Categories
Media People

Save William Stage

From Eric Seelig:

Did you ever like Street Talk, the man-on-the-street section in the Riverfront Times? Did you ever like William Stage’s old running column in the days when the RFT had editorials? Now might be a good time to write to the RFT. As you may have read in last week’s issue, William gave a goodbye message at the end of the “Best of Street Talk 2004,” but as I found out last night, this is not his choice, and if possible, he’d like to keep his job with the RFT. The only real reason given for replacing the column is because the higher-ups wanted a new column, and saw getting rid of one that’s been running for 22 years as the only way to accomplish it. I don’t know about you, but I always liked Street Talk, and I don’t see any point to eliminating it except possibly “eliminate personality from the newspaper.” If you’d like to see Street Talk continued in the RFT, or would at least like to see William keeps his job instead of being dropped just because the RFT could, NOTIFY THEM, and tell other people who might be unhappy about this to do likewise:
feedback@riverfronttimes.com
Tom.Finkel@riverfronttimes.com

Eric

Categories
Clearance McRee Town South St. Louis

The Destruction of McRee Town: December 2004

Photographs taken by Michael R. Allen on December 29, 2004

Views of the 3900 block of Lafayette Avenue

The corner of 39th and Lafayette, seen in the first photograph, was once the southern corner of McRee Town’s bustling 39th Street business district. The only remaining business on 39th Street in McRee Town is the St. Louis Architectural Art Company, which is on the east side of 39th and is unaffected by the clearance. The fences are part of the new development, which will leave all lots along 39th Street empty and enclosed.

“Dead Center”: Lawrence Avenue at McRee Avenue

This was the corner where the neighborhood grocery store stood just a few months earlier. Under the new project, this area will be left open as park space. Yet one assumes that the new residents will be humans and will require food and drink from some source.

Views of the 4000 block of Lafayette Avenue

Five buildings remained on the north side of this block, three of which were still occupied as of December 29, 2004. The twin two-flats below were the occupied, while the other two-flat shown below was unoccupied. Crews were working on tree removal in the 3900 block of Lafayette and were preparing to chop down the trees visible in these photographs.

Views of the 4000 block of McRee Avenue

Views of the 3900 Block of Blaine Avenue

The subdivision started booming in early December. Over six new homes were under construction alongside the three display buildings. People were moving into two of the display townhouse units.

Categories
Century Building Demolition Downtown

Night Wrecking at the Century Building

Photographs from December 27 and 29 by Michael R. Allen


Categories
Century Building Downtown

Old Post Office Project Clears Last Legal Hurdle

From the December 24 St. Louis Business Journal:

Judge ejects suit against Old Post Office tax credits

Categories
Century Building Demolition Downtown

The Demolition of the Century Building: Erasing the Edges

Photographs by Michael R. Allen

Categories
Century Building Demolition Downtown

We Lose More Than the Century Building

by Michael R. Allen

Published in The Commonspace, December 2004.

Many readers know that with the ongoing demolition of the Century Building, downtown Saint Louis has been altered forever. With each swing of the wrecking ball comes another dislocated load of precious marble, steel and other parts of a formidable building that refuses to die easily. Each swing, however, takes this city closer to the sad day on which nothing resembling the great Century Building will stand on Ninth Street. The ruptured streetscape will only get worse as the demolition progresses and, inevitably, the replacement structure—a dull and lifeless parking garage to serve Steve Stogel and the DFC Group’s Old Post Office renovation—begins to rise.

Everyone knows that the Century Building will never return. Few realize that something even greater disappears with the Century Building: the last intact district of great office buildings in all of downtown and the city.

That’s right; after the demolition is finished, there will be no spot anywhere in St. Louis where one can stand and be completely surrounded by the magnificent historic office buildings that made this city’s downtown a worthy—and perhaps superior—architectural competitor to Chicago’s. Nowhere. There are other impressive parts of downtown, notably along Washington Avenue, where one can stand and be surrounded by grand late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century wholesale commercial buildings, remnants of America’s second-largest garment district. Yet there is not a single district like the Old Post Office office building district, the definite core of downtown since the 1880’s.

