Author: Michael R. Allen

Categories
Abandonment Benton Park West South St. Louis

Two Blocks of Utah Street

by Michael R. Allen

Now that I live south of Tower Grove Park and work at Cherokee and Jefferson, my daily path has taken me through Benton Park West’s grid of state streets. Some blocks and buildings are familiar from my previous years living in Tower Grove East, but others are new. The dense cavalcade of vernacular red-brick (and some frame) buildings seems unending, and any way to and from the office seems to be the perfect way.

Still, as an architectural historian who works in historic preservation, my eye tends to wander toward the broken, the changing and the potential-filled buildings. The streets around Cherokee Street are changing a lot, but not always in concert with the renewal that is changing Cherokee almost-universally for the better. As with the relationship between Manchester Avenue and the rest of Forest Park Southeast, the relationship between Cherokee Street and its surrounding neighborhoods evokes a sense of social and architectural division. Then, of course, within the streets around Cherokee blocks are different from each other in unforeseen ways.

View southeast toward the house of the 2700 block of Utah Street.

This week a journey down Utah Street brought me into contact with two blocks in the midst of changes wrought by abandonment. The first of these is the 2700 block, between Iowa and California. On the south side of this block is a row of six houses marred by a vacant lot. Flat-roofed, with overhanging hoods and other elements, the brick houses are typical early twentieth century dwellings for this part of the city. Some people know these houses due to an unfortunate abnormality: several of these are crooked, sinking lop-sided below their lawns. The vacant lot marks the site of the first demolition, necessitated by a severe structural failure caused by subsidence. This demolition very likely won’t be the last.

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Categories
Demolition Gate District Schools South St. Louis

Hodgen School is Gone

by Michael R. Allen

View northeast across the Hodgen School site.

If the reader has had the sense that something is missing from St. Louis, that feeling has at least one concrete cause. The city stands bereft of one more monument to its former aspirations, the red brick Hodgen School that stood at California and Henrietta avenues until just two weeks ago. Yesterday, workers from Ahrens Contracting had already filled and graded the depression in which Hodgen’s foundation walls had begun rising in 1884. Now, a fragment of school yard fence, a tangled pile of pipes and wires and a stone retaining wall are the only traces on the site indicating that once something great stood here.

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Categories
Downtown

Lost: The Carleton Building

by Michael R. Allen

Among recent arrivals in the office this week came this postcard view of the long-lost Carleton Building, whose decorated mass once stood proudly at the northeast corner of Sixth and Olive streets. Designed by architect Theodore C. Link, the Carleton was completed in 1899. The building’s owners bestowed the name honoring businessman Murray Carleton upon completion. Fronting 50 feet on Olive Street and 114 feet on Sixth Street, the ten-story building seems small by contemporary standards but received considerable attention in its time.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch announced construction on October 8, 1898. The newspaper reported that the Reliance Building Company had secured a 99-year lease from the owner of the site, Mrs. Virginia Peugnet. Reliance Building Company evicted the Mermod-Jaccard Company, jewelers, from the building standing on the site, which they demolished. The builder of the new, yet-unnamed building was Hill O’Meara Construction Company. According to the National Register nomination for the Hadley-Dean Glass Company Building, written by Carolyn H. Toft, construction of the Carleton Building required the manufacture of the largest piece of plate glass made to that date.

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Categories
Fire Hospitals South St. Louis

St. Mary’s Infirmary

We were saddened to get the news this morning that the historic St. Mary’s Infirmary suffered a three-alarm fire last night. Perhaps the most significant association of the building is its connection to African-American history. The hospital entered an important new phase in 1933, when it became the city’s second African-American hospital with the city’s first-ever racially integrated medical staff. Later that year, the Sisters of St. Mary also opened a nursing school for African-American candidates, creating the city’s second school of nursing open to African-Americans and the nation’s first Catholic nursing school that admitted African-Americans.

Here we are posting the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the complex, written by Michael R. Allen.

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Categories
Parking

Jones on Parking and the Treasurer’s Office

Last night Tishaura Jones won a four-way Democratic primary for City Treasurer. From her campaign website comes this statement about parking policy. Currently, the Parking Division is under the control of the City Treasurer, with revenue collected from parking not placed directly in the city’s coffers.

Treasurer Larry Williams used his office to help finance the parking garage at Seventh and Olive streets. Visually atrocious, the "hubcap palace" is rarely ever more than half full.

Here is Jones’ statement:

No major city in the US has a “Parking Czar” that controls the building of city garages and where parking meters are placed. The primary function of the Treasurer’s office should be to collect, manage, and invest the city’s funds…period. If elected, I will work with other city elected officials and the Missouri Legislature to transfer this function to the appropriate department and concentrate on increasing the return on investment of the $1.5 billion currently under management.

