Since 1840, St. Paul has taken on different identities: frontier hamlet, steamboat burg, provincial capital, and railroad boomtown. These transformations have left their marks all over town. Nowhere can one see them better than on Cathedral Hill, which was known in day’s past as St. Anthony Hill.
At the Hill District’s beginning, you will find remnants of the empire-building years of the late 19th-century. Here lived people of wealth, ambition, and ostentation. The site offers one of the city’s best views: to the north, the Capitol; to the east, downtown below and Dayton’s Bluff in the distance; and to the southeast, Cherokee Heights. The observer blessed with imagination may see it as it was before transformed by the human hand: the tree-lined river gorge, the great turn of the river to the south, low hills rising on the left, white cliffs, sandbars in the channel, and wetlands and woods where downtown now stands.
As St. Paul expanded, the wealthy desired a location atop the bluffs, as a grand view of the river valley, a place above the industrial air and close proximity to their businesses below. Initially, only the wealthy had the means to transport themselves up the bluff. But later, stagecoach and streetcar routes afforded middle and working class citizens a means of traveling from work below to their homes up on the hill.
Beginning in 1890, the three streetcar lines ranged west from St. Anthony Hill along the parallel Grand Avenue, Rondo Avenue, and Selby Avenue. When the Selby streetcar route was developed, it ran every 3 minutes at peak times, along a newly established commercial route. This period marked the greatest boom in residential and commercial construction. However, 1922 ordinance prevented the building of multi-family dwellings thus preserving much of the original appearance to this day.
This area also included the Rondo neighborhood which sat north, where Highway 94 is today. The highways construction destroyed the vibrant African American community which had survived almost independently. Forced migrations scattered residents throughout the more depressed areas of Selby and University. Recovering from varying degrees of urban flight and red-lining, Selby is an area of resurgence, with an influx of new businesses and home ownership.
As you tour the area, you’ll visit the grand Roman Catholic Cathedral, completed in 1915. A visit here is akin to traveling back to ancient Rome and truly one of the greatest architectural marvels in the United States.
Although modest in comparison, a short trip down the hill from the Cathedral are some of Cass Gilbert's most exemplary works in religious architecture. Across from Boyd park on Selby is the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church and four blocks northwest of there is Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church - the first of which houses one of the longest-established congregations in the city. Other prominent buildings in the area in between the two churches on Selby and Western are the Dacotah Building, once the W.A. Frost Pharmacy, and the Blair Flats, which was once Hotel Albion, then the Angus Hotel.
Around Summit, you’ll also see such structures as the Governor’s Mansion, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace home, Stuart Driscoll house, the oldest on Summit, and even the rare remnants of the streetcar rails. The new light rail harbors a return to the connectedness of this area to a larger community, and the great potential that it brings.
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]]>The electric streetcar service began on Selby Avenue in 1890. St. Anthony Hill, however, proved to be a vexatious impediment; the steep grade made for slow and hard going travel, especially in winter. At about the same time that work began on the Cathedral of St. Paul, the city began digging a solution to the streetcar problem: the Selby Tunnel. It opened in 1907, taking people from the base of St. Anthony Hill beneath Selby Avenue to an opening near Nina Street. Streetcars used the tunnel until their demise in the early 1950s. The tunnel closed in 1959, but its lower entrance can still be seen, just down the slope from the Cathedral.
As St. Paul boomed in the late 19th-century, housing and commerce marched west across what must have seemed to developers an endlessly spacious prairie. Three streetcar lines ranged west from St. Anthony Hill along the parallel Grand Avenue, Rondo Avenue, and Selby Avenue. People filled the neighborhoods, and businesses followed the people, clustering along the three lines. Each of these commercial corridors had its own character. Selby Avenue businesses catered to people’s daily needs: food, clothing, and services.
By 1930, roughly the peak of streetcar commerce, there were nearly a hundred businesses on Selby between Western Avenue and Lexington Parkway—groceries, confectioneries, cobblers, moviehouses, butchers, pharmacies, and dressmakers. The Selby-Dale corner was the hub: at one time there were twenty-six businesses on a single block. This intersection was also a center of Jewish commerce: Proprietors named Levy, Cohen, Braufman, Eisenberg, Herman, and Katz ran stores there.
]]>The building at the southeast corner of the site, finished in 1863, is one of the city's oldest, and the oldest outside of downtown. The story goes back even further, to St. Paul's second decade.
In 1851 four nuns of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet arrived in St. Paul – then a muddy hamlet at best – and opened a school in what had been the log chapel that gave the city its name. Among their first pupils was Mary Mehegan, the future Mrs. James J. Hill.
When the school moved to St. Anthony Hill (now Cathedral Hill) in 1863, it was considered so far from downtown that it became a boarding school rather than a day school. Only when the city has grown around it did it become a day school again – for girls only – in 1905. St. Joseph's received an astounding guest in 1879; according to the centennial history of St. Joseph's, the entire body of St. Irinaeus, retrieved from the catacombs of Rome, was interred beneath the altar. (Another version of the facts has it that his remains were destroyed in France by Huguenots in 1562.)
The second most famous resident of St. Joseph's was the nun known as Mother Seraphim, who as Provincial Superior of the order lived there from 1882 to 1930. Mother Seraphim, founder of the College (now University) of St. Catherine, was also sister to Archbishop John Ireland. A high-achieving family.
Those with a sense of history may see in St. Joseph's a symbol of the tradition of Roman Catholic education in St. Paul, one still strong today.
As one can easily see, the school was augmented twice in its original style. The central building went up in 1877 and the large addition to the north in 1931. The school closed in 1971. The Protestant Christ's Household of Faith bought has used the place as a school and living quarters since 1976.
