The history of Cody, Duluth, Minnesota

Cody's history is West Duluth's history, and West Duluth was built to work.

The western end of the city grew in the late nineteenth century around the docks, the rail yards and the industry along the St. Louis Bay, and around the Proctor railroad yard just over the hill. The neighborhoods that formed on the slope above the commercial flats housed the people who worked in both. Cody's build window, roughly 1900 to 1970, tracks that economy through its long working plateau.

The street the neighborhood is named for runs through the middle of it, and the ravine does the rest of the shaping. Keene Creek drops through here on its way down to the bay, and the street pattern breaks around it rather than crossing it, which is why Cody's grid is less regular than the flats below and why several blocks end where the ravine begins.

The neighborhood never had a commercial core of its own, and that is not an accident or a decline. Spirit Valley was already immediately downhill, functioning as West Duluth's main street, and there was no reason to build a second one on a slope two minutes above it. Cody was residential from the start and has stayed that way.

What did sit inside the neighborhood was a congregation. Elim Lutheran at 6101 Cody Street remains an ELCA congregation today, confirmed current in the Northeastern Minnesota Synod directory (accessed 2026-08-13), and it is one of the few institutional buildings in the neighborhood.

The larger arc is the one every West Duluth neighborhood shares: an industrial base that sustained the west end for decades, a long decline through the second half of the twentieth century, and a citywide reputation formed in those decades that has outlasted the conditions that produced it. What is left in Cody is what was always here, which is housing.

History next door

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