river-front at Minneapolis is not available for house-building, nor is there any other topographical indication of a fashionable quarter, except what is furnished by the slight undulations of the plateau. The more pretentious houses are for the most part scattered, and, of course, much more isolated than the towering commercial buildings. On the other hand, the fashionable quarter of St. Paul is distinctly marked out by nature. It could not have been established anywhere but at the edge of the bluff overhanging the town and commanding the Mississippi. Surely this height must have been one of those eminences that struck the imagination of Trollope when they were yet unoccupied. And now the “noble residences” have come to crown the hill-side, and really noble residences many of them are. There are perhaps as skilfully designed houses in the younger city, and certainly there are houses as costly; but there is nothing to be compared with the massing of the handsome houses of St. Paul upon the ridge
DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.
Mould & McNichol, Architects.
above the river. Indeed, there are very few streets in the United States that give in as high a degree as Summit Avenue the sense of an expenditure liberal without ostentation, directed by skill, and restrained by taste. What mainly strikes a pilgrim from the East is not so much the merit of the best of these houses, as the fact that there are no bad ones; none, at least, so bad as to disturb the general impression of richness and refinement, and none that make the crude display of “new money” that is to be seen in the fashionable quarters of cities even richer and far older. The houses rise, to borrow one of Ruskin’s eloquent phrases, “in fair fulfilment of domestic service and modesty of home seclusion.” The air of completeness, of finish, of “keeping,” so rare in American towns, is here as marked as at Newport. In the architecture there is a wide variety, which does not, however, suffice to destroy the homogeneousness of the total effect. Suggestions from the Romanesque perhaps prevail, and testify anew to the
PORTE-COCHÈRE, ST. PAUL.
Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.