Row house where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his first novel will be on Summit Hill tour

The St. Paul row house where author Fitzgerald lived while finishing his first published novel is among the homes open during the Summit Hill House Tour.

By Kim Palmer

As a law student at William Mitchell in the late 1990s, David Meisenburg would go out of his way to walk past the New York-style row house on Summit Avenue.

“I used to take the long way home,” he recalled. “I love architecture, and I thought those row houses were unbelievable! I was envious of whoever designed them.”

Almost 20 years later, Meisenburg was living across the street from the eight-unit stone row house known as Summit Terrace. One morning he awoke and noticed a red sign in front. “I barely got all my clothes on and ran across the street,” he said. Just as he’d hoped, it was a “For Sale” sign — planted in front of the unit with a metal marker identifying it as the onetime home of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived there in 1919 while finishing the manuscript that would become “This Side of Paradise.”

Meisenburg jumped on the internet to look up the price. “I thought it was a little high,” he recalled, so he set up alerts to notify him by e-mail of any reductions. When the price dropped, he arranged to take a look inside the three-level row house. “It was really beautiful,” he said, with a huge arch between the living and dining rooms.

So he decided to make an offer. “The timing was just perfect,” he said. His business was doing well, and his passion project, an organic vodka made from potatoes and corn grown on his family’s farm, was temporarily in limbo. “I was waiting for the state of Wisconsin to give me my permit.” The row house was “something I’d admired a long time. I just loved the place! When’s the opportunity going to come again?”

Meisenburg moved into the row house in December 2016, just in time to celebrate the holidays. “It was very special to have Christmas here,” he said. “You could see the Christmas tree through the window. It was sort of like being in a Christmas movie.”

He’s made very few changes to the home, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Because of that designation, the exterior can’t be altered. Meisenburg can change the interiors, but he saw no need to. The previous owners had already restored them from an earlier Polynesian theme to period-appropriate Victorian-style decor. “They brought it back to its original character,” he said. “I wanted to keep the same theme.”

But he did need appropriate furniture. “Someone suggested the types of pieces I should have so I started researching,” he said. “Settee? I had no idea what a settee was.” He ultimately found a pair of the small antique sofas in Chicago and brought them home in a pickup truck.

For artwork, he chose framed vintage photos from Germany, where he once studied, and paintings by contemporary artists including Dennis Larkins, who created an original, featuring Meisenburg’s vodka, that now hangs in his dining room.

On the third floor is the office where Fitzgerald wrote, with a balcony, overlooking Summit Avenue, where the novelist smoked cigarettes. Meisenburg has turned the room into “an ode to F. Scott.” There’s a vintage desk with a portrait of Fitzgerald above it, copies of his novels and a “Great Gatsby” movie poster, along with some of Meisenburg’s own personal family mementos.

Owning and living in a piece of history is “pretty cool,” he said.

The house has been a people magnet — in more ways than one.

“When you host a party here, it’s not hard to get people to come,” Meisenburg said. He celebrated the launch of his vodka, Treboles and Key, with a Fitzgerald-themed soiree last September. A Fitzgerald scholar presented a monologue, and a dancer performed at the stroke of midnight, which happened to be Fitzgerald’s birthday. “I didn’t pick the date because of that date. I found out a week before. Sometimes you just get lucky.”

Meisenburg still gets e-mails asking when he’s going to have another party in the row house, he said.

He’s also had a few uninvited guests. Once, when he forgot to lock the front door, he came downstairs to find two strangers in his living room. “They thought it was a museum,” he said. “They did get a free tour.”

Summit Hill House Tour

What: Tour 12 private homes and six public spaces in St. Paul’s historic Summit Hill neighborhood.

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Sept. 30. (Ticket counter opens at 11 a.m.; 10 a.m. for VIP tickets.)

Where: Ticket pickup locations on day of tour: St. Thomas More Catholic Church, 1079 Summit Av., Mitchell-Hamline College of Law, 875 Summit Av.

