Enger Tower and Skyline Parkway

Duluth is a city built on a hillside, a long, steep escarpment rising nearly eight hundred feet above the lake over a horizontal distance of less than a mile. It is an unusual geography for a major industrial port, and it has shaped the city's character in ways that are easy to miss if you stay on the waterfront. Drive up the hill and everything changes.

The lake disappears below you. The harbor opens wide, and you can see from Wisconsin to the Aerial Lift Bridge to the long blue horizon where Superior becomes sky. Skyline Parkway follows the crest of that ridge for about twenty-eight miles through the city.

It was begun in the eighteen eighties as a carriage road designed to show off the view that Duluth's geography had accidentally provided. The road passes through residential neighborhoods, city parks, and stretches of exposed rock and birch forest that feel nothing like the industrial waterfront below. On a clear day the view from the parkway takes in a hundred miles of Lake Superior and the forested hills of Wisconsin and Michigan in the distance.

Enger Tower sits near the midpoint of the parkway, at the highest point accessible by road. It is a five-story bluestone tower built in nineteen thirty-nine with funds donated by Bert Enger, a Norwegian immigrant who made a fortune in the furniture business and gave the city a park and a tower on the hill he loved. The tower's observation deck is open to the public.

Climb it on a summer morning before the tourists arrive and you will see exactly what Bert Enger saw: a port city laid out below you like a map of American industrial ambition, and beyond it the greatest lake in the world, calm or violent depending on the weather's mood. Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha of Norway came to Duluth to dedicate the tower in nineteen thirty-nine. Duluth has always understood that its immigrant populations were part of what made it, and it has not been shy about saying so.