Harbors

In June of 1981, Debbie was kind enough to deliver me back to my summer job assigning freshmen to rooms. We took the long way around, following the south shore of Lake Superior from end to end and doing some other exploring. When our trip brought us to this old ship, I got pretty excited.... This is the last surviving whaleback laker , a tanker named Meteor. She was built as the Frank Rockefeller in 1896; later she was known as South Park before becoming Meteor in 1942. She was an active ship until 1969, and has been functioning as a museum in Superior, Wisconsin, since 1972. I hear she's deteriorating and may not last much longer. Should that happen I'll miss her. Taken during a harbor tour out of Duluth, approximately 1990.

This is the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Duluth Docks ore loading complex in Duluth, Minnesota, around 1990. Taken from a cruise ship around the Duluth/Superior harbor. Better LARGE . Not bad for a cheap camera.

Since the long boom tends to interfere with the loading chutes, Thayer gets hers out of the way. And we get a close look.... Another photo from that tour I took of Duluth harbor around 1990. (Dunno who the people are.)

One last photo from this roll of film: Paul Thayer from stem to stern at Missabe Railroad's Duluth dock; approximately 1990.

Best LARGE ; this one's not grainy. Another Skyline Drive photo, with baseball and the waterfront. Two of my favorite things. (And a close look reveals railroad tracks, weaving the place together.) Here's the Duluth ballpark, with the Hallett Dock behind. The long Missabe (CN, now) ore docks are just out of the picture, to the left. If you look at old pictures of the Missabe Duluth docks, you discover that there's always been a ball yard at this location.

Superior Harbor. Like most of the photos from this cruise, this one had some exposure issues; fixing those made things pretty grainy. I do like the composition, though.

Thought I'd play with Bibble's Andy plugin a little. This one's fairly conventional--imitating Tri-X printed on Agfa Multicontrast paper. Superior, Wisconsin.

The same photo; continuing my Bibble/Andy experiments with a well-composed but ill-exposed photo. This one's as though it was Agfapan 25 (ha! way too grainy) printed on Kodak Portra; I've also made some effort to brighten things up a bit. This brings out detail on the elevator, but costs detail in other places--particularly the clouds in the sky. A look at the map reveals that my lens has dramatically foreshortened the view, hiding the fact that the elevator's at the far end of a deep slip, most of a half-mile away. But the effect's quite dramatic. Superior Harbor, again, of course.

Great Lakes Towing's Duluth-based fleet. One of many they've stashed at strategic points around the Great Lakes.

The Missabe (now CN) Two Harbors ore docks, from across the harbor. With a gull. I wasn't happy with this photio, so I made it look old.

Think I took this in August of 1990, likely with my Chinon Genesis III. Never really liked that camera, but it took some good photographs for me. All that gear in the background is the Escanaba ore dock's shiploader. In the distance, you can sort of see Lake Michigan.

"Mon, May 30, 1937. Taken from old 23rd Street Bridge. Steamer Schoellkopf Jr down bound." I believe this to be a Bay City location, but would welcome a correction. Looks like the "Old 23rd Street Bridge" would be where Lafayette crosses the river nowadays; the existing bridge was completed in 1938 . There was apparently a temporary bridge at this site in 1937, which evidently replaced a 23rd Street Bridge built in 1902. This 1918 map suggests that Mr. Borucki's was an idiosyncratic usage. (By the way, the 1902 bridge was also a replacement, for a still earlier bridge.) This is the first of seven photographs Mr. Borucki took of this ship. Schoellkopf was originally a straight-decker, built in 1907 as Hugh Kennedy by American Ship Building in Lorain for Buffalo Steamships. Sold to American Steamship Co in 1922 and renamed Schoellkopf. She was part of the Erie Sand fleet late in her life. Converted to self-unloader in 1933, repowered in 1950 (steam turbine) and 1975 (coal to oil), with bow thruster added in 1960. Made last shipment in 1979; dismantled in Italy in 1980. In 1967 this ship damaged the I-75 drawbridge at Zilwaukee, forcing traffic reroutes for several days. Jacob Frederick Schoellkopf, Jr. was head of Buffalo-based National Aniline and Chemical Company, a major producer of dyes and other chemical products. Borucki's Lakers

Marietta, Ohio, settled in 1788, was the first place incorporated under the then-new Northwest Ordinance and therefore has a claim to be Ohio's oldest town. It's a pleasant little burg facing the Ohio River. This was the town's cargo landing. Still is, I suppose, but apparently not getting heavy use. There's no equipment for handling a significant load at the waterfront, though the Corps of Engineers has a heavy crane a couple blocks away on the Muskingum River.

"Looking from bow to stern on S.S. Calcite showing open hatches. Docked ft of 17th St. Bay City, Mich. Thurs. Sept 1 1938" Second of four Calcite photos; the ship's history is sketched with the first . A truly remarkable photo, this one, showing not only the deck detail but some features of the working Bay City waterfront. Borucki's Lakers

These two shacks--they house charter fishing boat offices--were visible from our hotel room last weekend. Both were closed for the season, of course, though a guy I took for Silver King's captain stopped by and sat on the dock, watching South Haven's harbor, for an hour or so. Presumably he was wishing he was out on the Lake.

We spent three days in South Haven. It rained, it snowed, it sleeted. On Lake Michigan the waves were breaking over the North Pier. And always-- always --there were folks out fishing in the harbor. Dedication, folks.

We could see two retired fish tugs from our room in South Haven: Evelyn S, which has been restored on the grounds of the Michigan Maritime Museum, and Elsie J, which was moored by the museum's dock. Elsie J's now doing tourist work --she hosts sunset cruises, ferries divers out to wrecks, and is available for charters. South Haven had a commercial fishing community into the 1970s, but there seems to be no website which explicitly discusses that; instead, many websites mention specific boats or incidents. I'll not try to fill that gap, here, but it would be a fine project for someone. These days the only commercial fishing out of the port seems to be fishing charters, which is a very different business.

South Haven's harbor used to be a conventional port. It had open areas where self-unloading freighters could dump their bulk cargoes, and warehouses which protected incoming package freight and outgoing blueberries. At the end of our hotel's pretty alleyway is a tiny jewelry shop named "The Perfect Setting." The shop lives in an apparently ancient brick building which likely began as some sort of harbor office. Perfect Setting's wall shows an old (1960ish) aerial photograph of South Haven. Of the harborfront buildings shown in that photo, only two seem to have survived into the 21st century: Perfect Setting itself, and this large, also repurposed, structure.