Preservation Research Officeby Michael R. Allen
Urban Review St. Louis reports that the Doering Mansion is almost gone. Demolition began last week.
Also nearly gone this week is the art deco Regal Theater on Martin Luther King Boulevard. I have been following the saga there and hope to post more information and photographs on our website soon. In the meantime, the other endangered art deco movie house in town, the
by Michael R. Allen
Franchon and Marco (later Arthur Theatres) built the Regal Theater on Easton Avenue (later named for Martin Luther King) in 1937, with their regular architect Arthur Stauder as the likely designer. Stauder designed the same chain’s Avalon Theater on South Kingshighway, which opened just two years earlier. The 846-seat theater cost $15,000.00 to build, and was an impressive three-story buff-brick Art Deco composition. The first floor was clad in lovely blue marble, enhancing the dreamy atmosphere of the movies, while the upper two floors emphasized the linear geometry of the brickwork. End bays carries alternating vertical bands of two brick tones, while the central section carried zig-zag bands above and below a central checkerboard-patterned area. Inside, the finish was not as exciting. A balcony contained 200 of the theater’s seats, and the restrooms were oddly located on the balcony level.
The theater closed in 1986. A photograph of the theater circa 2002, when it still had its vertical sign, appears in Eric Post’s book of nighttime photographs, Ghost Town.
Sadly, the theater never found a new life, and fell into the hands of the city government’s real estate agency, which proved to be a neglectful steward. While the area declined, new development spurred by the demolition of federally-subsidized high-rise housing never included this grand movie theater, which could have provided an excellent community space in a neighborhood lacking many ties to its past. In early 2006, the city had the Regal Theater demolished to make way for a church parking lot expansion.
Coincidentally, Chicago also had a Regal Theater, albeit one more famous than the one in St. Louis. The Regal Theater in Chicago was also located on a street named for Martin Luther King, but met its demise in 1973.
by Michael R. Allen
In his lifetime, Louis Sullivan designed many buildings. Of his designs, 238 were built. As of Friday, only 50 still stood — and one of them, Kehilath Anshe Ma’ ariv Synagogue (Later Pilgrim Baptist Church burned on that same day.
The interior and unique roof was totally lost, and the limestone exterior walls are left unstable.
The historic synagogue was one of the most formative designs in the collaboration of Dankmar Adler and Sullivan, demonstrating Adler’s deft structural mind and the maturation of Sullivan’s patterns of ornament.
The Place Where We Live has more information: Adler & Sullivan Historic Church Destroyed by Fire
Hopefully, the walls can be stabilized even if the interior spaces and roof structure are lost forever. The city of Chicago and the world cannot afford to lose the last traces of a Louis Sullivan building. By now, the callous city that tore down so many before may realize just how valuable Sullivan’s work really is.
Or not.
Chicago continues to drain its heritage: CTA platform expansion has claimed both the 1929 Hays-Healy Gymnasium at DePaul University as well as the Co-Operative Temperance Society Building (lately housing the Bottom Lounge) at Wilton and Belmont; Marshall Field’s will become Macy’s in September; the landmark Berghoff restaurant will close February 28; yet another turreted corner building is threatened; and so forth.
by Michael R. Allen
The building at 3206 N. Wilton Avenue housing Chicago all-ages venue the Bottom Lounge was demolished by early 2006 to make way for an expansion of the Belmont El station. At the time, the main story was that Chicago was sadly losing another all-ages venue due to technicalities in laws assisting the relocation of businesses. No one seemed to remember the history behind the building, despite the inexplicable painted-over sign reading “Cooperative Temperance Cafe – Idrott” that appeared above its storefront openings.
The building during demolition on December 31, 2005.
The design alone inspired intrigue. The basic form as the average early twentieth century flat-roofed Chicago Arts & Crafts commercial building. Yet the details were odd: yellow brick above a storefront ribbon trimmed with intricate terra cotta pieces that pleasantly clashed with the upper level even after being subjected to later painting schemes. (Demolition robbed us of the chance to see if the terra cotta was polychromatic.) The storefront ornament was part Spanish Revival, part Moorish and part Renaissance Revival and contained a lovely arcade entrance (see photograph).
