University Club of St. Paul

Designed to hug the bluff, the University Club of St. Paul has offered one of the best views in the city since 1913. With one story descending below 420 Summit Avenue, the L-shaped clubhouse overlooks the downtown and the Mississippi River gorge from the highest hill in the area.

In the early twentieth century, ambitious community leaders of the young, prosperous capital city established three private social clubs modeled after the great cities of the American East Coast and Europe. Members of the Minnesota Club (1910), the University Club of St. Paul (1913), and the Saint Paul Athletic Club (1917) all built elegant buildings.

Each club targeted different members. While the athletic club was a full-service urban sports facility, the Minnesota Club sought out high-society figures, politicians, and businessmen. The University Club welcomed graduates of colleges and universities. (A century later, only the University Club carries out its original mission.)

The club’s architects, Charles A. Reed and Allen H. Stem, also designed Grand Central Station in New York City, the St. Paul Hotel, the St. Paul Athletic Club, and a number of homes in the Summit Avenue neighborhood. The Tudor Revival-style club house was modeled after the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London.

Construction was completed in 1913. The new building’s facilities included dining areas, a library, squash courts, locker rooms, and a bar and grill. Asphalt shingles on an intersecting gabled roof topped the three-and-a-half-story structure.

An outdoor pool and tennis courts were added to the grounds in the 1930s. To pay for these additions, the club took a creative approach. In return for a fifty-cent donation, members signed their names on the countertop of the bar; a burning process made the signatures permanent.

F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in the Summit Avenue neighborhood and attended many events at the University Club, although he was never a member. On his last visit home to St. Paul, he and his wife, Zelda, hosted a “bad luck ball” on Friday, January 13, 1922, at the club. The couple loved jokes and published a parody society section of a fictitious newspaper, the St. Paul Daily Dirge, for their guests featuring satirical stories about local people.

After World War II, the University Club was the first of the three St. Paul social clubs to invite women to join. In 1976, the Hill District, including the University Club and other historic buildings along Summit Avenue, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The American Planning Association named Summit Avenue one of the ten “great streets of America” in 2008.

The club celebrated a hundred years of continuous operation in 2013. It is one of a prestigious group of similar clubs throughout the world—many chartered in the late nineteenth century.