Blair Flats

The $300,000 apartment building that opened on St. Paul’s western edge in 1887 would spend the next century as a hotel, a streetcar stop landmark, and a boarded-up relic in a neighborhood where mansions sold for a dollar. Today, 140 years later, it’s an apartment building again.

It became the Albion Hotel six years after opening, beginning decades of name changes and shifting fortunes. In 1911, Thomas Lowry, president of the St. Paul Street Railway Company, bought the Albion and renamed it the Angus Hotel. The location was well suited to a transit mogul: the first westbound Selby Avenue streetcar stop after emerging from the Selby Tunnel was at Selby and Western. The tunnel had opened in 1907 to solve the problem of streetcars struggling up the steep grade of St. Anthony Hill. Lowry sold the hotel in 1918, but the streetcars kept running past its doors for decades.

By the 1970s, both the Angus and the surrounding neighborhood had fallen on hard times. Some of the area’s once-grand mansions reportedly sold for as little as one dollar, and the hotel itself closed in 1971. Rather than disappear with them, the building was restored and reopened in 1985 as a mixed-use complex of apartments, offices, and shops. Today, it has come full circle, once again carrying its original name: Blair Flats.