The history of Riverside, Duluth, Minnesota
Part of the Riverside neighborhood guide. Back to the full guide.
Riverside exists because of a war and a shipyard.
The McDougall Duluth Shipbuilding Company operated on Spring Street in 1918, building vessels during the First World War on the Spirit Lake reach of the St. Louis River. The company's name connects to Alexander McDougall, the figure most associated with Duluth shipbuilding and with the whaleback freighter design. The yard's site is now the Spirit Lake Marina, which is a neat piece of continuity: the ground has been used for boats for more than a century, in two very different ways.
That yard is the neighborhood's founding fact. Housing here dates largely from the same period onward, and the pattern of a wartime industrial employer generating a residential settlement around it is one this stretch of the river repeats. Morgan Park, a few minutes downstream, is the more famous version: a fully planned company town built by US Steel from 1913.
What followed is the arc the whole far west end shares. The wartime yard wound down, the river corridor's industrial base carried on through the middle of the century and then declined, and the neighborhoods along it settled into being small, quiet residential pockets a long way from the rest of the city.
The river itself has a second history that matters more to a buyer today. The St. Louis River estuary was heavily worked and heavily polluted through the industrial era, and it has been the subject of decades of restoration effort, much of it coordinated through the St. Louis River Alliance. The water at Riverside is in considerably better condition than it was a generation ago, and that recovery is the reason a marina and a swimming-and-paddling relationship with the river are plausible here at all.
The Munger Trail arrived on an abandoned rail corridor and changed the neighborhood's character again, this time for the better: a small river settlement with a long-distance paved trail through it is a different proposition from one without.
History next door
Northeast, where the Munger and Western Waterfront trails begin and Indian Point gives boat access.
SmithvilleSouth along the river, sharing the same Census tract and a similar owner-heavy river-corridor profile.
Morgan ParkSoutheast along the river, the 1913 US Steel company town built of concrete block.
ProctorNorth over the hill, its own school district and a walkable small-town main street.
Fond du LacSouthwest along the river, the oldest community in Duluth and even quieter.