Cost: $30 in advance at summithillassociation.org. $35 the day of the tour, if tickets remain. New this year: VIP tickets, $100, that include access to all buildings, plus brunch at Dixie’s on Grand, free reserved parking at an off-street lot and exclusive admittance to the houses of your choice at 11 a.m., one hour before the tour opens to other guests. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit Summit Hill Association, and tickets are tax-deductible.

Fitzgrald

Zelda Fitzgerald: The Life of the Party Turns 118

The famous socialite and flapper would have turned 118 years old today.

 PHILIP GREENE

Like no other decade, the 1920s carried a number of nicknames: the “Dry Era,” the “Jazz Age,” the “Roaring Twenties” and, as the denizens of Paris referred to it, les Anées Folles, the “Crazy Years.” On both sides of the ocean, perhaps, no two people personified that epoch better than F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. And today, July 24, would have been Zelda’s 118th birthday.  

She was perhaps the quintessential “flapper,” the term used to describe the rebellious, non-conformist young woman of that era. She bobbed her hair and dressed (and behaved) provocatively. She smoked and enjoyed a cocktail or three, Volstead Act be damned!

And if Zelda was the personification of a flapper, her husband Scott was its chronicler and unofficial spokesperson. 

Specifically, you’ll find Zelda’s wild, flapper streak throughout the pages of his 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned, which some critics referred to as The Beautiful and Slammed. You’ll also find aspects of her sprinkled throughout the pages of his other prose, notably in This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Jelly Bean, and his short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers.

Zelda Sayre came from a wealthy and socially prominent family in Montgomery, Alabama. Her family’s social standing gave her a safety net to develop a bit of notoriety, which she did nothing to discourage. She flouted convention, danced the Charleston, smoked and drank, and took to swimming in a form-fitting, flesh-colored Annette Kellermann swimsuit, so as to give the appearance she was swimming nude. The belle of every society ball, Zelda soon grew tired of the Southern social scene.

When she met a dashing young Army lieutenant from up North named Fitzgerald (he was stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan), love soon ensued and, shortly after Scott’s first novel This Side of Paradise was published in 1920, they wed at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And that’s when the party life really began.

Scott and Zelda soon moved to Stamford, Connecticut, where that Prohibitionclassic, the Orange Blossom (a mix of gin and orange juice), became their favorite drink. Indeed, it was, according to Judith Mackrell’s Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, “Zelda’s cocktail of choice.” So much so that their summer of 1920 became “a summer of a thousand giant orange blossoms, with their biggest household expense the bootlegger,” wrote Marion Mead in her book, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties.

On one occasion, Zelda and her friend Helen Buck drank an entire pitcher of Orange Blossoms, then packed some in a Thermos for a round of golf at the country club. Zelda and Buck were visibly drunk out on the links, with Zelda belting out the turn-of-the-century ditty “Silver Dollar.” (It was later covered by Bobby Darin, sans Orange Blossoms, I would imagine.) Fortunately, the episode came to a peaceful end, writes Sarah Churchwell in Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, when Fitzgerald’s friend and author Ring Lardner (who had a thing for Zelda, by the way) escorted them home safely.

Like their Connecticut residence, their next home in Long Island continued the “party house” theme. Lardner would later quip that Scott and Zelda were compelled to move to France “because New Yorkers kept mistaking their Long Island home for a road house.” Indeed, by the spring of 1925, Scott had just published The Great Gatsby, and he and Zelda moved to Paris, looking to, according to Jessica Powell’s Literary Paris: A Guide, to “find a new rhythm’ for their lives.” Were they outgrowing the flapper lifestyle? To them, perhaps they saw it as a natural progression, even a maturing; indeed, in a 1927 interview in the New York World, Scott noted that “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.”

Unfortunately, their time in France brought about anything but good manners, and more of the non-stop party lifestyle from this dynamic duo. In the words of writer Morrill Cody in The Women of Montparnasse, “Scott and Zelda had little in common, yet the one passion they did share was very strong indeed. They were both ‘excitement-eaters’… a phrase that Zelda used in her book to describe herself.”

