Local history

On Sunday morning, after Natty and I woke up and helped Wish and her pup forge a friendship, we were talking about what we should do that day. We talked about going for a walk, maybe checking out a yoga class or heading over to the Chain of Lakes in Minneapolis. "There is one more thing," I told her hesitantly. "There are these neighborhood architectural tours on Summit Avenue...and I've never been on one but always read about them...and I don't know if you're interested, but..."

Well, I should have known. This is the girl who loved our hummingbird class in March as much as I did, after all. Peas in a pod. She was in for the tour!

After Highland Fest, we lugged our lemonades (cherry for me, lime for Nat) over to the James J. Hill House in St. Paul's Cathedral Hill neighborhood. Tickets for this walking tour are $10 for adults - and let me make a long story short, it's worth every penny. We waited outside for a couple of minutes with about 25 other people, a crowd that eventually split into two tours.

At 2:00, our guides came outside and started the introduction.

The Hill House belonged to James J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway. It was built in the late 1800s, and many of the homes in the area were built in the Gilded Age (around then or just afterward). This has always been a fascinating era to me.

We learned all about the architectural styles of the street's homes. For a lot of the structures, our guide passed around photos of what the houses used to look like. Apparently the Queen Anne look, which I loved and Natty didn't, went out of style in a major way a little farther into the 1900s, and a lot of owners scrubbed their homes free of Queen Anne style and totally remodeled their homes.

Summit Avenue is the longest stretch of restored Victorian homes in the country, and because of the wide sidewalks, picturesque views and neat measurements (the stoplights are almost all exactly one-half mile apart!), the street is very popular with local runners, walkers and cyclists.

You get the idea:

The last several miles of the Twin Cities Marathon course go up Summit, too. The funny thing, though, is how much I've missed in the hundreds or even thousands of times I've run, walked or biked on various sections of Summit. I'm talking about the layers and layers of history that line this street, of course, but I'm also just talking about the physical, tangible parts of the street.

I was practically dumbstruck, for example, by this door frame:

And this railing!

And these windows:

If you love learning new words, this is also a good tour. You know that category of words you've read and read but are surprised when you hear someone say them? (Think epitome or posthumous. Do you have a favorite example?) Anyway, I always pronounced cupola in my head as kuhp-OH-lah. Our guide pointed out a nice KEW-pew-luh and I whispered, "Wow." Cupola.

The second new word - well, besides all of the architectural styles I couldn't have told you one thing about before this tour - is quoin, an architectural term to describe mostly decorative cornerstone (kind of like trim) on brick structures. It's pronounced the same as coin, by the way. Our guide introduced this term by saying, "As soon as you identify this, you'll see it everywhere" and my ears perked up. I love stuff like that - and of course, she was totally right.

(I should stop here and note that our guide was just wonderful. She kept the tour moving along but dished just the right amount of facts and juicy tidbits and still had time to entertain our questions. The whole thing was absolutely fascinating, even with the heat and humidity that accompanied the 90-minute tour.)

Anyway, these houses are magnificent, in part because each house finds a balance between the big picture and the small details.  Like this...

...tucked into something like this:

But what, you ask, was my favorite, favorite building? That was easy. It's tucked away on another side street on which I've never stepped. It's one of several places in the neighborhood where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived  - here, I think, with his grandmother. I also heard on the tour that he and Zelda used to attend dances on the rooftop of the Commodore Hotel, not too far away. I would like to go on a 1920s tour next.

I love the red stone.

Whether you live in St. Paul or are visiting from anywhere else in the world, I highly, highly recommend this tour. I ran on Summit by myself yesterday, and my perspective felt completely different. I noticed so many new things - quoins and all - and now I know a little bit more about the people whose feet have touched these sidewalks before me.

This tour will be hard to top, but I'm going to track down some more around town. Any ideas?