Duluth Heights

By Kelly Busche kbusche@duluthnews.com

One of Duluth’s largest neighborhoods, Duluth Heights, sits atop the hills of the city.

Its lengthy corridor of numerous retail shops along Miller Trunk Highway serves as the area’s main shopping destination.

But on its southern point, a different type of activity is available: Enger Park Golf Course stretches across the neighborhood. Adjacent to the public golf course is Enger Tower. The five-story tall tower, built in 1939, offers astonishing views of downtown Duluth, Canal Park and Lake Superior.

From its southern side, the neighborhood stretches northeast to the Marshall School, up to an area just north of West Arrowhead Road, and then south to the Miller Hill Mall. Numerous parks, like Duluth Heights Park, Web Woods and Pennell Park, dot the neighborhood.

Miller Hill Mall’s 1973 opening transformed the neighborhood into a “regional shopping hub,” Jim Skurla, a University of Minnesota Duluth economist, said in a 2013 interview with the News Tribune. While some malls have faced closure as online shopping dominates the market,

The neighborhood’s other retail spaces include T.J Maxx, Cub Foods, PetSmart, Best Buy, Home Depot and Target, among numerous others.

The initial work for the hill-topping neighborhood came in the late 1800s, when the Highland Improvement Company, which owned over 1,000 acres along Skyline Parkway, had a goal to develop the area into a neighborhood.

A prospectus from the company said in the Duluth Daily Reader that the neighborhood was “one of the most wonderfully picturesque and unique boulevards in the world,” according to Zenith City Press.

To access the neighborhood, an incline railway connected downtown Duluth to housing developments in Duluth Heights. It ran from 1891 through 1939, when it was scrapped as automobiles became a popular mode of transportation.

Now, U.S. Highway 53 and Central Entrance feed the lower neighborhoods into Duluth Heights.