Neighbors band together to preserve Rochester’s most storied neighborhood

ROCHESTER – When Dan Larson and his wife, Kathryn, purchased their Pill Hill home in 2022, they assumed the neighborhood’s status on the National Register of Historic Places came with protections for preserving their house.

“The house has a plaque and everything,” Larson said. “The neighborhood has always kind of been known to be historic. And we kind of were surprised that wasn’t the case.”

Larson soon found he was not alone among residents of the storied Rochester neighborhood — named for the influx of medical professionals who took up residence there in the early 20th century.

In 2023, as the city considered a zoning change that would have potentially allowed the redevelopment of the neighborhood, residents of Pill Hill began to grapple with the limitations of the honorary federal designation.

How could they safeguard a neighborhood so closely linked to the story of Mayo Clinic from redevelopment pressures being brought on by the massive expansion of the same institution?

“There are very real development pressures in Rochester; and one of the things, having lived here so long, some of it happens just slowly enough that you almost don’t notice it,” said Pill Hill resident Martha Grogan. “We really need to preserve these historic structures and weave them into the fabric of the city and the community of the future.”

While the city never moved forward with plans to rezone the neighborhood, it didn’t shake the feeling among residents that it could only be a matter of time that the wave of redevelopment in the city could encroach on Pill Hill, a neighborhood known as much for its Colonial and Tudor revival architecture as its famous past inhabitants, including Mayo’s founders.

“The temptation could still be there to just sell a house to a builder who will demolish it and build a large high-rise,” said Bobbi Pritt, a pathologist at Mayo who owns one of the oldest homes on her block. “And once you’ve destroyed a historic property, you never get it back. It changes the whole character of the neighborhood.”

Rather than wait for the city to take action, residents of the mostly affluent neighborhood began raising money to hire a consultant to review the possibility of designating the neighborhood as a local historic district. Their efforts culminated in a report that is expected to be delivered to the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission later this month.

“This is about Rochester’s history, about Mayo Clinic’s history, about the history of medicine,” said Larson, a pathologist at Mayo. “Pill Hill is an incredibly unique neighborhood in our country, in that it represents this effort to really attract talent and clinicians to come and move to Rochester to set up camp and build their dream homes as they start their careers at what was becoming a world-famous Mayo Clinic early in the 1900s.”

Dr. William J. Mayo, one of the founders of Mayo Clinic, built his lavish 24,000-square-foot home atop Pill Hill, as did his colleague, Dr. Henry Plummer, an inventor and physician known for establishing Mayo’s unified medical record system. Dr. Edward Kendall, who received the Nobel Prize in 1950 for the discovery of cortisone, also resided in the neighborhood, which hovers about 100 feet above nearby St. Marys Hospital.

The three physicians were among scores of Mayo physicians, researchers and administrators who built homes in the neighborhood just as Rochester was gaining a reputation as a health care mecca.

“Some of the most major discoveries in modern medicine happened right in this neighborhood,” said Grogan, a cardiologist at Mayo who has spearheaded the historic designation initiative, along with Larson. “And you can envision that in the dens and libraries in most of these homes, that’s where a lot of these papers were written.”

Not only did the homes belong to some of the brightest minds in medicine — Grogan’s home was built by Louis Austin, an early pioneer in dentistry at Mayo — they also offered hospitality for some of the biggest names of the time. Ernest Hemingway was known to walk the streets of Pill Hill while seeking treatment at Mayo. President John F. Kennedy once stayed in a physician’s home in the neighborhood. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s eldest son, James, recovered from surgery at a home across the street from Grogan.

And while Rochester abounds with history closely linked to Mayo Clinic, what distinguishes Pill Hill from other parts of the city is that much of the neighborhood remains intact, said Grogan. She noted that since 1990, when 133 properties in the neighborhood were added to the National Register, only two homes have been torn down.

“Historic preservation has not been Rochester’s strong point; it just hasn’t,” Grogan said. “Now, Pill Hill is the opposite of that. [The homes] are very well preserved and maintained, and they have some of the most important history of the foundations of Mayo Clinic.”

The push by Pill Hill residents comes in the wake of a yearslong, city-led initiative to designate three blocks of downtown Rochester as a historic district. Those plans, approved last year by the Rochester City Council, followed years of contentious debate about the financial impacts to property owners. To ease concerns, Destination Medical Center later kicked in $5 million to the program to support the restoration of historic buildings.

Molly Patterson-Lundgren, the heritage preservation and urban design coordinator for the city, said the initial pushback downtown stemmed, in part, from property owners feeling like the decision was being made top-down. To avoid a repeat of the situation, Patterson-Lundgren challenged Pill Hill residents to first build local support for their initiative.

“I said, you know, it would be beneficial for them to really start out at building a grassroots effort, and then bring that forward to the city,” Patterson-Lundgren said.

A neighborhood survey found that the proposal for a local historic district was supported by the vast majority of residents, with only one resident raising concerns about possible restrictions, Larson said.

Those restrictions include requiring homeowners to go before the Historic Preservation Commission any time a building permit is pulled for exterior modifications or demolition. The restrictions, however, do not apply to work done inside the home or to other modifications that do not require a permit, such as painting the house a new color.

“It’s going to be a lot more relaxed than what you could see in other types of landmark properties,” said Larson, whose 1929 home once belonged to Dr. Alfred Washington Adson, the founder of Mayo’s first neurosurgical department.

If established by the city, the Pill Hill historic district would use the same period of significance (1903-1937) used by the National Register — an honorary distinction that provides little protection to properties unless the federal government is involved — to establish what homes meet the criteria of being historically significant.

While the initiative in Pill Hill is limited to about 15 blocks, Patterson-Lundgren said she believes the effort could also spur additional city residents to get involved in preserving the city’s history.

“It can be somewhat of a model to other neighborhoods in the community to use this as kind of a rallying point in terms of building neighborhood culture, in terms of uncovering the distinct history of a neighborhood within the community,” she said.

After review by the Heritage Preservation Commission, the Pill Hill proposal will head to the City Council, which has final say on the district. Unlike the downtown district, Larson said the neighborhood is not requesting any financial incentives to property owners.