Indeed, during the 1920s, Morrill Cody wrote that the Fitzgeralds became “the most renowned ‘excitement-eaters’ of the western world.” Artist and expat Gerald Murphy noted that they “did not seek ordinary pleasures. They wanted something unusual to happen, some act that they might not even understand.” Zelda’s friend Livye Hart is quoted in Sara Mayfield’s Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, saying that “one of her main characteristics was her apparent delight in shocking people. And that was what she almost invariably did.”

Like what? Oh, how about that night at dinner at La Colombe d’Or near Antibes, when Zelda (jealous that Scott was flirting with dancer Isadora Duncan) threw herself off the top of a parapet and down a flight of stone steps. Everyone assumed she was dead, until she emerged, a bit bloodied but otherwise fine. (Unfazed, that night she even managed to steal a pair of glass salt and pepper shakers from the restaurant!)

 Or that wild Paris night when Scott and Zelda, according to Noël Riley Fitch’s Walks in Hemingway’s Paris, “entertained themselves by frivolously racing around the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in a stolen delivery-cart tricycle.” (If that feat sounds familiar, Scott included it in his short story “Babylon Revisited.”) Or perhaps that farewell party in Antibes for theatre critic Alexander Woollcott. It seems Zelda was bored by all of the stuffy toasts, so she got up and, according to a 1951 Life Magazine article, said, “‘I have been so touched by all these kind words. But what are words? Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them. I’ll start off.’ And she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw them toward Woollcott…”

The ironic thing about Scott and Zelda’s lifestyle is that Scott was seen as being a satirist of that crazy jazz/flapper-era. In its review of The Beautiful and Damned, the Philadelphia Record noted that it told the cautionary tale of “a man and woman who go to spiritual and physical ruin.” Yet if Scott and Zelda sought out to satirize the dissolution and recklessness of their own age, why were they so bent on actually living it?

For Zelda’s sake, she seemed powerless to stop it. Reminiscing in Arlen J. Hansen’s Expatriate Paris, she’s quoted as saying “Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive.” Perhaps it was Zelda herself who was the one “consecrated” to keeping the party alive.

Indeed, way back in 1919, she wrote these words in a letter to her suitor, Scott, which I found in the journal, American Literary Dimensions: “And I don’t want to be famous and fêted—all I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own—to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.”

Meet the Man that May Have Inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to Write The Great Gatsby

In the summer of 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, spent their honeymoon in Westport, Connecticut.

It was there, in the sleepy town 50 miles northeast of New York City, that F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly found inspiration for The Great Gatsby.

The couple spent five months in a modest cottage, which was next door to multi-millionaire F.E. Lewis, the mysterious man and frequent party host that resembles Jay Gatsby’s character.

F.E. Lewis mansion, which abutted the property that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived on in Westport, CT in 1920.

The Fitzgerald’s formative summer is chronicled in Richard Webb Jr.’s new book, Boats Against the Current. Webb grew up just down the street from the cottage 40 years after the Fitzgerald’s left, sparking his interest in the story.

When Westport resident Barbara Probst Solomon wrote an article for The New Yorker that challenged the long-held belief that the novel was set on Long Island, Webb began to investigate and found The Great Gatsby‘s ties to Westport.

However, not everyone agrees on the particulars. Alden Bryan, the grandson of Lewis, told The New York Times that “Gatsby was a criminal, my grandfather was not!”

While the connections between Lewis and Gatsby are not direct, it’s likely that F. Scott’s stay in Westport helped spark ideas for the legendary novel.

The quotable Fitzgerald

[She] had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you. F. Scott Fitzerald, Tender Is The Night

 He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. For all he knew there might be some code among the wanderers of obscure spas by which they found each other quickly. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

 I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

  

 Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night

Just found this one: 

 If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. F. Scott Fitzerald, The Great Gatsby

The family

House where ‘Great Gatsby’ writer lived now an Alabama museum with Airbnb upstairs

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA – As she sat in the house where “Great Gatsby” writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, once lived, a visitor contemplated the famous Jazz Age couple.