Throughout the debate over preserving the Century Building, no one made this point very well. Many people mentioned other sound reasons for preserving the Century Building: old building are superior to parking garages and bland new construction; its date of construction, 1896, makes it one of the oldest downtown office buildings; its marble facade is a singularity in the Midwest, if not in America; its history as one of the first hybrid office buildings in St. Louis, replete with theater; home to the famous Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney department store and the local White Star Line—remember the R.M.S. Titanic?—office; its undeniably majestic beauty; and the fact that the Century Building generates more street-level activity than a huge and disruptive parking garage.

While these are great arguments for preserving the Century Building, they are but elements of a larger argument for retaining the architectural integrity of the Old Post Office district. At the Ninth and Olive intersection stands an amazing array of buildings: Alfred B. Mullett’s Old Post Office, the visual anchor of eastern downtown since its completion in 1882 and the current rationale for the Century Building’s woes; the 1906 Frisco Building, by one of St. Louis’s most prolific and important architectural firms, Eames and Young; the 1926 Paul Brown Building by Preston Bradshaw, currently under renovation; and the Century Building, by the Chicago firm of Raeder and Coffin. Up and down Ninth Street are the Mark Twain (formerly Maryland) Hotel, by St. Louisan Albert Groves and featuring some of the most whimsical ornamental pieces made by local Winkle Terra Cotta Company, and the 1891 Board of Education Building by Issac Taylor, a highly prolific and important local architect.

Along Olive, of course, is a lovely canyon that is no longer architecturally intact but still retains a highly urban scale. Immediate to the Ninth and Olive intersection are H.E. Roach’s 1906 Syndicate Trust Building, joined to the Century since 1912; the combined landmarks of the 1906 Wright Building by Eames and Young and the 1918 Arcade Building by Tom Barnett; and the stunning Romanesque Revival first headquarters of Bell Telephone, from 1888 and designed by the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. To both east and west along Olive, other landmarks abound. Many of these buildings replaced earlier spectacular office buildings.

This district earlier lost some of its coherence with the 1969 addition of the towering Laclede Gas Building at Eighth and Olive as well as with the 1971 demolition of the Victoria Building, which was the rebuilt 1893 St. Nicholas Hotel by none other than Louis Sullivan and the pointless removal of the upper floors of Isaac Taylor’s 1891 Columbia Building (now Hamilton Jewelers). Both of these buildings were at the corner of Eighth and Locust. Also lost on this corner was the entire row of small commercial buildings that stood north of the Victoria Building along Locust, the last of which was demolished in 2001. Still, the Old Post Office core remains incredibly intact, especially around the corner of Ninth and Olive.

I offer all of these names and dates not only to catalog the importance of the intersection but also to offer glimpses into the larger interplay of St. Louis architectural history in which the Century Building is situated. Of course, the Century Building is an inherently valuable structure, but its value is enhanced by its neighborhood—just as it enhances its neighbors’ value. Each of the collection of buildings near Ninth and Olive exhibits a remarkable sympathy to the others, with elegant variations in materials, color, style and massing.

The Old Post Office district, however grand, takes a definite second place behind the even grander office building district that radiated from the corner of Seventh and Olive. That district, of course, is long gone. Steady demolition along Seventh ensured that a good deal of it was gone before I was born in 1980, and almost all of it was gone before I was old enough to pay serious attention. Many of us watched in agony in 1997 as Mercantile Bank attacked one of its last survivors, the ornate Ambassador Building, to build a bland plaza that has become a driveway. Others may recall the earlier and still greater loss in this district in the early 1980’s, which shares some similarities with the Century Building demolition.

