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St. Paul is the older and quieter of the Twin Cities, a place that has never felt the need to compete with its flashier neighbor across the Mississippi. The Minnesota State Capitol, completed in 1905 with the third-largest self-supporting dome in the world, sits on a gentle rise above the downtown grid, visible from much of the city in a way that makes the seat of government feel genuinely central rather than tucked away. Summit Avenue, the longest stretch of intact Victorian residential architecture in the United States, runs four miles from the cathedral to the river, a corridor of brownstones and Romanesque mansions that reads like an open-air catalogue of Gilded Age ambition.

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Scott Fitzgerald was born here in 1896 at 481 Laurel Avenue and grew up in the Selby-Dale neighborhood, which still has a literary character in its bookshops and coffee houses. The James J. Hill House at 240 Summit Avenue, built by the railway magnate who built the Great Northern Railway, is open for tours and gives a sense of what it meant to be obscenely wealthy in 1891 Minnesota. The Cathedral of Saint Paul, which Hill helped finance, stands across the street, built large enough to answer ambitions that were considerably grander than the city they served.