Category: Demolition

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Demolition Downtown Terra Cotta

Locust Street Breathes Again

by Michael R. Allen

Our landmark Railway Exchange Building, home of Macy’s Department Store, breathed a sigh of relief last week as the last bit of the monstrous St. Louis Centre sky bridge over Locust Street came down. The wide, tall bridge connected the second through fifth floors of the department store space to the mall, and blocked views of the building’s north elevation.

Completed in 1913 and designed by Mauran, Russell & Crowell, the Railway Exchange occupies the entire city block between Olive, 6th, Locust and 7th streets. The 21-story mass is adorned with 183,000 white-glazed terra cotta tiles by St. Louis’ Winkle Terra Cotta Company. The tiles display a wealth of original work and Italian Renaissance-derived patterns. For the past 25 years, only three sides of the building have been fully displayed.

Removal shows that the sky bridge construction in 1984-1985 did entail grinding away of the faces of many tiles, but the damage is not as extensive as it could have been. Most of the area was simply coated with fire-proofing spray.

As with the former Stix-Baer and Fuller department store building to the south (coincidentally designed by the same firm), some replication of terra cotta is ahead. The Railway Exchange’s north elevation will again shine, perhaps with a substitute material (hopefully not a plastic-based one!) or perhaps with the real thing. Recent replacement work on the Orpheum Theater used actual new clay terra cotta pieces. Terra cotta is still manufactured in Italy, but there may be fewer than a half-dozen American makers. When the Railway Exchange was built, there were many makers domestically but none finer than our own Winkle Company.

The Railway Exchange has repair work ahead, but already Locust Street is a restored place. With both of St. Louis Centre’s sky bridges demolished, we have reversed one of the worst atrocities of the 1980’s urban renewal era in St. Louis. At an event Sunday, someone asked me if the Gateway One of the Mall building’s demolition could be far behind.

I won’t bet on that event happening soon, and I would certainly prioritize projects that reclaim the public space of the street eroded in the post-modern era.  (Also, with the mass of the bridge gone, the loss of density through demolition on Locust between 7th and 9th is terribly evident.)  The sky bridges may not have precluded pedestrian and vehicle passage, but they cast a psychological shadow that devastated the east end of downtown.  No more.

Categories
Belleville, Illinois Demolition Fire Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

Opportunity Lost in Belleville

by Michael R. Allen

Photograph by Chad Briesacher.

In a strange move, on October 19 the Belleville (Illinois) City Council voted 14-1 to approve a plan that would replace the former Meredith Home with a park. The Meredith Home is the six-story former Hotel Belleville at the southeast corner of Illinois and Main streets at the fountain circle. Built in 1931, the hotel has art deco stylistic elements expressed through brick and terra cotta. Between 1962 and earlier this year, the hotel served as retirement home operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Belleville.

How the City Council came to vote away the sales and property tax revenues the building might generate in the future is uncertain. Using a loan, the city purchased the occupied building for $487,500 in February when the Diocese placed the building for sale. The sale generated some raised eyebrows in light of how the city of Belleville has cited lack of funds as a reason for not assisting the effort to save the former Belleville Turner Hall.

Photograph by Chad Briesacher.

After discussing redevelopment with a boutique hotel developer from St. Louis, Belleville officials abruptly changed course. Suddenly, attorney Bruce Cook stepped forward with an offer to pay off the loan on the property if the old hotel were demolished and the site became a park memorial for his late daughter. The park plan — a noble purpose best suited for a site whose development would cost less — lacks funding for demolition and construction. Belleville Mayor Mark Eckert has stated that the city might help with the cost, even though it has steadfastly refused to help the citizens trying to turn the Turner Hall into an arts center.


Photograph by Chad Briesacher.

Downtown Belleville has many vacant lots and surface parking lots well suited for a small memorial park. The city could easily have helped Cook find another site, and just as easily not purchased a large building that private developers may have purchased. The city does not have another building like the Meredith Home, which has not generated revenues in nearly 40 years. Beyond the preservation issue, it is odd that the city — with its revenues strained like every city’s — would not have jumped at the chance to move a prominent downtown parcel from tax-exempt status to a taxable piece of land. Cities thrive when private initiative, not government control, is the driving force in commercial districts. Belleville has missed a big opportunity with the Meredith Home.


Photograph by Chad Briesacher.

Another Belleville opportunity that hopefully won’t be squandered is a few blocks east at the northeast corner of Main and Jackson streets. In May, a corner building and part of the slipcover-clad former Fellner’s Department Store were destroyed by fire. The taller, more stylized section of the Fellner’s building survives, to the delight of the region’s mid-century modern aficionados.  Hopefully the city of Belleville will support new urban infill on this prime corner.