In the early 1980’s, St. Louis civic leaders lead by H. Edwin Trusheim promoted one of the worst designs ever to hit downtown: that of the “half-mall” completion of the Gateway Mall, that band of parkland stretching west between Market and Chestnut Streets from the Arch grounds to 22nd Street. This half-mall plan resulted not only in the destruction of one of the key blocks in the Seventh Street district but also in the construction of the horribly ugly Gateway One building right where older, more dignified buildings sat.

As in the case of the Century Building, civic leaders claimed—in the face of intense opposition from preservationists and the general public—that the demolition of significant historic office buildings actually helped save other buildings by making downtown as a whole more vital. Just like the Century Building demolition, this demolition led to the construction of an ugly structure that killed sidewalk life on its block. And, as with the Century Building case, the demolition did nothing to help revive downtown—it effected the reverse by destroying one of the most important architectural blocks and eliminating one of the last bits of vibrant street life south of Chestnut.

Back then, the victims were the stunning collection of buildings on the block bounded by Seventh and Eighth streets on the east and west and Market and Chestnut streets on the south and north, respectively. These were the 1898 Lincoln Trust (Title Guaranty) Building, by Eames and Young; the 1902 Missouri Pacific (Buder) Building, by William Swasey; and the 1906 Liggett (International) Building, also by Eames and Young. I won’t even get into the merits of these great buildings here. All three were gone by 1984.

Suffice to say, these buildings worked with each other and others—a few gone even before these—to form a harmonious and picturesque district of great office buildings centered around Louis Sullivan’s pioneering achievement, the 1891 Wainwright Building. These buildings expanded upon Sullivan’s ingenious triumph without overwhelming it. From the Buder Building at Seventh and Market up to the Ambassador Building at Seventh and Locust, this district’s buildings complimented each other through sophisticated variety of materials and colors, structural and stylistic experimentation and density of construction. This district served as a majestic corridor of commerce linking the northern downtown core, centered around the Old Post Office, with the southern Cupples Station warehouse district—which has been horribly devastated since the construction of Busch Stadium claimed half of the district and current “revitalization” plans have led to another demolition.

All that’s left today are the two downtown Sullivan buildings, the Wainright and the 1893 Union Trust Building at Seventh and Olive and two white terra cotta survivors also at Seventh and Olive, the looming 1914 Railway Exchange Building by Mauran, Russell and Garden, and the diminutive 1910 Louis Curtiss-designed Gill Building, which faces an uncertain future. That’s all. The fourth building at the corner of Seventh and Olive is a new, grossly overstated new parking garage that sits empty most of the time.

The Old Post Office district has not lost as many component buildings as the Seventh Street corridor. The fact that the Century Building was seriously considered for demolition in order to build an adjunct parking garage for another building is outrageous if one assumes that things are very good for downtown. If one instead assumes that downtown is caught in another speculation-driven bubble like the one that burst in the mid-1980s—not to mention the earlier bubble of the late 1960’s—the demolition makes sense. Recall that there was much talk about renovation and widespread support for preservation then, but stupid demolition decisions were still common.

One can also recall the 1998 demolition of the Marquette Building Annex on Broadway, which produced a bulky parking garage that stole sidewalk space and did nothing to further the renovation of the attached Marquette Building, which remains largely empty. This blunder pales in comparison to the Gateway Mall destruction, but serves as a direct and recent parable for the future of the Old Post Office project. The hype of the Marquette Garage’s saving power was totally false.

I’ll admit that the hype of the earlier waves of downtown reinvestment led to the renovation of many buildings, but only those deemed affordable to save. Many others were torn down, with horrible consequences. Somehow, the Old Post Office core made it out of the demolition spree to survive as the last place downtown where anyone could experience the elegant office building core as a living environment. Now, it becomes a memory—an abstract greatness that future generations may never believe existed.

Ironically, part of the earlier hype in downtown St. Louis was the renovation of the Old Post Office, reopened triumphantly in 1982. By 1996, the building’s doors were locked on weekends and the building fell into such disuse that less than 25 years after its grand re-opening it is once again the subject of redevelopment. This time, though, the Old Post Office will reopen slightly out of context and more than a little less elegant with a hulking concrete garage glaring from where solid Georgia marble once responded to the its ornate Second Empire lines. The old context—a relationship between buildings—will no longer exist in the same way as before.

