“It’s not a big house. It’s just a little stairway,” Swank said. “But the impact for the community is probably outsized.”
Rethos and other organizations, including the St. Paul Parks Conservancy, will pull together an advisory committee with the West 7th/Fort Road Federation to lead fundraising efforts. Swank said the group will look for preservation grants, and may ask for state and federal funding to repair the stairs.
“It’s really expensive to get them back to what they exactly were,” she said, so the focus will be on restoring the historical movement pattern, not the historical look of the steps. An eventual staircase might look more like the nearby Lawton Street stairs.
Swank said Rethos is interested not just in making the steps usable again, but in unearthing stories about the St. Paulites who climbed them.
“A lot of people know the stories at the top of the steps,” she said, with the stairs ending at the J.J. Hill House and Summit Avenue, “but not a lot of people know the stories at the bottom of the steps.”
The historic set of steps connects St. Paul’s Summit Avenue to the West Seventh neighborhood. In this picture, the closed stairs descend from the J.J. Hill House and connect to a pedestrian bridge over Interstate 35E before descending to the campus of United and Children’s hospitals. (Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
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