that was where the port and the rail were, and housing went up the only direction left, onto a slope steep enough that the street grid had to be imposed on it rather than fitted to it. The stock dates mostly from about 1885 to 1940 and it was built close, cheap and fast: worker cottages, gable-fronts, four-squares, and a great many buildings designed from the outset as two or three units.

The institutional layer arrived alongside the housing and it is still the neighborhood's defining feature. Churches were built within blocks of each other for communities that had arrived speaking different languages, and the grandest of them, Sacred Heart at 201 West 4th Street, served as Duluth's Roman Catholic cathedral until the function moved east to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary, completed in 1957. Sacred Heart is now a concert venue, and its own operators describe it as a landmark in Duluth's Central Hillside neighborhood.

Duluth's most significant public memorial stands at the foot of the neighborhood, at East 1st Street and North 2nd Avenue East: the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, which commemorates three Black men killed by a mob in Duluth in 1920. The organization that stewards it runs memorial tours, Juneteenth events and scholarship programs from an office on East Superior Street.

The twentieth century treated this neighborhood the way it treated inner-ring housing everywhere. Households that could buy new bought above the hill or out east, ownership fell, and a great deal of the single-family stock was cut into upper and lower units. What did not leave was the institutional density. CHUM was founded in 1973 when ten Central Hillside churches pooled resources to serve the neighborhood better, and it now runs shelter, housing, street outreach and a food shelf. The Damiano Center at 206 West 4th Street runs the largest emergency meal program in northeastern Minnesota and the largest free store in Duluth.

The most recent chapter is the medical one, and it is the biggest physical change here in decades. Essentia's Vision Northland hospital, about 942,000 square feet with 344 patient rooms and 16 operating rooms, was completed in early 2023 at a reported cost near $900 million and replaced the former St. Mary's Medical Center on the neighborhood's lower shoulder. St. Luke's sits alongside it. A neighborhood at the bottom of the city's price range now has one of the region's largest employment concentrations inside walking distance, and LISC Duluth's Hillside Revitalization Plan is the organized attempt to make that count for the people already living here.

The land at the head of the lake was Ojibwe country, ceded under treaty in the mid-nineteenth century before the city was platted.

History next door

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