Such beautiful contexts are the results of consistent accumulation of design choices. When planners make these choices carefully, districts like the Old Post Office core and the Seventh Street corridor emerge. When planners consistently make careless choices when altering existing districts, these districts become diminished over time until they become crude and disjointed collections of buildings. So goes downtown Saint Louis.

Categories
Chicago Louis Sullivan People Salvage

The Legacy of Richard Nickel

by Michael R. Allen

Today at the Chicago Cultural Center I attended a slide-show presentation of Richard Nickel‘s photographs of the buildings of Adler and Sullivan, given by Ward Miller of the Richard Nickel Committee. The slide-show included lesser-known color photographs of such notable buildings by the firm, including the Auditorium Building, the Ann Halstead Flats and the Jewelers Building. I was awed once again by the sensitivity to architectural detail that Nickel imparted in each of his images. He articulated buildings in another language than architecture, and thus made them greater than they were when he found them.

As a fitting summation of the day’s introspection, I found this essay online tonight: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by Dan Kelly. Kelly traces minor buildings and fragments of Chicago buildings by Adler and Sullivan — the ones Frank Lloyd Wright discouraged Nickel from including in his unpublished Complete Works of Adler and Sullivan — and concludes:

“…the most minor buildings that construct the city’s neighborhoods are always “missed” when they’re gone, most often because no one bothered to notice them when they were still here. It follows that preservation isn’t just about landmark status or collecting museum-quality ornamental scraps; it’s about noticing what builds a neighborhood into a neighborhood. The city’s blandest buildings can possess rich histories.”

Indeed. This insight had to be what drove Nickel to keep working, and it’s what drives this blog. Hopefully, we will help people avoid the “missing” of buildings and, with more effort, the losses themselves.

Categories
Abandonment Chicago Midtown Theaters

Two Theaters That Closed in 1981

New to Ecology of Absence today are pages on two theaters on two different scales in two different cities that closed in the same year, 1981. Neither has reopened and both are deteriorating badly. Yet the future looks brighter than ever for both.

They are:

  • Chicago’s Uptown Theatre
  • Saint Louis’s Sun Theatre

    (For perspective on the timeframe of the vacancies, consider that I was born on December 31, 1980.)

  • Categories
    Downtown

    Closing Locust

    by Michael R. Allen

    A thread on the Urban St. Louis discussion forum shows that the Federal Reserve Bank is closing Locust Street between 4th and Broadway to build a “security plaza.” This plan leaves me with mixed feelings. I never like to see any streets closed in downtown St. Louis, because inevitably they close to assemble dead super blocks. On the other hand, I am a staunch opponent of automobile traffic in downtown areas, because such traffic is unnecessary in a small, walkable downtown like the one in St. Louis. Traffic also perpetuates the myth of the need for parking, which leads to many bad planning decisions, like the one that created the ugly parking garage at Broadway and Locust that the Federal Reserve Bank acquired for their “plaza” project.

    This plaza may be a great place to sit and avoid traffic for the handful of downtowners who like to enjoy just being in a dense and busy environment while they read or otherwise relax. Or it could be a dead space in which the Bank’s security will usher away any loungers or geeky photographers in the name of protecting the bank from terrorism.

    Two undoubtedly good things come out of this project, though: the plaza’s replacement of the street makes the visual blunder of the aforementioned parking garage, which was built over the sidewalk, a tad less offensive; and the plaza project coincides with the restoration of the grand Romanesque Security Building (now fully caught up in irony), completed in 1891 and designed by the Boston firm of Peabody, Stearns and Furber–their only St. Louis project.

    As to the other results, we’ll see what happens. I tend to think that it will be another dead space in this age of paranoia.

