The location, on the corner of W. 5th St. and St. Peter St. had been the site of a hotel since the 60-room Greenman House was built there in 1871. After being destroyed by fire seven years later, it was replaced with the larger Windsor, which operated until a few years before it was torn down to make way for The Saint Paul Hotel.
Lucius Pond Ordway had been negotiating unsuccessfully for three years to build a new modern hotel in St. Paul. Ordway was at the time the president of the fledgling
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (now 3M). A deal was struck in 1908 when Ordway offered to finance the hotel with $1 million of his own money if the community would match the investment. The hotel was built on the site of a prior city landmark, the Windsor hotel. The site was valued at $250,000, which was transferred to Ordway as part of the matching contribution. The building itself was expected to cost $1 million, and the furnishings another quarter million. The hotel was claimed to be "absolutely fireproof". A
rathskeller was dug under the building, carved into the white-colored
sandstone that underlaid the site. The hotel has a steel frame with a brick and limestone exterior cladding. Most of the lower nine floors are light brown and most of the upper four floors are white. It was designed by the then-local architectural firm of
Reed and Stem. Stem was an accomplished architect, and Reed an engineer who partnered in 1890. They were later involved in many significant projects including New York's
Grand Central Station. Architectural critic
Larry Millett described the building as appearing top-heavy due to the "grandiose cornice" on top of the building. Other critics highlighted the
Beaux-Arts architecture and the three zones of the hotel with the first floors faced with stone, a terra-cotta midsection, and the cornice described as "gaudy" and "precipitously overhanging". The hotel opened in 1910. In the 1919 edition of
The Encyclopedia Americana, it was called one of St. Paul's most noteworthy buildings of the decade, along with the
Saint Paul Public Library. Each of the 300 rooms included a private bath and all rooms had an outside view of a main street or
Rice Park. The hotel is eleven stories and built on high ground. At the time of its opening, it was said the view of the
Mississippi Valley, from the hotel's roof, was better than from any other location except the dome of the
Minnesota State Capitol. The hotel was opened with a formal dedication ceremony held on April 18 that was attended by hundreds of prominent citizens, including two governors and several transcontinental railroad presidents including
James J. Hill. Even before completion in early 1910, a addition was begun. The three-story annex was built to house "sample rooms" for traveling sales reps, and was a unique innovation segregating these rooms from the main hotel and finishing them especially for this usage. The rooms functioned as a regular hotel room for the salesman, but with a display area used to show their products to local merchants. The hotel's location at an intersection provided a dramatic view of the building when traveling west on 5th. The antenna of the region's first
wireless station was on the roof as was a
rooftop garden. ==Later years==