Summit Avenue: Fitzgerald Wrote Here

Summit Avenue: Fitzgerald Wrote Here

In 1855 Edward Duffield Neill, pastor of House of Hope Presbyterian Church, built his sturdy limestone villa by the muddy path that ran along the Mississippi River bluff upstream from town. In doing so, he started a game of fashionable one-upmanship that would create one of the most enduring boulevards of Victorian architecture in the country. His was the first house along St. Paul's sumptuous Summit Avenue. The homes along tree-lined Summit and nearby residential streets were once the mansions of the city's elite, monuments to the Gilded Age. Stretching from the Cathedral of St. Paul westward eventually to the Mississippi River, Summit was the place to see and be seen, on flashy trotters and riding horses pulling surreys and broughams. In fact, Neill's house, as fashionable as it was, would not survive. It was razed in 1886 to make room for the grim, grandiose mansion of James J. Hill.

During the mid-20th century, the neighborhood fell on hard times. "During the postwar decades, Summit Avenue was in great danger of disappearing, as have so many other fashionable boulevards when their moment of glory has passed," wrote historian Ernest R. Sandeen. Many of the homes were split into apartments and were left to deteriorate. The neighborhood underwent a revival in the last 30 years, however, and has recaptured much of its former style. The east (the oldest and grandest) end of the avenue was designated a historic district in the 1970s. In the 1990s, the remaining stretch clear to the Mississippi was designated as well. The avenue and neighborhoods on its flanks are a great place to tour by car, bike, or on foot.

The Cathedral of St. Paul, at the east end of Summit, looks to the Capitol and the downtown, separated from each by a gulf of freeways and entry ramps, as if contemplating the separation of church from state and all things secular. The Cathedral sprung from the vision of Archbishop John Ireland. E. L. Masqueray designed it. Completed in 1915, the Cathedral was clad with St. Cloud granite. Its copper dome soars to more than 300 feet. Like the dome of the Capitol across the way, it suggests Michelangelo's St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. The space inside is huge: the building can seat 3,000. Neither Ireland nor Masqueray lived to see completion of its interior in 1953.

West and across Summit is the James J. Hill House, built in 1891 by the transportation baron who built the Great Northern Railway to the West Coast. The largest and one of the most depressingly impressive private residences in the Midwest, this looming, Richardsonian Romanesque structure is clad in black-stained red sandstone. Its interior is decorated with carved woodwork, stained glass, tiled fireplaces, cut-glass chandeliers, and a skylight lighting the art gallery. Said Hill to the architects, "I want very little stained or leaded glass, but I want it good." Showing the same determination to control the work on this project as he did on many in his life and business, Hill fired the architects part way through the project and hired a new firm to finish the house. When complete, the 36,000-square-foot mansion had 22 fireplaces and its own barn, power plant, and mushroom cave. It cost nearly $1 million to build in an era when stonecutters earned $3.50 a day and wood carvers up to $1 an hour. The fuel bill for January 1894 was $449, when coal cost $4 a ton. When he moved his family, he razed the former house, a large, beautiful and still-new Italianate three-story in Lowertown. He told his daughter Clara that he feared the neighborhood was deteriorating, and "could not bear to drive by here, day after day, and see milk bottles in the windows." Hill lived in his mansion till he died in 1916. Hill's daughters bequeathed the building to the archdiocese. For the next 53 years, the mansion served as school convent, college, and conference center. In 1978 the Minnesota Historical Society acquired the building. Today, the society holds art exhibits, concerts, and guided tours there. 240 Summit Avenue; 651-297-2555.

The private house at 312 Summit, built in 1858, is the oldest house still standing along the avenue. A little farther west, at 432 Summit, is perhaps the most striking and beautiful house along the avenue, the Italianate Livingston-Burbank-Griggs villa, built in 1862 of gray limestone by Vermonter James Burbank, who made his money in river shipping and a stagecoach line. Rooms were finished with whole interiors imported from France and Italy.

Summit might be known as authors' row. Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis lived briefly at 516 Summit. But the writer most closely identified with the avenue is F. Scott Fitzgerald. He grew up near Summit, at 481 Laurel (private). In the summer of 1919, as he rewrote This Side of Paradise, the book that would launch his career, the 22-year-old Fitzgerald rented an apartment in the brownstone row house at 599 Summit. The author described the brownstone as "a house below the average on a street above the average." Yet he could refer to the avenue as "a museum of American architectural failures." Fitzgerald, never accepted by Summit Avenue gentry, remained forever ambivalent about the wealth around him.

Generally speaking, to the north of Summit is Ramsey Hill and to the south is Crocus Hill. Ramsey is older, with a mix of Queen Anne and other Victorian-style homes, many beautifully restored; Crocus is slightly newer, though perhaps more exclusive. The heart of Ramsey Hill is at Western and Selby where stylish bars and restaurants like W. A. Frost & Co. (see page 331) now occupy renovated buildings. (A young Fitzgerald used to pop in to the old Frost Co. pharmacy for smokes and Cokes.) One essential oddity: the St. Paul Curling Club, 470 Selby Avenue; 651-224-7408. The Scottish game of curling combines elements of many sports in an absurd whole: players appear to be playing shuffleboard on ice with slightly squat bowling balls with handles (called "stones"). With brooms they sweep the ice in the path of each stone to cause the stone to curve or to help speed it to its target.

Back on Summit, just east of Lexington Avenue, is the three-story English Tudor Governor's Residence. Built in 1910 as a private residence for lawyer and lumber baron Horace Hills Irvine, it was offered to the state in 1965. On the grounds is Paul Granlund's Garden Memorial to Vietnam vets. 1006 Summit.