The Summers Hotel

The Summers Hotel

A Victorian building in downtown Minneapolis with an intriguing connection to St. Paul

An undated postcard view of the Summers Hotel in Minneapolis, looking across Tenth St. toward Fourth Ave. S.

Some years ago, a reader sent me a postcard photo of a little-known, long gone building in downtown Minneapolis. Located at the southwest corner of Fourth Ave. S. and Tenth St., the building—completed in 1886 and originally known as the Summers Hotel—was an intriguing Victorian

hybrid that consisted of a four-story residential hotel linked to a row house

containing five three-story units.

Designed in a loose version of the Victorian Gothic style, the Summers included two crested towers at the corner, false gables atop the row houses and bands of white stone threaded through the brickwork. The hotel section was also notable for large, transomed picture windows on its first three floors that would have brought in an abundance of natural light.

Before receiving the photo, I’d never seen or heard of the Summers, later known as Dudley Court, but its unusual form reminded me of a similar building constructed in 1878 in downtown St. Paul. That building was the Windsor Hotel (on site today of The St. Paul Hotel) and like the Summers it included a main four-story structure connected to row houses. (See my blog on the Greenman-Windsor Hotel).

The Windsor Hotel at Fifth and St. Peter Sts. in St. Paul, ca. 1900; it would soon be  demolished to make way for the new St. Paul Hotel (Minn. Hist. Soc.)

A little sleuthing revealed that the resemblance between the Summers and the Windsor was no accident because they were built by members of the same family—brothers John (1830-1903) and George (1872-1908) Summers. I don’t why the brothers built such peculiar combination structures, but as far as I know they were the only ones of their kind in the Twin Cities.

The Windsor was built by John, a Scottish born carpenter-turned-builder who arrived in St. Paul in the 1850s. He also operated the hotel for many years. George, two years younger, was presumably born in Scotland as well but pursued his career as a building contractor in Minneapolis.

According to one newspaper account, George began working in Minneapolis in the 1870s. In 1881 he built the first Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church (long gone), of which he was a founding member. But row houses and apartment buildings seem to have been his specialty. At least one of his projects, the Drexel Apartments (1889) at 1009 Park Ave., still stands in downtown Minneapolis.

While the Windsor was a popular, frequently photographed establishment, the Summers seems to have come and gone with relativelylittle notice. I’ve found no photos of the hotel in public collections and only one description of the building, in the May 21, 1885 edition of the Minneapolis Journal.

The newspaper described the project as a “high class brick tenement block” consisting of five houses, each “handsomely finished internally.” The adjacent four-story residential hotel, according to the Journal, would offer 35 rooms to be “rented for boarding house purposes.”

Spacious, multi-floor row houses intended for an upper middle-class clientele were quite common in the Twin Cities in the 1880s. Perhaps the most lavish was Zier Row, which George Summers built to the plans of architect William H. Dennis in 1889. It was located just a block from the Summers Hotel at Fourth Ave. S. and Ninth St. and stood until 1967. (See my blog on “Row Houses” for more on Zier Row).

Zier Row (then known as the Residence Apartment Hotel) in 1966, a year before it was demolished (Henn. Cty. Lib.)

The Summers appears to have been reasonably successful, although the row houses may have been subdivided into smaller apartments at some point. City directories indicate that George’s son, William, managed the hotel for a few years before moving to Louisville, KY.

In about 1915 the Summers was renamed Dudley Court, possibly after a change of ownership. By that time, however, its days were numbered because a much larger hotel next door—the Curtis—was rapidly expanding.

A Sanborn Co. insurance map, ca. 1912, shows the Summers (upper right) next to what was then known as the Curtis Court Apartments (Lib. of Cong.)

Opened in 1903, the Curtis initially consisted of a pair of four-story buildings on Tenth St. linked by a central pavilion, but it quickly grew much larger. 

Curtis Hotel, looking across Tenth St. S., 1940; the 12-story wing at left replaced the old Summers Hotel (Minn. Hist. Soc.)

In 1911-12, the Curtis greatly expanded with the construction of a 12-story wing along Third Ave. S. When the hotel decided to add a similar wing along Fourth Ave. S. in about 1920, the old Summers was demolished to make way for the new structure.

The relatively short life of the Summers hardly made it unique in downtown Minneapolis, where many buildings from the booming 1880s were torn down in the 1920s to make way for bigger, more modern structures. The Curtis, which in time became the city’s largest hotel, lasted much longer, surviving until 1984.

Today, the entire block is occupied by a glassy and not very memorable building constructed in 1988 as a data center but that now serves as the headquarters of the Sleep Number Co.