This afternoon Cultural Resources Office Director Betsy Bradley will recommend that the Preservation Board adopt new standards governing solar collectors installed on City Landmarks and Sites and on buildings within Local Historic Districts. The board’s approval will allow the office to put forth new standards for public comment and then adopt a final version as official city policy. Today’s action could put St. Louis ahead of many other cities with historic districts. Nationwide, the preservation community is debating how to fix local ordinances written before solar panels were widely being installed. Although historic preservation and environmental laws are often compatible — and while historic preservation laws are environmental laws — recently there have been conflicts between new energy policies and practices and old approaches within historic preservation.
Solar panels installed on a historic house in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph from Flickr by Emily Mills.
Locally, there has been at least one recent case in which the owner of a building within a local historic district initially faced denial by CRO of a permit to install street-facing solar panels, but won a new hearing and later approval from the Preservation Board.
In The Power of Place, Dolores Hayden champions the study and preservation of common urban vernacular housing as the best way to record the lives of most Americans. “Most can be learned from urban building types that the represent the conditions of thousands or millions of people,” Hayden writes. Yet Hayden finds that scholars are more interested in simpler rural and exotic urban types (the mythic flounder house is our local intrigue-builder). To some scholars, Hayden observes, “the best vernacular building will always be the purest, the best preserved or the most elaborate example of its physical type.”
Hayden’s observations can be counterbalanced by emergent material culture studies that widen the architectural history of cities beyond the showiest (prettiest?) vernacular buildings and those whose owners seek official landmark or National Register status (regulatory vehicles that enhance but do not replace cultural appreciation). Objectification of domestic architecture is far simpler using pure examples — we who practice architectural history can then shift the focus onto style, form and material so as to avoid messier discussions of class, race, use, power and alteration. Yet much housing production historically in St. Louis and other cities came through mass building practice. One of those practices was alteration by later, lower-income owners often strapped for cash and in search of a cheap fix.
The building at 1426-28 N. Grand Boulevard in 2007.
Now that my office is at the corner of Cherokee and Jefferson, I have occasion to slip eastward afoot (often for coffee at the Mud House). In the last two months, I have been delighted to find the owners of the two-part commercial building — and by two-part I mean one part store, one part flats above — at 2220-22 Cherokee Street have fully restored their cast iron storefront. The building dates to 1912 and its front is the product of the St. Louis Architectural Iron Company.
A distinctive building in the northern reaches of The Ville is no more. In late August, the city wrecked the two-story, mansard-atop-brick mass at 4159 Ashland Avenue. This strange specimen sat on the sidewalk line on a block where remaining buildings — fewer in number than ever — maintain a general setback of ten feet, and are residential. This building had traces of a storefront opening (see the painted, nearly-concealed I-beam above a new entrance at left) suggesting a commercial past.
The storefront at 616 Washington was home to Thompson's Restuarant when this photograph was taken around 1950. Preservation Research Office Collection.
CVS’ announcement that it has abandoned its quest to demolish the mid-century modern AAA Building on Lindell Boulevard comes nearly one century after the first time St. Louis learned that an ambitious chain drug store from Indianapolis was looking for sites here. The August 1914 issue of The Pharmaceutical Era reported that Indianapolis-based Hook Drug Company was opening a store at 616 Washington Avenue and intended to become St. Louis’ first drug store chain. Hook Drug Company was a relatively new company, having been founded by pharmacist John A. Hook in 1900. Hook and partner Edward Roesch served a German-American neighborhood in Indianapolis in a corner shop, but had added another eleven stores in that city by 1912.
Yet Hook Drug never opened the Washington Avenue store or any others in St. Louis. For some reason, the chain backed away from entry into this market. Hook Drug Company would grow as a prominent chain in the Midwestern market, with stores branded as “Hook’s Drugs.” By 1985, Hook’s was purchased by Kroger, and entered into a series of sales until the chain went defunct after a 1994 purchase by Revco. In 1997, CVS purchased Revco, and converted many Hook’s stores into CVS outlets.
Walgreens on the fourth floor of St. Louis Centre, 2006.
St. Louis had no want for drug stores. In 1914, at least 28 St. Louis drug stores had multiple locations. The first chain drug store, a Walgreen’s, would not open until 1926. Walgreens entered the market with force, opening stores at 500 DeBalievere, 6100 Easton, 515 Olive, 360 N. Skinker, 514 and 725 Washington and 5501 Pershing. Indianapolis-based CVS opened its first store in St. Louis in 2010.
