Gilbert, Cass (1859–1934)

Architect Cass Gilbert’s best-known work is the Woolworth Building in New York City, completed in 1913. From 1882 to 1898, however, Gilbert was based in Minnesota, where he designed houses, churches, office buildings, and, most notably, the third Minnesota State Capitol, commissioned in 1895 and completed ten years later.

Cass Gilbert was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on November 24, 1859. His parents, Samuel and Elizabeth, were descended from two of the town’s more prosperous families. They named their second son after Samuel’s great uncle Lewis Cass, a well-known Democrat who lost the 1848 presidential election to Zachary Taylor.

Samuel, Elizabeth, and their children moved to St. Paul in 1868. Shortly after the family was settled, Samuel died. Elizabeth raised her sons, Charlie, Cass, and Sam, in a small house on Aurora Avenue, near the future site of Minnesota’s third capitol building.

At sixteen, Cass left school to apprentice with St. Paul architect Abraham Radcliffe. Such training was the standard route toward professionalization at the time. But times were changing. In 1878, Gilbert and his close friend and fellow draftsman Clarence Johnston went east to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the only school in the country offering a formal curriculum in architecture. Johnston—known today for works including Duluth’s Glensheen Historic Estate and the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium—soon ran out of tuition money and returned to St. Paul. Gilbert completed a year’s study, then embarked on an architectural tour of Europe, hoping to find work in London.

In 1880 Gilbert returned home, unemployed and out of money. His sketches of the architectural landmarks of Europe impressed architect Stanford White, though, who hired Gilbert as a draftsman in the New York City office of McKim, Mead and White. Gilbert stayed with the up-and-coming firm for two years.

In early 1883, Gilbert returned to St. Paul. He opened an office in the Gilfillan block, where Clarence Johnston and another of his friends, James Knox Taylor, also practiced architecture. Like many American cities at this time, St. Paul was growing fast. There was a steady demand for office buildings, warehouses, libraries, rail stations, and churches, and the city’s architects competed for commissions. As a relative newcomer to the city, Gilbert lacked the family and social ties that benefitted his friends. But his connection to McKim, Mead and White served him well when he was put in charge of all the firm’s work from St. Paul to Helena, Montana, for the Northern Pacific Railway. Gilbert oversaw two successful building projects before the railroad halted expansion due to financial difficulties.

Over the next several years, Gilbert forged his reputation and expanded his client base. He had returned to St. Paul with a design for a house for his mother—he described it as “sensible, genuine and a place I shall not tire of myself”—at 471 Ashland Avenue. He and his mother both knew the value of social connections. In addition to sharing a house built in a fashionable neighborhood, Elizabeth invited Cass to join her in several clubs through which he could meet potential clients. In 1884 Gilbert gained access to civic leaders like railroad baron James J. Hill, fur trader Norman Kittson, and lumberman Amherst Wilder as a member of the Minnesota Club. That same year, he went into business with James Knox Taylor, whose father was a realtor.

Gilbert’s personal life, as well as his professional prospects, continued to evolve. While visiting Lake Minnetonka in 1886 he renewed an acquaintance with Julia Fitch, whom he had first met in New York six years earlier. A twenty-four-year-old music teacher who lived in Milwaukee with her mother and sister, Fitch embarked on a courtship conducted primarily by mail, since she and Gilbert were rarely in the same place at the same time. The pair married in 1887. Their first home was an apartment in the Albion building at Selby and Western Avenues in St. Paul (later known as Blair Flats). Within seven years the couple had four children: Emily, Elizabeth, Julia, and Cass, Jr.

Gilbert designed a number of office buildings, churches, and Summit Avenue houses before receiving the state capitol commission in 1895. The capitol's design attracted national attention, and in 1899 Gilbert received the commission for the US Custom House (later a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian) in New York City. Gilbert soon moved his family and his practice there. Other significant commissions followed, from the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, to Gilbert’s last design, the US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, completed shortly after his death in 1934.