Categories
Demolition Downtown

Good Riddance, Locust Street Sky Bridge

by Michael R. Allen

This video — I apologize for the shakiness — captures what I hope is my last walk under the Locust Street sky bridge at St. Louis Centre. I can think of no place downtown that fills me with greater dread, and I am anticipating the demolition of the bridge here more than the bridge over Washington. While the Washington bridge blocked the more prominent and cohesive view, it also crossed a street with enough existing pedestrian traffic to absorb some of its ill effects. The Locust bridge may well have been a wall to grade level for its chilling effect on downtown. With the Railway Exchange Building sale closed, the demolition of this bridge is now ready to go.

Of course, the shift in obscenities from an enclosed downtown mall to a parking garage is a downward fall. Any grace in the loss of the sky bridges is at least partly mitigated by the unimaginative new use of St. Louis Centre. I know it took some imagination for the city to extricate itself from the Pyramid’s tax increment financing program for the One City Center tower, a truly atrocious deal, but better solutions may have been at hand. What’s done is done, and with the heavy, ugly bridges both gone, downtown will be much improved. A garage at the mall can — and should — be undone.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Historic Preservation

Old Stix Baer & Fuller Building Re-Emerging

by Michael R. Allen

The spirit of John Mauran might be pleased to float down Washington Avenue nowadays. With demolition of the St. Louis Centre skybridge comes the first clear view of the Washington Avenue elevation of the building that originally housed Stix Baer and Fuller Company’s Grand-Leader Department Store. Mauran’s firm of Mauran, Russell & Garden designed the eight-story eastern section, built in 1906. The successor firm Mauran Russell & Crowell designed the nearly-identically-articulated ten-story western section, completed in 1919.

Photograph by Landmarks Association of St. Louis, 1982.

The firm’s later incarnation of Russell, Mullgardt & Schwarz designed a contrasting modern rooftop addition on the eight-story section that was built in 1949, but otherwise the department store building stood unsullied until the start of construction of the St. Louis Centre skybridge in 1984. Fortunately, the bridge has not taken nearly as long to destroy as it did to build, and 25 years of an occluded Stix facade are over. The Washington elevation looks decent underneath, too. The damage is minimal and shall be easily overcome when the building is rehabilitated starting this year.

One of the small joys of the skybridge demolition is the revelation that one of the eastern section’s iron balconies has been intact under the bridge all this time. The use of the balconies remains undocumented, but they are an original feature of the building.

The view of the old Stix building gets better every day.

Categories
Demolition Downtown

St. Louis Centre Skybridge Coming Down

by Michael R. Allen

At about 5:05 p.m., wreckers from Environmental Operations Incorporated made first contact between the wrecking ball and the Washington Avenue skybridge between the old St. Louis Centre mall and the former Stix, Baer and Fuller building. Wreckers used the ball to knock out some glass for a few minutes, but stopped short of inflicting major damage. Heavy wrecking has already begun, with the roof already removed before today’s ceremonial demolition.

Long forgotten, it seems, are the proclamations of urban renewal made in 1985 when St. Louis Centre opened. In a 1985 Fortune article on St. Louis’ supposed rebound, Edmund Faltermeyer wrote:

Amid great hoopla — appearances by Bob Hope and child actor Ricky Schroder and thousands of balloons — the glittering $150-million St. Louis Centre opened in August after 16 years of gestation. It is the largest enclosed downtown shopping mall in the U.S., with 1.4 million square feet.

At least Ricky Schroeder is still around.

Categories
Demolition Downtown

View from St. Louis Centre’s Washington Avenue Skybridge, 1988

by Michael R. Allen

Reader David Schroth sent me this photographs taken by his father, Philip Schroth, on September 1, 1988. The photograph was taken from the Washington Avenue skybridge at St. Louis Centre, and shows a Washington west of Seventh street before the Convention Center expansion and hotel were built.

The skybridge is under demolition now, and will receive the first blow of the wrecking ball on Friday at 5:00 p.m. (or, 5:10 p.m. so that television news can pick it up live).

Categories
Demolition Historic Preservation North St. Louis The Ville

Some Frame Houses in the Ville

by Michael R. Allen

The Ville has lost plenty of buildings in the last fifty years, but remarkably many frame houses remain from early development. Still, the frame houses don’t last long when abandoned. The photograph above shows three similar frame houses in the 2500 block of Whittier (across from the old Homer G. Phillips Hospital) back in 2004.

