Category: Demolition

Categories
Academy Neighborhood Demolition North St. Louis Old North Preservation Board

Planning Commission Overturns Two Preservation Board Decisions

by Michael R. Allen

On June 3, the Planning Commission unanimously adopted a resolution to grant demolition of the corner commercial building at 5286-98 Page Boulevard if owner Berean Seventh Day Adventist Church met several conditions. Those conditions are completion of permit-appropriate construction drawings for the proposed surface parking lot within 30 days and securing of construction financing within 90 days. If those dates are not met, the permit stands denied and the church will have to appeal the denial to the St. Louis Circuit Court.

How did the demolition permit end up at the Planning Commission, and why would that body approve demolition for a parking lot? In January 2008, the Preservation Board upheld Cultural Resources Office staff denial of the demolition permit by a vote of 5-2. Per city preservation law, Berean appealed this decision to the Planning Commission. The next step in the appeals process would be court. The Planning Commission has authority to review and “modify” decisions of the Preservation Board, which is what the June 3 decision is considered. (Note that the Planning Commission does not typically solicit or accept citizen testimony, although the public may attend its meetings.)

At the behest of the Planning Commission, the Berean church worked with Dale Ruthsatz at the St. Louis Development Corporation to improve the original plan for a parking lot. The new plan calls for “green” features such as permeable paving and landscaping. Parking entrances have been moved off of Page and Union and onto the alley, so that pedestrians on these streets won’t be bothered by traffic. Eventually, the church wants to build a community center on the site. Planning Commission members expressed the sentiment that they wanted to exercise leverage over the parking lot design rather than let the matter go to court where the city might lose its case and its design review.

Back in April, the Planning Commission also overturned — or, rather, modified — the Preservation Board decision on a certain house at 2619-21 Hadley Street. The back story is slightly complicated. Suffice to say that the Haven of Grace, a shelter for homeless pregnant women, wanted the old house gone — after it had resolved to rehabilitate it in order to secure a demolition permit for another historic building.

The Haven of Grace pursued demolition relentlessly. After the Preservation Board in August 2008 reaffirmed its original decision, the organization appealed to the Planning Commission. The legal strategy of the Haven of Grace was effective enough to lead to the Planning Commission’s vote to overturn the Preservation Board decision, but not enough to do so without penalty. The Planning Commission stipulated that the Haven of Grace must pay $25,000 to city that will be used for building stabilization by the Cultural Resources Office.

While there are few chances for the city to secure $25,000 for stabilization, the Planning Commission action may be a dangerous precedent. My hope is that it is an isolated instance of such a questionable outcome. It’s certainly better than a victory for demolition with no trade-off.

The house on Hadley Street is now gone. Watching the demolition, it was clear to me that the house was in much better condition that I had assumed. The floors looked sturdy, original millwork abounded and even the plaster walls looked to be in fair condition. An expenditure of $25,000 could have mothballed this house for better days.

The Planning Commission’s compromises demonstrate the flaws in our current system or preservation review and planning. In fairness to the Planning Commission, the city lacks progressive ordinances here. I understand the inclination toward meting out compromise rather than take matter into lengthy circuit court battles. However, if the Preservation Board’s decisions on these matters were made fairly and by wide margins of voting members, they should be upheld on appeal.

The Planning Commission should not feel trapped. The Preservation Board should not be rendered powerless because an applicant (or elected official) has the money and time to make things difficult for the city. We need better design ordinances and city agencies empowered to do more than just say “no.” Ultimately, we need a better framework in which to make planning decisions.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: The Mercantile Club

by Michael R. Allen

Recent discussion about development around the intersection of Seventh and Locust streets — prompted by a plan to convert St. Louis Centre into a parking garage — brings to mind one of that intersection’s lost landmarks. The Mercantile Club stood at the southwest corner of that intersection, where now there is a parking lot.

The illustration here appeared in the Northwestern Architect in December 1891, showing the successful entry by Isaac S. Taylor in the Club design competition. Completed in 1892 according to the plan shown here, Taylor’s design beat the work of other architects, including Louis Sullivan. (Had Sullivan won, Seventh Street would have been home to three of his works, with the Union Trust Building directly adjacent to the south.)

Taylor’s design clearly was influenced by the Romanesque Revival architecture of H.H. Richardson as well as the architecture French Renaissance, which favored high-pitched roofs and turrets. The base of the building was Missouri granite, with brick above punctuated with terra cotta ornament.

The site had been occupied by the town home of Henry Shaw, which was relocated to a site on Tower Grove Avenue at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1891, the Mercantile Club was a rising and successful group consisting largely of downtown businessmen, and the site chosen for the club home was in the heart of members’ commercial interests.

Later known as the Compton Building, the Mercantile Club fell in the early 1970s for the current surface lot.

Categories
Demolition North St. Louis Northside Regeneration St. Louis Place

Long Lost House on University Avenue

by Michael R. Allen

Dentist William J. Swekosky spent his lifetime taking photographs of St. Louis’ historic architecture. Often, Swekosky took photographs of doomed buildings, and his images are the only known remaining photographs. Swekosky’s work began in 1930 and continued until 1964, when he passed away.

