The character of Downtown Superior, Wisconsin
Part of the Downtown Superior neighborhood guide. Back to the full guide.
Downtown Superior feels like a place with more room than people, which is either melancholy or full of possibility depending on the day and your temperament. The streetwall is continuous and handsome, the sidewalks are wide, and on a Tuesday afternoon in March there is not much happening on them.
The district has two distinct moods at two ends. The civic middle, around the courthouse, city hall, and the library, is busy on weekdays and empty after five. The north end of Tower, around Earth Rider and the Cedar Lounge, is the opposite: quiet by day and genuinely alive on a Friday night, with a music calendar that pulls people across the bridge.
The architecture rewards attention. Tower Avenue has cornices, transom windows, and stone detailing from a decade when Superior expected to matter enormously, and the 2014 streetscape work gave that stock a setting worth photographing. Walk it with your eyes up.
A Saturday downtown is a short list done well: coffee, the library, a walk out the Osaugie Trail to Barker's Island, a look at the SS Meteor, and a brewery in the evening. What you will not find is browsing retail, a farmers market on every corner, or the density of activity a visitor from a larger city expects from the word downtown. The right frame is a small city's main street that is partway through coming back, not a finished urban district.
Landmarks
Opened in 1892 at 1202-1208 Tower Avenue and restored in a three-year, roughly $6 million project into 15 market-rate apartments over three street-level commercial spaces. The largest historic commercial building restoration ever completed in Superior.
The rebuilt main street, reopened July 2014 with a landscaped median, period lighting, wide sidewalks, and street trees. It won the State of Wisconsin Urban Design award and a Mid America Quality of Life award.
Italianate limestone cathedral at 1111 Belknap Street, dedicated Christmas 1927, seat of the Diocese of Superior.
The county seat's courthouse and offices, in the downtown core, which is why Superior functions as the administrative center for all of Douglas County.
The city's main library, downtown.
Character next door
Immediately north, sharing the brewery district and the same 1890s building stock at a residential scale.
Central Park (Superior)East of downtown, the city's historic residential district with the substantial 1890s houses.
Billings Park (Superior)West along the river, a quieter residential neighborhood with the city's best riverfront park.
South End (South Superior)South along Tower Avenue, where the commercial strip loosens into residential blocks.
Allouez-Itasca (Superior)East past Barker's Island toward the ore docks and Wisconsin Point.