Detail of the entrance arcade.
Through this entrance passed many young people headed to a show, including the editors of Ecology of Absence. (This is where we saw Bobby Conn and the Glass Gypsies as well as Weird War perform on the day after Ronald Reagan’s death.) But long before that phase, the building was built for an idealistic experiment that also was an important part of the social fabric of Lakeview: the Cooperative Temperance Society Cafe, also known as Idrott.
The local society had its roots in the Cooperative Movement, an almost socialist consumers’ movement. The center of the movement was the Cooperative League, based in New York and founded in 1916, which aimed to promote a world “whereby the people, in voluntary association, produce and distribute for their own use the things they need.”
In 1913, a Chicago group composed of 75 young Swedish people, elected to open a cafe and club known as “Idrott” (Swedish for “sport”) on Wilton Avenue just north of Belmont Avenue. The organization existed to promote temperance and athletics as well as to provide a place for Swedish immigrants to speak and read in the native language while in a new country. The principles of the club were based on self-sufficiency, thrift and sharing. The goal of the cafe was to provide good food at good prices with fair ages paid to staff. The society decided to limit membership to ten new members each year. Later, the group became an important part of the Cooperative Movement although never an official affiliate of the Cooperative League. The society built a new building at the Wilton Avenue location, adding a bakery, meat department, library, game room, overnight rooms and mail delivery for members. The operation was renamed the Cooperative Temperance Cafe, with the old name noted on the exterior. By 1926, there were 200 members and the organization opened a branch cafe at 5248 N. Clark Street. All surplus funds raised by the club were used for expansion and educational efforts, so that there was no profit to any member or to the club.
The Cooperative League became the National Cooperative Business Association and still exists. The Chicago group eventually folded, and the building became home to Lakeview Links, later the Bottom Lounge, in 1991. More information about the history of the Cooperative Movement and the Cooperative Temperance Society can be found in the archives of Co-Op Magazine, where I gleaned some of my information.
by Michael R. Allen
From CraigsList St. Louis comes this ad:
I have Two 2-story Brick houses that i would like demolitioned. The bricks are yours to keep as long as the property is demolitioned and all debris removed by way of dumping at an official/legitamite dumping site. Must obtain proper permits & adhere to city code & regulations.
Please only reply if you have the equipment for this job and proof of your ability to complete the job as well as remove all bricks from the site.
Thank you.
Now, I wonder if this person knows about the city’s preservation review ordinance. Of course, there’s a good chance that the ward in which these homes are located is exempt from review.
Photographs by Michael R. Allen
By the middle of December, only rubble from the above-ground structure of the stadium was left. Wreckers were busy removing this rubble and excavating foundations so that the new stadium could be completed in time for the opening of the baseball season in April 2006.
Photographs by Michael R. Allen
by Michael R. Allen
The buildings still standing on June 8, 2005. Photograph by Michael R. Allen.
Built in the period of 1893-1895 by Clemens Eckhoff, the buildings at 2013-15, 2017-19 and 2023-25 Palm Avenue in Old North were sturdy Mansard-style four-flat buildings. Eckhoff owned the Eckhoff (later Valley) Furniture Company operating across the alley from these buildings at 21st and Branch and developed much of the area around his factory. In addition to these buildings, he also built two buildings on 21st Street in the same period.
Sadly, these three buildings fell empty in the 1970s and 1980s and sustained the usual structural problems brought to old buildings by water and stupid people. Vandalism came quickly, followed by collapsing rear walls. Unpaid taxes led the ownership of 2013-15 and 2023-25 as well as the buildings on 21st Street to the hands of the city’s Land Reutilization Authority. In the 1990s, the owner of 2017-19 Palm wrecked the building and recently sold the cleared lot to a suspicious group of speculators organized as Blairmont Associates LC.
2023-25 Palm Street on June 8, 2005.
2033-15 Palm Street on June 8, 2005.
