Lincoln Park, an emerging neighborhood in the city of Duluth, stretches from West Superior Street to Skyline Parkway. With its own business district, Lincoln Park hosts many of Duluth’s favorite local businesses, most of which are in the Lincoln Park Business Group.

The Lincoln Park Business Group has been around since the 1930s. It is a 501 (c)3 nonprofit that is membership based, but promotes any business in Lincoln Park.

The Lincoln Park Business Group logo. Photo by Madison Hunter

Julia Mattson is the Executive Director for the business group. She is the sole employee for the organization and works with 11 other board members.

“Our mission statement is ‘strengthening Lincoln Park businesses,’” Mattson said.

One of the ways the business group helps strengthen businesses is by making the area around the business district a comfortable and vibrant place for people.

The group does this by having a “Beautification Committee” that partners with the City of Duluth and local artists to add murals around the area, fix up parks and add outdoor seating for customers in the business district. With COVID-19, these kinds of projects help businesses by creating additional seating outside.

Mattson said that the Beautification Committee allows people to still enjoy the neighborhood in the midst of COVID-19.“Somebody can go get a sandwich at Corktown or, OMC, or an ice cream cone at Love Creamery and go sit at the park that was redone across the street,” Mattson said.

Mattson promotes businesses and their product by spreading the word to other businesses throughout the group. But she thinks that biggest way to promote a business is through the Lincoln Park Business Groups Facebook page.

Businesses in the area work with Mattson on what she can post and share on the Facebook page to help that business or person out.

One example of this is Tiersa Wodash and her business, Brick and Mortar. Wodash is an architect and her mission is to assist small businesses in imagining and visualizing their storefront.

Wodash reached out to Mattson about a resource she had developed to help businesses plan out their spacing in accordance to COVID-19, asking Mattson to promote this on the Lincoln Park Business Group’s Facebook page for other businesses to see.

“What I created was a toolkit to help businesses think through their processes,” Wodash explains about her COVID-19 package she sells.

She had people reach out to her directly because of a Facebook post that Mattson had shared on the Lincoln Park Business Groups page.

The storefront of Duluth Folk School and Dovetail Cafe & Marketplace. Photo by Madison Hunter

Two businesses specifically in Lincoln Park that utilized this were the Duluth Folk School and Duluth Pottery. The toolkit gives businesses the resources and ideas on how they can reimagine their business to adhere to the COVID-19 social distancing guidelines.

The storefront of Duluth Pottery in Lincoln Park. Photo by Madison Hunter

Wodash has been an architect in Duluth for over 10 years and started her own business in late January. She works from her home office in Lincoln Park, which she says helped her business stay afloat when COVID-19 hit.

Wodash thinks the hardest part of COVID-19 was getting her name out and letting people know she was on her own; that she was Brick and Mortar, “I felt like my connections to reach out to people to let them who I am and what I am doing as an independent architect [were] cut off.”

Wodash did not plan to build an online presence on social media for the first year. She wanted to focus on getting jobs and didn’t think having social media was as important at the time.

“I really had to shift gears and build that presence online,” Woodash explains about her social media presence. “Once you start that, you can’t stop. It was a real change of gears in how I was thinking…. about approaching my businesses and how I was going to reach potential customers.”

But, with a community like Lincoln Park and with the help of the Lincoln Park Business Group, Wodash was able to obtain customers virtually and it helped her businesses immensely.

Lincoln Park is a community within the larger Duluth community. Mattson talked about how the businesses work together to make the area a great place for the community to come together and share their lives with each other.

“Lincoln Park is not a huge neighborhood, but what’s nice is that it’s big enough to have a name, but it’s small enough where people like on a summer morning people are out on the street having their morning coffee and chatting and laughing and it’s got that neighborhood feel.”

Wodash’s business can be found here.

Lincoln Park Business Group lends helping hand, builds strong business community