Later, the building at 616 Washington was demolished for the St. Louis Centre, which opened in 1985 with a Walgreens store inside the shopping mall. That store closed in 2006. Today, St. Louis Centre has been reconstructed as a parking garage with ground-level retail named the MX. Rumors surfaced that CVS was looking at the MX building for a downtown store, but so far has not signed a lease.
Next American Vanguard attendees listen to remarks by Katherine Gajewski, Director of the Philadelphia Mayor's Office of Sustainability, at the 2010 conference held in Philadelphia.Preservation Research Office is proud to be one of the sponsors for this year’s Next American Vanguard Conference, which comes to our town October 11 and 12. Created and supported by Next American City, Next American Vanguard is a fellowship program that gathers emerging young leaders in various fields such as urban planning, entrepreneurship, community development, transportation, sustainability, design, art and media.
I am a Next American Vanguard alum, having been part of the 2010 “class” that met in that eastern outpost of solidly red brick neighborhoods, Philadelphia. In two days, we spent time taking in talks from the city’s experts in public policy, touring urban farms, abandoned waterfront sites and innovative small businesses, and learning about — and from — each other. Getting into conversations with peer practitioners from other disciplines and cities, I felt like my work in St. Louis was connected to a national movement to make our cities better. I also learned about my work — that it was something different to an education reform advocate from Los Angeles than to a City Councilman in Portland, Maine. Since 2010, the people I met at Next American Vanguard have shared ideas and articles, given me places to stay, connected me to colleagues in my field and provided advice.
While in St. Louis, Vanguard attendees will see what this city is doing right, and wrong. They will visit neighborhoods, the City Museum, the Regional Arts Commission and a downtown rooftop loft. They will hear from Mayor Francis Slay, from vanguard alums, Amos Harris, Richard Baron and Joe Edwards. Yet most of all they will find each other, peers who will invigorate their work with new perspectives. St. Louis is lucky to be the scene for the conversation at Next American Vanguard.
Who knows — maybe the city will shine brightly enough that a Vanguard or two will end up living here in the next few years. Maybe some people will leave us with a new idea or a potent, useful critique. At the very least, everyone will return to their cities knowing that St. Louis definitely is part of the national discussion on the future of American cities.
Looking west across Whittier Avenue at the remaining house built by Frederick W. Fout after 1892.
Although heavily deteriorated, and possessed by a shadowy real estate speculator, the lonely large residence at the southwest corner of Cook and Whittier avenues remains a stunning example of local Richardsonian Romanesque residential design. The house was built around 1892, with its definite architect a mystery and its origin enmeshed in a design exercise whose details are also elusive. Underneath a high-pitched slate-clad hipped roof with dormers is a two-story brick building on raised basement. A curious corner bow is open at the second story, framed by Iowa sandstone elements and rising to an intersecting rounded hip.
Open Streets comes to Southwest Garden this Saturday morning, and we are joining in with a tour:
Architectural Tour of Reber Place
Saturday, September 29 at 9:30 a.m.
Meet at west end of Reber Place at Hereford Avenue (both streets closed for Open Streets)
With its central median and large 19th century single dwellings, Reber Place might have passed for one of the city’s private streets. Yet historical development included the city’s largest clay sewer pipe works, a Roman Catholic parish complex, apartment buildings and bungalows. Today the one-block stretch of Reber Place west of Tower Grove Park contains a range of architectural styles and building types on a green, park-like street. Michael R. Allen will offer a short walk along Reber Place.
“When Should Cities Go Away?”
Thursday, September 28 at 2:30 p.m.
Washington University in St. Louis, Danforth Campus, Busch Hall, Room 18
With guest speaker
Andrew Theising
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Director, Institute for Urban Research,
Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville
Light refreshments/ reception and discussion afterwards.
Generously sponsored by the American Culture Studies Program (AMCS) at Washington University.
City Seminar is a forum in which scholars across disciplines and from colleges and universities in the St. Louis area can share ideas, research methods, theories and topics on anything related to urban studies in the United States and abroad. At each meeting, a scholar presents some work in progress and then we have an informal discussion of the work, accompanied by drinks and snacks.
We hope this forum will help to build an intellectual community around urban scholarship and urban politics.