“I tried to imagine how maybe Scott would tell a joke and Zelda would laugh,” said Farong Zhu, a Fulbright scholar from China who translated Zelda’s only novel, “Save Me the Waltz,” into Chinese. “Everything was very beautiful. I was so excited to be close to the Fitzgeralds, I couldn’t sleep well the first night.”

But you don’t have to be a literary scholar to stay in this apartment upstairs from the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. The Fitzgeralds lived in the house in 1931 and 1932, and for $150 a night, anyone can rent the apartment on Airbnb . There’s nothing else quite like it in the rental website’s inventory, according to Airbnb spokeswoman Alyssa McEwan.

It’s also the only site on the Southern Literary Trail open to the public for overnight stays. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for travelers,” said trail director Sarah McCullough. “And of course it generates revenue,” always a challenge for historic sites.

Fitzgerald Museum director Sara Powell said she worried when rentals began in April that visitors might throw wild “Gatsby”-style parties. But those concerns proved unjustified. As McCullough put it, “Most of the people who would want to stay there probably have a great love for the writer and the writer’s work and would have great respect for the property.”

The house dates to 1910. The apartment is furnished in casual 20th century style: sofa, armchairs, decorative lamps, Oriental rug, and pillows embroidered with quotes from Zelda like this one: “Those men think I’m purely decorative and they’re fools for not knowing better.” It has two bedrooms, a working kitchen and Wi-Fi, but the ambiance evokes another era, with a record player and jazz albums, a balcony and flowering magnolia trees in the yard, all tucked away on a quiet street in Montgomery’s historic Old Cloverdale neighborhood.

“It’s hard for writers to be disconnected from their own world, even for a second,” Powell said. “We’ve had people tell us it was so good to be up there, even for a couple of days. You do unplug and get out of your headspace.”

Though the Fitzgeralds didn’t live in the house for long, Montgomery was important in their celebrated, tumultuous lives. Zelda was a Montgomery native, and they met at a country club here in 1918 during World War I. She was a teenage debutante and he was stationed at a nearby military base.

Once married, rich and rootless, they moved from place to place, including Paris and New York, where a stay on Long Island planted the seed for “Gatsby.” In Montgomery, he worked on “Tender Is the Night” and she wrote “Save Me the Waltz.” It was the last place they lived together with their daughter, Scottie, who turned 10 there and later was sent to boarding school. F. Scott, an alcoholic, died at age 44. Zelda battled mental illness and perished in a hospital fire at age 47.

In the 1980s, the house was threatened with demolition to make way for condos. Local lawyer Julian McPhillips and his wife, Leslie, bought the house and established a nonprofit for it. McPhillips is a Princeton University alumnus; Fitzgerald also attended Princeton, and the museum displays a copy of his Princeton transcript, showing many dropped courses before he left school to join the military. The museum also owns 11 of Zelda’s paintings, personal belongings like an inkwell and beaded purse, and first editions of Fitzgerald’s novels.

As a tourist destination, Montgomery is best-known for civil rights history. This is where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man, sparking a bus boycott by African-Americans that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring segregation on public buses unconstitutional. That protest also turned a young Montgomery minister, Martin Luther King Jr., into the leader of the civil rights movement.

In April, two new sites opened in Montgomery that are already attracting a lot of attention: a memorial to victims of racial terror lynchings, and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

Powell is looking for ways to connect with visitors coming to experience these other attractions. She’s developing a workshop for 2019 looking at how race relations were impacted by an 1890s election law named for Zelda’s father, Judge Anthony Sayre, that made it harder for illiterate and semi-illiterate citizens to vote. And while Fitzgerald scholars like Zhu are a natural fit for writers’ residences, Powell is open to proposals on any topic.

Katherine Malone-France, vice president of historic sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says the Airbnb rental and writers’ residencies are great ways to keep places like the Fitzgerald house “financially sustainable and culturally sustainable” while remaining “respectful and relevant to their pasts.”

“That is the best way to preserve something: To use it,” she said.