Beyond Summit Avenue: The Walnut Street Steps and the Stories Below the Hill

Drinking in History, Monday, July 13th from 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Tickets

Photo courtesy of Saint Paul Parks Conservancy

Saint Paul’s Summit Avenue is nationally recognized as the longest stretch of Victorian mansions remaining in the country, a remarkable historic landscape of architecture, wealth, and preservation. But the Walnut Street Steps ask us to widen the lens. Who moved between the hill and the neighborhoods below? Who worked in these houses, supported the daily life of the avenue, or lived in the communities connected by this public passageway? 

At this Drinking in History, Rethos Executive Director Heidi Swank and Ari Fields, a member of the Walnut Steps Advisory Committee, will explore the Walnut Street Steps as more than infrastructure. The steps connect Summit Avenue, Irvine Park, the bluff landscape, historic neighborhoods, and generations of pedestrian movement. They also create an opportunity to ask whose stories have been preserved, whose have been overlooked, and how public places can help us recover a fuller understanding of Saint Paul’s past. 

Ari will share the history and meaning of the steps, including their role in daily movement, neighborhood memory, and public access. Heidi will connect the project to Rethos’ advocacy work and the effort to reopen the steps through coalition-building, public funding, and clear storytelling. The evening will also invite attendees to consider what preservation looks like when it includes not only landmark homes, but the routes, labor, relationships, and lived experiences around them. 

This conversation is about the Walnut Street Steps, but it is also about how we tell history: not as a single story from the top of the hill, but as a shared landscape shaped by many people moving through it.