Privately funded repair pitched for stairway to St. Paul's Summit Avenue

An architectural preservation group wants to fix up a historic set of steps that connects St. Paul's Summit Avenue to the West Seventh neighborhood and restore a connection interrupted during the pandemic.

"We're going to try to help resolve the problem of the Walnut Street steps," said Heidi Swank, executive director of Rethos, the nonprofit coordinating the project.

It'll be a climb about as grueling as the ascent up the steps themselves. Swank said getting the stairs usable again will cost "multiple millions of dollars." And they will likely not be restored just as they were 100 years ago.

The stairs were constructed in 1901 when railroad magnate James J. Hill built his Summit Avenue mansion. Hill wanted the city to close Walnut Street between his property and his neighbor, and St. Paul had him build the steps so people could keep moving along that street.

It was not particularly clear for the next 100 years who was supposed to maintain the steps: Hill and the adjacent property owner? The city of St. Paul? All of the above?

A 2013 city resolution called for the property owners across the stairs from the Hill house pay for more than $80,000 in repairs to a wall on one side of the steps, and then transferred responsibility of the staircase to the city for future upkeep.

Little of that upkeep happened, and the stairs fell back into disrepair. Instead of making fixes, the city fenced off the crumbling steps in October 2020.

Rethos, formerly known as the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota, is the architectural heritage group that puts on Doors Open Minneapolis, which provides behind-the-scenes tours of notable structures. Swank said the group has been looking for a way to make a splash in St. Paul. The Walnut Street corridor seemed like a perfect candidate.

"It's not a big house. It's just a little stairway," Swank said. "But the impact for the community is probably outsized."

Rethos and other organizations, including the St. Paul Parks Conservancy, will pull together an advisory committee with the West 7th Street/Fort Road Federation to lead fundraising efforts. Swank said the group will look for preservation grants, and may ask for state and federal funding to repair the stairs.

"It's really expensive to get them back to what they exactly were," she said, so the focus will be on restoring the historical movement pattern, not the historical look of the steps. An eventual staircase might look more like the nearby Lawton Street stairs.

Swank said Rethos is interested not just in making the steps usable again, but in unearthing stories about the St. Paulites who climbed them.

"A lot of people know the stories at the top of the steps," she said, with the stairs ending at the J.J. Hill House and Summit Avenue, "but not a lot of people know the stories at the bottom of the steps."