The history of Central Park (Superior), Wisconsin
Part of the Central Park (Superior) neighborhood guide. Back to the full guide.
Central Park is the oldest platted ground in Superior and, for its first thirty years, the emptiest. The Superior City townsite was laid out in 1862 across what is now Second to Thirteenth Avenues East between East Ninth Street and the bay, part of the enormous speculative plat that Superior's founders drew in the 1850s and 1860s on the assumption that the head-of-the-lakes metropolis would be built on this side of the water.
It was not, at least not on schedule. Duluth got the railroad connections that mattered, the Panic of 1873 ended the first boom, and the Superior City plat sat with limited development for decades. That delay is the reason the neighborhood looks the way it does: when building finally came, it came all at once, into lots that had been drawn much larger than a later plat would have made them.
The 1880s revival changed everything. Renewed rail development and grain shipping brought money back to Superior, and the distinct settlements of the era, the original Superior on this east side, West Superior around the present downtown, and South Superior along Tower Avenue, consolidated into a single city charter on March 25, 1889 (City of Superior, accessed 2026-08-13). The decade that followed filled Central Park with the houses that define it.
The best illustration of the era stands at the neighborhood's harbor-side edge. Martin Pattison, a lumber and mining baron who served as Superior's mayor, built Fairlawn between 1889 and 1891 for roughly $150,000: 42 rooms, 15,000 square feet, 12 fireplaces, and a four-story turret. Pattison is also why Wisconsin's tallest waterfall is public land, having bought the Black River property to stop a hydroelectric dam and given it to the state. After his death in 1918 his widow Grace donated Fairlawn to the Superior Children's Home and Refuge Association, and it operated as an orphanage for decades before becoming a museum.
What happened next is what happened to the whole city: growth stopped. Superior's population peaked mid-century and drifted down, and Central Park settled into its long second act as a stable, quiet, architecturally rich residential district in a city that stopped expanding around it. The houses stayed. The prices never ran the way Duluth's did. That is the situation a buyer walks into today.
History next door
A mile west, the Tower Avenue commercial core with the breweries, the Anchor Bar, and the civic buildings.
North End (Superior)Northwest toward the port, older working-class stock and the brewery district at a lower price.
Allouez-Itasca (Superior)East along the bay toward the ore docks and Wisconsin Point.
South End (South Superior)South along Tower Avenue, more postwar housing and a lower entry price.
Billings Park (Superior)The west end of the city on the St. Louis River, the other quiet residential neighborhood with a signature park.