This Side of Paradise: A Summit Hill tour

Another neighborhood tour! Can you believe it?!

Recently I read in the newspaper that the Minnesota Historical Society was hosting tours of the Summit Hill neighborhood where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in honor of the writer's Sept. 24 birthday. This is the same organization that coordinated the walking tour Nat and I attended back in July, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. I clipped the event listing enthusiastically, posted it on my fridge, begged Natty to come back to Minnesota for the tour (my plea didn't work) and called that week to reserve my place!

(Can you tell, Reader, that there's absolutely no neutrality here? In the last year or so, I've figured out that I simply adore tours - and really, it's no surprise, because the idea fits so nicely with what Miles and Laurel is all about. I love walking around a neighborhood with an expert who tell me all kinds of things about the layers of history behind each place. Some bloggers want to get sponsored by companies that sell running gear or beauty projects or food or whatever. Can I figure out a way to get sponsored by historical societies and then just go on every tour in Minnesota?)

The tour started at the Commodore, a building near the intersection of Western and Summit. There were four tour times available for the weekend, and about 20-25 people had signed up for the early afternoon time slot. We split into two groups and got started.

Scott and his wife, Zelda, lived in the Commodore after being evicted from their White Bear Lake residences because of their raucous parties. Our guide said that his income spiked to coincide with the Jazz Age - a term that Wikipedia says Scott actually coined himself - and Scott and Zelda really lived it up during that era, including a great year in New York. (If the tour had been longer, I would've loved some more elaboration on that year!)

What I didn't realize before the tour was how many places in St. Paul connect to Fitzgerald, his family and his friends. Why is that, you ask? Well, Scott's maternal grandmother invested in real estate and had property around the area, his parents moved frequently, and he also simply just had a fab social life. He was born in St. Paul and left several times for reasons like boarding school, but St. Paul was a nostalgic place for him: after all, he brought Zelda back to St. Paul so their baby could be born here.

The tour was full of stories about how he spent his years in St. Paul, from attending dancing school before he was a teenager in the space on Grand Avenue now occupied by Ramaley Liquors to hanging out with friends on a porch that I run by often.

Here's our guide elaborating on those topics in front of one of his old girlfriend's houses:

Even though the tour covered some of the same ground from the neighborhood walking tour I took with Natty, I was surprised how little content was duplicated. I don't think the other one, for example, mentioned author Sinclair Lewis's former house!

My favorite stop was a building a few steps away from Summit and Dale. He had been away - in New York, I think - and moved back to Minnesota to live with his parents after a bad period of rejection, both personally and professionally. He told everyone he was ready to write a novel, and it sounds like his friends and family essentially smiled and nodded gently in response. He buckled down and wrote all summer in the third floor of their home, posting chapters on the walls, and soon got a letter that This Side of Paradise had been accepted for publication. Take that!

We also walked past some of the schools in the neighborhood, including the early campus of St. Paul Academy - again, close to Summit and Dale. (Excuse the power lines in the photo. Oops.)

I loved this part of the tour, too, because even though Scott was several years older than Coco from Through No Fault of My Own (the book I just read about a girl growing up on Summit during the Jazz Age) the tour connected some of the places Coco references in her diary entries. It felt like puzzle pieces fitting together right in front of me.

It was also fascinating because of what happened to the Summit Hill neighborhood after the Jazz Age hey-day. The whole neighborhood fell into terrible disrepair for many years - in fact, as one person on our tour told our guide, his parents basically called the streets we were walking through off-limits to him growing up because of the crime rate.

It's hard to get my mind around that idea, because today's Summit Hill houses are by and large beautifully restored. Beginning in the 1970s, an era of urban renewal began, and people began investing in the neighborhood again and restoring its houses. Before that time, our guide told us, even some of the houses with Fitzgerald connections could be bought for next-to-nothing, including the place where he wrote This Side of Paradise. I need to learn more about this era in St. Paul's history.

And maybe that's the mark, Reader, of a really good tour: one that simultaneously gives a lot of answers and begs more questions to dig into down the road. Tell me: What's the best tour you've ever taken, and why was it so good?