07/07/2026
Summit Avenue stretches nearly five miles through St. Paul, and it holds the distinction of being the longest continuous stretch of Victorian residential architecture left in America. Most cities lost blocks like this to urban renewal decades ago. St. Paul kept theirs intact, and today it stands as a rare, nearly untouched record of Gilded Age wealth.
The avenue's history traces back to the 1850s, when St. Paul's business elite started building mansions along the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Railroad money built most of it. Timber money built the rest. By the late 1800s, Summit Avenue had become the address for anyone who mattered in Minnesota business and politics, a physical display of who had made it and who hadn't.
James J. Hill's mansion anchors the street's reputation more than any other building on it. The railroad tycoon behind the Great Northern Railway built a 36,000 square foot stone mansion in 1891 that still dominates the block today, a monument to the kind of fortune that only a handful of Gilded Age industrialists ever accumulated. Down the street, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent parts of his childhood and young adulthood in a rowhouse on Summit, and later returned to finish writing This Side of Paradise in a rented room just blocks from where Hill's mansion still stood.
The architecture along the avenue reads like a survey course in nineteenth century design. Romanesque Revival mansions with heavy stone arches sit next to Queen Anne homes dripping with turrets and wraparound porches. Georgian Revival brick facades line up beside French Second Empire mansards, each style representing whatever the owner's architect thought looked most impressive at the time.
What makes Summit Avenue rare today isn't just the individual buildings, it's the fact that the whole stretch survived largely intact while so many similar avenues in other cities got demolished for highways, parking lots, or postwar development. St. Paul chose preservation instead, and Summit Avenue now functions as a walkable timeline of exactly how a Gilded Age fortune expressed itself in brick, stone, and turret, one block after another.