]]>The first stop of the westbound Selby Avenue streetcar after emerging from the tunnel was at the corner of Selby and Western. It made that corner desirable as a business address. And there was a time in the late 19th century when prosperous people, sometimes after their children had grown, chose to live in residential hotels – the most famous of which was the Aberdeen, also at the Selby/Western intersection.
The italianate Blair Flats went up in 1887 at a cost of $300,000, about $5 million in today's money. It became a residential hotel, the Albion, in 1893. When streetcar magnate Thomas Lowry bought it in 1911, it became the Angus and kept that name till its closing in 1971.
The world changed in the meantime. The once-fashionable neighborhood developed pockets of decay; houses that had once been mansions could be had for a dollar. The Angus, once a symbol of prosperity, became a reproachful reminder of a seemingly irretrievable past. A visitor in the early 1970s would have seen a grimy hulk awaiting the wrecking ball.
But the success of W.A. Frost across the street, and the early stirrings of preservation and gentrification, brought a different destiny. The Angus reopened in 1985 as a mixed-use complex of apartments, offices, and retail and remains so today. The best place to get a sense of the original interior is in the basement, where you will find graceful brick arches and the foundation stones of Platteville limestone, St. Paul's original building material. The exterior has been beautifully restored. The Angus has done the full circle as a neighborhood symbol – first of growth, then decline, and now rebirth.
]]>St. Paul began as a steamboat town, but that era lasted barely 30 years. Railroads, and the boom in population and prosperity that they brought, made St. Paul into a city. As the city outgrerw the downtown bowl, those with means moved up, literally, to higher ground and away from the clatter and smoke of the riverfront. Money follows money, so as people came to Cathedral Hill, businesses followed.
The Richardsonian Romanesque Dacotah builing went up in 1889 at a cost of $70,000. The following year the Newfoundland-born, New York educated W.A. Frost arrived in the city and set up a pharmacy downtown. He moved the business to the Dacotah a few years later. Frost had a long and distinguised career and was one of the creators of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. He operated the business and lived in the neighborhood until his death in 1930.
The pharmacy carried on for another 20 years, under Oscar Nordrum, but closed in 1950. The Cathedral Hill area went into a long decline, with aging buildings, little new investment, and, starting around 1970, a rapid decline in population. Many fine old buildings around the city tumbled, and this one might have too.
But where many saw blight, a few saw opportunity. The Rupp family bought the Dacotah in 1974 and opened – an act of faith! – W.A. Frost bar and restaurant in 1975. This was one of the first, and bravest, acts of private preservation in the city. It turned out to be a harbinger of the revival of Cathedral Hill as a whole. W.A. Frost has thrived now for nearly 40 years. The interior is wonderfully restored, with period fixtures and furnishings brought in from near and far.
]]>Built in 1886, the Swedenborgian Church was designed by Cass Gilbert, the St. Paul architect who later became famous for the Minnesota State Capitol, the Woolworth Building in New York, and the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. This was an early commission (he was 37 years old), during what he called his “house building”period.
The design was intended to reflect the tenets of the Swedenborgian faith. Emmanuel Swedenborg, 1688 – 1772 -- was a Swedish scientist and self-taught theologian who experienced a series of revelations over the course of decades. He received a different version of the Trinity, with Christ as both Creator and Redeemer; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost comprised three aspects of His nature. Christ's Second Coming had already occurred – in His revelation to Swedenborg in 1747.
Objects in the physical world have spiritual correspondences. The fieldstone foundation of the Virginia Street church, unique among Gilbert creations, “represents the enduring faith in Jesus Christ, the Divine/Human who as God incarnate is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.” The simplicity of the interior, little changed since Gilbert's time, reflects , in the words of the congregation, “a sense of spiritual harmony.”
Swedenborg never established a church, but his followers in England did so, 16 years after his death. The first American congregation arose in 1792. There are believed to be about 10,000 Swedenborgian parishioners in the world today. William R. Marshall, governor of Minnesota from 1866 to 1870, founded the Virginia Street congregation, first in 1860 and again in 1873, making this one of the longest-established congregations in the city.
The addition to the east end of the building from 1922 was designed by St. Paul's second-most-famous architect, Clarence Johnson.
The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
]]>Completed in 1915, The Cathedral of St. Paul was the creation of Archbishop John Ireland, architect Emmanuel Masqueray, and the mostly anonymous artists, craftsmen, masons, stonecutters, laborers, and citizen contributors. It is 306 feet high with a recently restored copper dome in the Beaux Arts style.
The severe exterior of Minnesota Rockville granite, belies a glorious interior of soaring spaces, statuary and metalwork, stained glass, and a display of rare marbles from around the world. The interior dome is 175 feet high and 96 feet in diameter.
One of the Cathedral's signature features is the Shrine of Nations, forming a semicircle behind the altar. Each of the six chapels represents an ethnic group whose members contributed to the construction of the building; a statue of the patron saint is paired with a marble floor medallion representing the home country. For Ireland, for example, St. Patrick is represented in stone and a medallion of Connemara Green.
For the history-minded, a mural high on a east-facing wall on the buiding's north side shows the arrival of St. Paul's first bishop, Joseph Cretin, in a canoe, greeted by the first priest, Father Lucien Galtier, the man who gave St. Paul its name. In the background you see St. Paul's first church and cathedral, the log cabin Chapel of St. Paul.
By all means enter and see for yourself. The Cathedral is open long hours daily; you can take a self-guided tour anytime and free guided tours on Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM
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