February 2009

Following in Fitzgerald's Footsteps

By Steve Lange

The stories became legends; the facts got lost in the fiction.

Just an hour north, though, you can still take a tour of the brick and brownstone history of the writer who’s been called “THE writer of THE great American novel.”

In Ernest Hemingway’s Oak Park, Illinois birthplace and his Key West, Florida home, the crass commercialization has twisted history into brochured anecdotes and glossy on-the-hour tours. In Key West, for example, trolley loads of folks in touristy shirts and flip-down sunglasses wander through the Hemingway house asking things like “Is this where he killed himself?”

In St. Paul, the foundation for the F. Scott Fitzgerald legacy, apathy keeps the tourist hype at bay. During the city’s 1996 celebration of the author’s 100th birthday (and 56 years after his death), a bronze statue of Fitzgerald was dedicated in Rice Park. Small plaques mark a few of the Fitzgerald hotspots. There is a theater, renamed in 1994. But no regular tours or annual city-wide celebrations. The local tourism bureaus carry little or hard-to-find info on their famous literary son. St. Paul is not the kind of town that embraces dancing in fountains.

The heart of the Fitzgerald history is a four-block radius with the pointy compass part jabbed into the intersection of Kent Street and Summit Avenue, which has been called “one of the grandest rows of Victorian Boulevard architecture anywhere in America.” Summit has also been dubbed, by a character in a Fitzgerald story, “a museum of American architectural failures.” Summit stretches nearly five miles to the Mississippi in the country’s longest span of residential, Victorian architecture.

On Sept. 24, 1896, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Fitzgerald, 481 Laurel Avenue, were “pleased to announce the birth of a son, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, 10 pounds, 6 ounces.” The child was named for “Star Spangled Banner” lyrical author and distant Fitzgerald cousin Francis Scott Key, although few would have caught the reference—the song wasn’t popularized until the early 1910s. The brick, three-story at 481 Laurel—then and now a six-plex apartment building—was built in 1893. The young Fitzgerald lived here only two years, and the tight street and painfully private apartments relegate most tourists to a quick drive- or walk-by. A small plaque (“F. Scott Fitzgerald Birthplace”) is bolted to brick. In 2004, the building was dedicated as a National Literary Landmark.

Conception sites of the famous—or at least the sites where the parents lived during the conception—are less popular, and there is no plaque just a few blocks south at 548 Portland Avenue.

In 1898, Edward’s wicker furniture business failed and the Fitzgerald family moved to Buffalo, N.Y. They returned to St. Paul in 1908, and Scott enrolled in the St. Paul Academy, a prep school at 25 N. Dale Street which he attended from 1908 to 1911. He acted in school plays, competed on the debate team, sat the bench in three sports. In 1909, Scott published his first piece of writing, a short story called “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” in the school magazine. The yellow brick two-story school now houses a mortgage company. In 2006, a bronze statue depicting a schoolboy-age Fitzgerald, leaning back on the building’s original steps and looking up at the overhead stoplight (he’s gazing at the green light!), was placed outside the building in honor of the author’s 100th birthday.

As a teenager, Fitzgerald cheered on his hometown St. Paul Saints (who played in the old Lexington Park from 1896 to 1956). He visited the Minnesota State Fair, and described it in the short story “A Night at the Fair”: “The two cities were separated only by a thin well-bridged river; their tails curling over the banks met and mingled, and, at their juncture ... lay, every fall, the State Fair ... one of the most magnificent in America.”

Fitzgerald also referenced various St. Paul sites—and even important residents—in various stories and novels. Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill was mentioned in two Fitzgerald novels, This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby. “If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man,” Gatsby’s father said following his son’s death. “A man like James J. Hill. He’d have helped build up the country.” Built in 1891, James J. Hill residence (240 Summit), just a few blocks down from the Fitzgerald brownstone, featured 36,000 square feet of living space, a 100 foot long reception hall, and 22 fireplaces. The building currently houses a museum and guided tours (651-297-2555; www.mnhs.org/places/sites/jjhh) offer a glimpse into the “Rugged stone, massive scale, fine detail and ingenious mechanical systems that recall the powerful presence of James J. Hill.”

The Fitzgeralds moved a half dozen times from brick apartment house to brick apartment house in the next few years, but never strayed far from the fashionable Summit area neighborhood. Scott left for a New Jersey prep school in 1912; visited St. Paul during the holidays. He joined and dropped out of Princeton, enrolled in the Army, fell in love with Zelda Sayre.

In the summer of 1919, Scott returned to St. Paul to rewrite and revise This Side of Paradise, his first—and previously rejected—novel. He moved into his parents’ house at 599 Summit. Built in 1889, the hulking, rough-faced brownstone is marked by conical turrets and projecting bay windows. Here, in the row house’s third-floor study, Scott worked long days crafting sentences and plotting storylines. Chapter outlines were pinned to the curtains. In early September, Fitzgerald resubmitted the novel to a New York publishing house. Two weeks later, This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication. “The postman rang,” Fitzgerald later recalled, “and that day I quit work and ran along the streets, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it.” When it was published the next year, This Side of Paradise sold 3,000 copies in three days and brought Fitzgerald instant fame at age 24. A plaque outside marks the still-private residence as a Registered National Historic Landmark (“The F. Scott Fitzgerald House”).

Scott married Zelda in 1920 in New York, and the couple returned to St. Paul in 1921.

The Fitzgeralds attended parties at the swank University Club (420 Summit). They rented a house at White Bear Lake, then got evicted when the water pipes burst after an all-night winter party. 

After the eviction, the Fitzgeralds moved into the Commodore Hotel (79 Western Avenue North), a stylish spot for the coat-and-tie crowd. The Commodore billed itself as “A high class Residential Service that features, among other things, the ‘Homelike spirit’ and a location in the most aristocratic and quiet section of the city.”

“In the fall of the year we got to the Commodore in St. Paul,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and while leaves blew up the street we waited for our child to be born.”

In October, Zelda gave birth to a daughter—the couple’s only child—Frances Scott (“Scottie”) in St. Paul’s Miller Hospital. Zelda, upon seeing her daughter, said, “Isn’t she smart? ... I hope it’s beautiful and a fool, a beautiful little fool.”

“I hope she’ll be a fool,” Daisy Buchanan says of her daughter in The Great Gatsby. “That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool!”

The Fitzgeralds soon moved again, and Scott worked on his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, from the tower room of their 626 Goodrich Avenue residence.

After a short, summer stint at White Bear Lake, Scott and Zelda made their way back for one last stay at the Commodore before they left St. Paul for the final time.

Three years later, Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby.

“We tend to think of Gatsby as the great story of New York and Long Island, of American capitalism at its most orgiastic,” St. Paul native and Fitzgerald expert Patricia Hampl told the Pioneer Press. “In fact, the whole story is told from St. Paul, in the voice of Nick Carraway. ... Gatsby is quintessentially a book out of the consciousness of a St. Paul boy.”

Mark Twain’s history fills the southern Mississippi River, and white-suited, white-haired fans make pilgrimages in the form of old-fashioned riverboat tours. Jack Kerouac followers meander the country’s back roads with mandatory stops to read beatnik poetry in San Francisco and Greenwich Village. Jack London-ites fill oversized backpacks and head north to the Yukon.

In Hemingway’s Key West, the local stores are just a realized profit away from marketing items like “The Sun Also Rises Sunscreen” or “The Old Man and the Seasickness Pills.”

St. Paul holds Fitzgerald history. It’s there in ink and paper, and, for now, brick and brownstone.