Summit Avenue is the longest intact stretch of Victorian residential architecture in the United States — nearly five kilometres of grand 19th-century mansions running west from the Cathedral of Saint Paul toward the Mississippi River bluffs. The street was the address of St. Paul's wealthy families in the Gilded Age: railroad barons, flour-milling heirs, and merchant princes built substantial houses here through the 1880s and 1890s.
The most famous house is James J. Hill's at the eastern end (now open for tours), but the whole avenue repays a slow walk or bike ride. The houses range from Queen Anne to Romanesque Revival to early Colonial Revival, in brick, stone, and limestone. The Cathedral of Saint Paul at the east end is a fine beaux-arts structure in its own right, and the river bluffs at the west end offer good views across the Mississippi valley.