Lincoln Park Braces for Three-Year West Superior Street Reconstruction Starting This Summer

Dozens of Lincoln Park businesses crowded into a community meeting this week to hear what three years of construction on West Superior Street will actually look like, after the Lincoln Park Business Group gathered local owners and the city's senior engineer to walk through a phased rebuild stretching from West Michigan Street to Carlton Street.

Alex Popp, Senior Engineer for the City of Duluth, laid out a three-phase timeline at the meeting. The first phase targets the intersections at 27th Avenue West and Michigan Street, with work set to begin as soon as late May through early July 2026. Subsequent phases will move through the remainder of Michigan Street, 18th Avenue West, 24th Avenue West, and the Carlton Street intersection, with the full project expected to wrap up sometime between May and November 2028. A city spokesperson has also confirmed construction is expected to begin in 2026, though an earlier Northern News Now report from 2024 had projected a summer 2025 start; the City of Duluth has not publicly reconciled that discrepancy.

The $25 million in federal transportation grant dollars that is funding the project was secured in 2022. The scope goes well beyond repaving: Popp described plans for watermain construction, storm sewer replacement, sidewalk repaving, fixes to foundations of older buildings along the corridor, new bikeways, modernized lighting, upgraded parking infrastructure, fiber optics for stronger broadband, and the addition of green space. Fox21 has reported the work will be comparable in scale to the Superior Street reconstruction previously completed in downtown Duluth.

Popp explained the core problem driving the rebuild: "Going out onto the street today, you can see some very clear drainage problems that are occurring out there. There's a lot of poor pavement condition out there. But then also just looking at it, the road was constructed as a state highway prior to I-35's construction, so it still retains a lot of that feature of a highway." He added that the corridor's identity has fundamentally shifted in recent years: "The business district has kind of taken off, there's been a lot of push for restaurants, smaller stores, places for people to kind of linger. The road doesn't really support that, so we're looking to reconstruct the road more focused on the current use of it."

Duluth Transportation Planner James Gittemeier made the same point in earlier reporting, saying of the street: "This is what the street is now, it's not a highway anymore for fast-moving cars. Now it's a place where people are gonna want to go and be."

Not everyone is convinced the city will execute the vision. On social media, the downtown Superior Street project served as an immediate reference point for skeptics. "You know the city of Duluth will just screw it up. Just like they screwed up Superior Street in downtown," wrote Gary Fridge Gronlund in response to the WDIO coverage. Carl Bock put it more bluntly: "3 years 🤣🤣…..well they already killed off downtown starting with that project, why not kill off the rest of the business and they all will move over the hill." Jim Madill added: "What great city planning. Revitalize an area and kill it with a 3 year project. What a bunch of geniuses."

Hannah Bourgault, marketing coordinator for Bent Paddle Brewing Co., which sits along the corridor, captured the split sentiment many businesses are navigating. "I think it's exciting that Superior Street will have this new vitality within it. It'll be great to have better infrastructure for parking and for walking, and it'll be nice to have a green space in there," she said. "It is also a little nerve-wracking to imagine what it will be like for the next however long this project takes and imagining how we get people to our businesses."

BusinessNorth reported that a Thursday meeting would specifically address how Lincoln Park companies can support one another across the three construction years, in addition to covering traffic impacts and detour plans. Each phase is expected to include specific detour and pedestrian access arrangements, though no specific routes have been made public. The official project length has been reported as 1.65 miles by Northern News Now and as nearly 2 miles by Fox21; the City of Duluth has not issued an official corridor measurement.