Photo, left side shows the original rail approach leading down to the Lower Harbor. The right side is as it appears today. (Photo credit–Marquette Regional History Center (left) Jim Koski (right))

By JIM KOSKI

Marquette Regional History Center

Special to the Journal

MARQUETTE — One of the shortest streets in the city of Marquette is downtown’s Main Street, running a mere two blocks from the Commons to the Fish Dock.

It’s also a street that holds three different secrets.

The first secret is readily apparent to anyone who’s been in Marquette. Despite its lofty name, Main Street is in no way Marquette’s main street. That honor first went to Superior Street (now called Baraga Avenue), and eventually shifted, as businesses moved there, up to Washington Street.

And it never became Marquette’s main street because of Main Street’s second secret: Until the 1910s, the street itself didn’t exist.

Downtown Marquette was shaped by two things, fires and railroads. The railroad lines that ran through the area were fed by the main set of tracks that ran into the city from the west end of Marquette County (what is now today’s Iron Ore Heritage Trail).

That main line first ran down to what was called the Iron Mountain Dock (the pilings of which now hold the fish dock). Because there was quite an elevation drop in the final quarter mile of the line, a gradual decline had to be built into the tracks, which necessitated constructing what was basically a tunnel under Front Street so the trains safely could make it through down to the dock.

If you look at pictures of Front Street from the 1860s to the early 1900s, you’ll see a wall where East Main Street now sits, to protect pedestrians from falling onto the tracks below. Even after train traffic shifted to docks being built to the south of the original Iron Mountain dock, the “tunnel” remained.

However, with the construction of a new passenger train station along the rail line, it was decided to fill in that particular rail approach to Lower Harbor and turn it into a new, two block street.

It was given the name Main Street.

Shortly after Main Street itself came into existence, its third secret was also constructed, what some people called “the building in the middle of the street.”

The then Marquette Light & Power Department had a store in the Bacon Block on South Front Street where they sold appliances and other gadgets powered by electricity, the thought being that if people had those devices in their homes, the department could make money off the electricity being used.

Changing needs and changing times led to the closure of that store in the 1910s, but the need for a downtown office led to construction of another structure, built a few dozen feet away in a location that was quite out of the ordinary, right in the middle of Main Street, between the Vierling Building and what’s now commonly called the Upfront Building.

The long, narrow building unintentionally recalled the train cars that used to run under the now-paved street. Aside from several offices, the building also had public restrooms for passersby who needed to use the facilities.

In 1931, the newly formed Marquette Chamber of Commerce, needing space, moved into the structure, which then became known as “the Chamber Building.”

For the next two and a half decades, the Marquette Chamber of Commerce conducted business from the building in the middle of Main Street. By the late 1950s it needed bigger facilities and constructed the structure that still sits on top of Lakeside Park. No longer needed, the “building in the middle of the street” was torn down, allowing cars to park for the first time on the eastern portion of Main Street. It is still, however, fondly recalled by city residents who frequented the downtown area in the 1940s and 1950s.

Today, it’s home almost exclusively to parking lots and parking spaces, but since the founding of Marquette, the two block section of downtown we now call Main Street has had its fair share of what we might now consider secrets.

Stories like this will be the subject of a program called “Legends & Lore II-Even More Legendary,” a fundraiser presented by Jack Deo and Jim Koski to benefit the Marquette Regional History Center.

It takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23rd at Kaufman Auditorium. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. More information is available by calling 906-226-3571 or by visiting www.marquettehistory.org.