In summer 2004, I suspected that demolition may be on the way. Palm Avenue is not enjoying as much reinvestment as the rest of Old North St. Louis and that reinvestment is a fragile things itself. Buildings in more desirable neighborhood locations have fallen in the last three years, too. We visited the buildings and took photographs. We saw a hopeful sign: Someone was working on a gut rehab across Palm that is now nearing completion. The buildings slipped out of active recall as I progressed on purchasing and rehabbing a home in the neighborhood, until we learned from a resident on Palm that demolition had commenced.
According to this resident, demolition of 2013-15 Palm began on Saturday, November 5, 2005 and was complete within a week. The lot has already been graded and a new sidewalk poured. Our neighbor says that demolition of 2023-25 Palm began on Monday, November 7. Much of the building still stands, although wreckers have been working steadily at taking it down.
The specifics of the demolition of these buildings are distressing. First of all, neither building’s demolition went through demolition review by the city’s Cultural Resources Office. Such review is mandatory for all buildings considered contributing resources in a National Register of Historic Places district. The buildings on Palm Avenue are indeed contributing resources to the Murphy-Blair Historic District (listed in 1984). Secondly, no one in the neighborhood received notice of the forthcoming demolition. Lastly, on the day of the demolition, a representative of a private development company visited the site and observed the proceedings while talking on a cellular phone. Could this person be connected to Blairmont?
Also distressing is that this unlawful demolition cannot be stopped. The city government enforces its own laws, so its actions occur largely outside of the scope of law enforcement. The only recourse in this case would have been a lawsuit seeking a restraining injunction, and that recourse is meaningless once work has already commenced (as painfully learned in the Century Building case).
The only good news is that the city government stopped an illegal demolition by a private owner at 1501 Palm Avenue recently, and intervened before much damage had been done. For some reason, however, fortune was set against the buildings down the block.
by Michael R. Allen
The much-publicized demolition stunt at Busch Stadium yesterday was as uninspiring and uninteresting as the new stadium itself. At 3:00 p.m., the first swing of the wrecking ball occurred. Yet it was swung from inside of the stadium, on which demolition really started ten days prior, and could not be seen from sidewalk level anywhere nearby. The only visible damage seen was the demolished mezzanine ramp, which had come down prior to yesterday (although few fans seemed to notice.) A small cheer started to rise up from the crowd long after the first swing, at about the moment when most people realized that wrecking had commenced. But it died as quickly as people started walking back to work.
Soon to be gone forever is one of the city’s most popular landmarks and one of its most successful works of mid-century modern design. The design itself is testament to the civic fortitude of a past generation: upon seeing Sverdrup & Parcel’s truly bland U-shaped stadium design, Howard Baer urged his fellow leaders to make something lovelier. The leaders brought in iconoclast Edward Durrell Stone, who redesigned the stadium as a round structure with a thin-shell concrete roof that repeated the curve of the new Gateway Arch. When the Arch was completed in October 1965 and the new Busch Stadium opened the following spring, Durrell’s genius was evident. The stadium and the Arch were inseparable works of modern design, and quickly became the symbols of new St. Louis.
Today’s civic fortitude and care for design must be hiding under the drive to enhance private reception of baseball in luxury boxes. Even the old love for putting on a show for the whole public seems dead. In the old days, wreckers like Spirtas would have done something dramatic. The Cardinals cancelled an implosion when they fell ahead of schedule on completion of the new stadium, a decision that will save money and avoid spectacle. Nowadays, even the passing of a landmark like Busch Stadium is treated like a neutral even by city leaders. The suggestion the Cardinals propaganda makes is that the demolition is a non-event that will be over before we realize it is going on. They promise the noise and dust won’t be too extreme, the season will start on-time at the new stadium and nothing will be out of the ordinary. The new stadium itself is almost a non-building, with its trite, neutral appearance.
Demolition, however, is very much out of the ordinary. The psychological impact of seeing a landmark destroyed is big, and once there is a huge pile of rubble where Busch Stadium once stood the spin will be hard to justify. There will be a disruption.
The Stadium will be gone, and a scar will be left in its place. At the rate it will take the Cardinals to redevelop the old site, the city and its residents will be faced with that scar for a long time to come.