Categories
Ladue Mid-Century Modern St. Louis County

The Schweiss House: Bernoudy-Mutrux’s Parallelogram Dwelling

by Michael R. Allen

The Schweiss House, located at 4 Daniel Road in Ladue, is one of two diminutive houses on geometric modules completed in 1952 by the master modern firm Bernoudy-Mutrux. The other house is the triangular Pinkney House in Columbia, Missouri. (The firm’s Simms House, also from 1952, is based on a parallelogram grid but is not a small house.) William A. Bernoudy and Edouard J. Mutrux’s partnership had formed in 1946 and would last until 1965, with Henry Bauer added as partner in 1955. Together, the pair explored the use of parallelogram and triangular modular layouts for Modern Movement homes both small and large. The partnership’s work in applying geometric modules was inspired partially by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and his Usonian Houses, which include the Kraus House at Ebsworth Park (1949-1955) that dramatically employed a cross plan of parallelogram grids. As with the Kraus House, here the clients would do much of the construction work themselves.

Photograph of the floor plan.
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Categories
National Register North St. Louis O'Fallon Uncategorized

O’Fallon Park Historic District Nominated to National Register of Historic Places

Today the St. Louis Preservation Board will consider recommending approval of the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the O’Fallon Park Historic District. This meeting is the first step toward listing the historic neighborhood in the National Register. After today, the nomination heads to the biggest step: consideration by the Missouri Advisory Council of Historic Preservation at its next public meeting on August 17.


View O’Fallon Park Historic District in a larger map

If the Advisory Council approves the nomination, it will be sent to the National Park Service for final listing. Depending on the length of that consideration, the O’Fallon Park Historic District might be listed in the National Register of Historic Places by the end of October. State and federal historic rehabilitation tax credits would be available immediately.

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Categories
Central West End Midtown Severe Weather

Disasters on Lindell Boulevard, Past and Present

by Michael R. Allen

The loss of the apartment building at 3949 Lindell Boulevard (rebuilt in 2009 after a 2007 fire) after a devastating fire on Monday has raised questions about lightweight construction’s fire resistance. Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson has questioned whether the city can stand the risk of allowing the construction of buildings like the lost apartment building, which had an open attic with only drywall partition fire stops. The roaring fire quickly ate these thin, flammable stops, and raced across the top of the building in a matter of minutes.

3949 Lindell Boulevard on fire at around 9:00 p.m. Monday.

The fire chief’s concerns are appropriate. Although no lives were lost, the construction of 3949 Lindell Boulevard clearly was not adequate to resist what started as a small fire on the fourth floor. The wake of the fire might lead to revisions to the city’s building code reminiscent of past changes that have shifted away from requiring fireproof masonry construction. In 1961, the city created its first code that permitted exterior wall systems — “curtain walls” — to not include any masonry. Subsequent revisions have modified provisions in concert with both changes in building technology and the desires of developers who wish to lower constructions costs while shortening building times.

Monday’s fire brought to mind the impact of another disaster on Lindell Boulevard. On September 27, 1927, a major tornado raced northeasterly through the city. Damage on Lindell Boulevard stretched from Vandeventer Avenue west to Taylor avenue, and many buildings were destroyed completely while others were badly damaged.

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Events

Pruitt-Igoe Tour and Film Screening, July 26

A playground at Pruitt-Igoe. Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.
A Pruitt-Igoe sidewalk tour and screening of the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth will begin at 6 p.m. July 26 at the St. Louis Fire Department Training Auditorium, 1421 Jefferson Ave. in St. Louis (63106). Michael Allen, director of the Preservation Research Office, a St. Louis-based historic preservation and architectural research organization, will lead the tour at 6 p.m.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which will be shown at 7 p.m., uses the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and its residents to tell the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II.

A panel discussion will follow the film screening.

The event is sponsored by the St. Louis Metropolitan Research Exchange and the Institute for Urban Research at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. STLMRE is a consortium of academic scholars from universities and institutions across the St. Louis metropolitan area, including Terry Jones, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and Mark Tranel, director of the Public Policy Research Center at UMSL.

The event is free. Contact Rebecca Pastor at 314-516-5277 or rebecca@umsl.edu to register.

Categories
Events

Happy Hour Talk on the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Subdivisions Tomorrow



Botanical Grove Happy Hour & Speaker Series With Michael Allen
Wednesday, June 18 from 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. (talk at 6:00 p.m.)
1624 Tower Grove Avenue

Come grab a (free) cold Urban Chestnut brew and a delicious crepe from Holy Crepe Food Truck and listen to acclaimed Architectural Historian Michael Allen discuss the history of the subdivisions around the Missouri Botanical Garden — including Gurney Court. Allen will discuss the Missouri Botanical Garden’s twentieth century effort to develop lands once held for garden expansion into a unique middle-class streetcar suburb that maintains its lovely character to this day.