The house at 2420 Whittier dated to 1885 and was built by James Chadwick, an active developer in what was then known as Elleardsville. This house was for sale in 2004. The original clapboard siding was still in place under later asbestos tile siding. Now it is a burned out pile of building debris. The fire revealed that the original wooden shingles were still present under layers of newer roofing!

The only house remaining from the group of three that I photographed in 2004 is the house in the middle at 2518 Whittier. The date of construction is unknown, but it was probably built around 1885 too. In 1906, it was moved to this site. Today it is well-kept (although the original siding is either missing or covered) and occupied. The house at 2518 Whittier is included in an architectural survey of the Ville neighborhood conducted by Lynn Josse and myself under the supervision of the city’s Cultural Resources Office.

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Demolition Fountain Park North St. Louis

Bye-Bye, Corner Commercial

by Michael R. Allen

Today I saw that the two-story brick corner commercial building at Page and Walton avenues in Fountain Park was mostly gone, and I snapped this sad scene. The heartbeat of the city always grows a little more faint whenever a corner store gets wrecked. Gone is a point of exchange — a point for drawing people together, for employment, for tax revenue generation and for provision of goods near people’s houses.

St. Louis remains far outside of the relevance of the recently-publicized writings by economist Edward Glaeser. In the New York Times yesterday, Glaeser argued against hard-line preservation: “[i]f a successful city doesn’t build, its prices will skyrocket and it can turn into an exclusive, elite enclave.”

Perhaps true, but too often in St. Louis we never get to that conundrum. We take down a building and leave its site empty for generations. Not only are we not building, but we are not preserving. Often, physical condition of buildings demands demolition, and I can assent to protecting public safety. Yet the building at Page and Walton was in fine shape. Located in the 18th ward outside of preservation review, however, there was not even a moment’s deliberation once the owner applied to take it down. And I don’t know the circumstances — perhaps there is a good reason for demolition.

Yet as I passed the largely intact residential block to the east — the 4700 block of Page Boulevard — I thought about how many people would be able to walk to that corner storefront easily. I also thought about how there are no storefronts on the other end of that block. This has been the case for some time, of course, since the corner building was vacant for over 20 years. Yet the past could have been rendered future with rehabilitation. A blocked network of social relations, between residents of Page and that corner store, is now effectively dead.

Preservation here would not have raised prices, but maintained the potential for recreating a beneficial pedestrian experience. The lost building reinforces the high prices in other neighborhood, like the nearby Central West End, that retain their density, walkability and their commercial activity. Also reinforced are prices in other cities where preservation has indeed led to excessively high real estate prices — but you can read about those in the New York Times.

Categories
Agriculture Belleville, Illinois Demolition Southern Illinois

Farm House Facing Death In Belleville

by Michael R. Allen

I have been conducting an architectural survey at Scott Air Force Base and passing back through Belleville. Last week, just east of town I came across this 19th century brick farmhouse on Highway 161 east of town. The rest of the farm — a clay tile silo and some outbuildings — are well under demolition, but work has yet to really start on the house. A porch and the roofing have been removed, but the old building is painfully still able to be saved. The demolition set me to thinking.

I know, I know. Illinois is full of these one-story brick center-hall houses, with their two-over-two wooden windows and simple brick cornices. Yet that’s really the point: these vernacular houses give the state’s rural areas unique architectural character compatible with the rich and lovely landscape upon which they reside.

Besides, this house has an interesting hipped roof, and lovely cast stone porch columns (definitely not original, but certainly a historic alteration). With a new Wal-Mart and strip retail in this vicinity, I think I know what happens next to this farm. Even if one does not see the folly of the wasted building, what about thinking through losing soil that has fed people for over 100 years?

St. Louisans should think about these things too. What happens in Belleville matters to St. Louis. The loss of good farm land and usable farm building stock within 100 miles weakens our renewing regional food economy. We lost much of the good farm land in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, but we still have a lot left across the river. Some talk about “balancing” the region’s sprawl, but without regional growth that is tantamount to doubling the waste: settled and unsettled areas, wasted. When do we stop?

Categories
Demolition Housing Mid-Century Modern St. Louis County

Olivette Tear-Down

by Michael R. Allen

Last week I spotted this tear-down on Dielman Road at Engel Lane just south of Olive Boulevard. Another fine postwar ranch house, built sturdy of brick and concrete, will meet its death. Oh, recession, you were supposed to bring calm to the troubled waters of suburban real estate!