Kudos Given To Saint Paul's Summit Hill Neighborhood

Saint Paul's Summit Avenue has been designated the nations best street from the victorian era, according to the American Planning Association.

During the late 19th century, Summit Avenue was not considered the grandest of the country's Victorian-era residential boulevards, yet today this 4.5-mile-long boulevard stands alone as the country's best-preserved avenue from that period. Remarkably, more than 370 of the gilded-age mansions and other residences representing a dozen different architectural styles remain.

Complementing this architectural legacy, are the avenue's marvelous vistas, park-like qualities, and a decades-long history of planning measures, civic participation, and private stewardship that kept Summit's unique character intact.

The first house to be built on Summit, or the "bluff" as it was then known, was by Edward Duffield Neill in 1855. It was not until the 1880s that the first major wave of house building got under way. The most famous house built during this time was the Romanesque mansion in 1887 for Canadian-American railroad executive James J. Hill. Located at 240 Summit, the Hill House is one of the residences that helps give the easternmost section or Lower Summit its embassy row–like character.

About this same time the Summit Avenue Improvement Association was formed in order to encourage property owners along the western-most half of the avenue to donate enough land on each side of the street to widen the public right-of-way from 100 to 200 feet. This allowed creation of a center median, including a bridle path for horses. Planted with trees and shrubs, today this shaded canopy imparts the feeling of standing in a large, open-air ballroom.

Summit Avenue saw another period of opulent mansion construction during the Roaring Twenties, in such styles as Beaux Arts, Spanish Colonial, Twenties and Tudor Villa, Georgian Revival, and Rectilinear. With the Great Depression, however, new building stopped and many owners had to give up the homes altogether. Luckily, Hill's mansion and several other estates were bequeathed to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul, which maintained them until the 1970s when a back-to-the-city movement began to attract a new group of owners.

The American Planning Association is a Washington D.C. based non profit that "provides leadership in the development of vital communities. We measure our success by the successes of our members and the communities they serve." Source APA website.