    Categories
    Century Building Demolition Downtown Salvage

    Terror on Ninth Street

    by Michael R. Allen

    I visited Saint Louis last week, and spent some time in the Century Building. Yes, I was inside of the remains of the grandest marble building ever built. The experience was chilling, bizarre and intense. It would have been even more intense if I had made the visit with my colleague Claire Nowak-Boyd, but she had obligations that kept her home in Chicago while I went ahead with a truly terrible trip.

    Last Wednesday morning, I was downtown in St. Louis, walking without an umbrella in the near-freezing rain to go to the Century. No one was there to let me in, so I wandered around and come back in an hour via MetroLink. As I ascended from the Eighth and Pine station, I heard a crack overhead and suddenly a light shower of glass mingled with the rain literally falling around me. I saw a set of vertical blinds flying in the strong wind many stories above. My first thought is that the workers at the Paul Brown Building had knocked their boom crane against the Arcade Building, causing a window to break. Then, a quick glance above revealed that a window had broken out in the Laclede Gas Building above.

    A worker walking by turned to me and said, “That’s the problem with those windows. They don’t open and close, so they make a vacuum and the wind just sucks them out.”

    Right on. Needless to say, the window now sports a plywood bandage.

    I kept walking and, a few moments later, was inside of the fence at the Century Building, meeting up with salvager Larry Giles to get my hard hat. Then I went inside of the gruesome wreckage of the old gem. I watched as Larry and his two workers desparately began assembling bracing for the Ninth Street arch that he is trying to preserve in its entirety.

    Water dripped consistently above the spot where Larry and his workers were working. The roof was removed weeks ago and there are some holes in the second floor due to the wrecking activities. Otherwise, the structure is fine even if slightly weakened. I believe that one could devise a workable plan to rebuild the building even in this late stage of demolition. The street frame with its exterior concrete piers is holding up well, as is the facade. Demolition of the corners has not damaged the intergrity of other spots in the building. Oh, well.

    (The next day, another worker headed to the Board of Education Building rehab walks by and states to me that he thinks that the Century Building could be saved as-is if demolition stopped, and glass structures were built to encapsulate the corner areas and roof. Hmmm.)

    At any rate, Larry informed me that the wrecking plan was altered to accomodate complaints from the Bell Lofts at Tenth and Olive; now, wrecking has to proceed from Locust to Olive, catching the arch in the middle. The original plan called for wrecking the corners first and then wrecking the building from the Syndicate Trust Building wall eastward toward the Ninth Street elevation. The arch would have been in the last area to be wrecked.

    Hopefully, though, the salvage efforts will be completed without interference. Saving the entire arched entrance ornament system is a remarkable achievement that could only be bested by saving the entire building on-site.

    Wednesday’s weather escalated into snow by mid-day, so the wreckers and Larry’s crew both stopped work after lunch.

    When I returned to the site on Friday, the weather had improved and both operations were back in action, as they had been on Thanksgiving (hopefully Saint Louisans are thankful that Larry and his crew have been working seven days a week on this important and grueling task). I was able to take many good photographs that I will share on the EOA site later this week.

    While the work was going on, I shuffled around the columns, open elevator shafts — some still framed with original Winslow Brothers cast iron framing — and piles of debris from the upper floors (the whole building is considerably smashed and somewhat unstable). The old Walgreens’ store space still sported macabre signs, one almost reading “BEAUTY” but missing some letters because the wall had been smashed out. The upper floors have been thoroughly gutted, but the ground floor’s shops paces are still full of furniture and a few old computers, buried under debris.

    Being inside of the Century Building during demolition was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was plainly terrible to observe the signs of structural ingenuity exposed before destruction in addition to seeing the decorative beauty trampled. As the building continues to fall, more of the things that made it great are exposed in a grim irony.

    As I said to Larry Giles while looking up through the archway at the Old Post Office as snow fell, this view never existed before and it’s beautiful as much as it is gruesome. But I never, ever wanted to even know that such a view existed.