Among his hundreds of photographs is the one shown here, of a fine Italianate town house at 2505 University Avenue in St. Louis Place. The house is noteworthy for the finely detailed stone front, elaborate continuous cornice and the “widow’s walk” cresting above the mansard roof. Like other buildings, this one fell not long after the dentist took its photograph around 1965. Today, the house site is occupied by a vacant Section 235 home owned by a McEagle holding company.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: Lucas Avenue Warehouse Meets the Dart

by Michael R. Allen


Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

Following through the recent downtown demolitions with some link to the Miss Hullings Building tragedy, here are photographs of the slender commercial building that once stood at 1427 Lucas Avenue just a block north of Washington and a block east of the City Museum. The link to Miss Hullings? This building was also designed by prominent architect John Ludwig Wees. The visual link to Miss Hullings is clear: a tripartite division into ornamental base, a more prosaic center and a crown featuring an arcade of Roman windows beneath a brick cornice.

Sure, these weren’t the buildings that Wees put in the front of his portfolio, but they were hardly throwaway designs. Every architect has a way of designing when the budget is lavish, or when it’s severely restricted. Where the architect’s hand comes through the most is in the middle — the work that he or she designs day in and day out. Wees certainly gave his commercial buildings a strongly modern sensibility, meted through a classical screen. The first two floors — the public interface at the sidewalk — exhibits a restrained classicism through a limestone surround, a central cast iron column with Corinthian capital, lion heads inside of wreaths above each storefront and an egg and dart cornice in the limestone surround above the whole assembly.

Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The egg and dart is every building’s sad nod toward fate. That pattern enshrines the life cycle of creation and death in a succinct, poetic metaphor. Egg brings life. Dart takes it away.

Alas, the dart of death frequently comes in the form of heavy metal. The wrecking ball took down this splendid essay in commerce around the last months of 2000, when St. Louis Auto Sales successfully obtained an “emergency” demolition permit from the Building Division. A building that once housed Continental Shoemakers and countless dry good companies ranging from leather wholesalers to garment retailers met the dour economics of parking. Not quite an egg there, eh?

Categories
Demolition Downtown JNEM

Lost: Claes and Lehnbeuter Mfg. Co. Building

by Michael R. Allen

Photograph by Cindi Longwisch for Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The Claes and Lehnbeuter Manufacturing Company Building stood at 2128-30 Washington Avenue from construction in 1891 through demolition in March 1997 (just a month after the Miss Hullings Building). Claes and Lehnbeuter manufactured store, office, bank and saloon fixtures. According to E.D. Kargau’s Mercantile, Industrial and Professional St. Louis (1894), the company was founded by Caspar Claes and Joseoph Lehnbeuter in 1861 and the company’s first home was on the south side of Market Street between Second and Third (inside of the present boundaries of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial). After moving to a large home on Seventh Street between Walnut and Clark, the firm built its own “massive building” where over 300 workers were employed.

The site is now a vacant lot.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: Miss Hullings Building

by Michael R. Allen

Steve Patterson’s post “Stealing a Sidewalk” shows how the parking lot at the northwest corner of 11th and Locust streets invades the public right of way by paving over what legally is sidewalk space. The post takes me back to the doom and gloom days of the mid-1990s, when the so-called Miss Hullings Building at that site fell to the wrecking ball at the hands of owner Larry Deutch.

Here’s a photograph of the Miss Hullings Building in February 1997, a few weeks after demolition started, taken by Lynn Josse.


The four-story commercial building dated to 1905, and John Ludwig Wees was the architect. The second and third floors’ robust window grid was softened by a more traditionally Romanesque third floor window arcade and corbelled cornice. The scale of the building was a nice complement to the taller buildings on the other three corners of the intersection — the Alverne, Louderman and 1015 Locust buildings.

Miss Hullings operated a famous cafeteria in the building from 1931 through 1993, when Larry Deutsch sought a demolition permit. The staff of the city’s Heritage and Urban Design Commission (now the Cultural Resources Office) first denied the permit, but on appeal to the Commission recommended approval. Commission staff member Jan Cameron laid out reasons for original denial, but added that the building was not among Wees’ finest. Deutsch proposed leaving the first floor walls of the building in place to screen the parking lot!

At a September 22, 1994 meeting, the Commission voted 4-3 to deny the appeal. Commissioners Karl Grice, Fred Andres and Jeff Brambila spoke strongly against demolition. Acting Chairman Susan Taylor joined these three to vote to deny the appeal. Voting against denying the appeal were Sarah Martin, Renni Shuter and Brad Weir.

Brambila said that “this building has a very definite presence and its context to me is extremely strong.” Andres reminded his fellow commissioners that “the [1993] downtown plan specifically says that there should not be further surface parking lots in the core of downtown.” Reading the transcript from this meeting, one finds many quotes that could have come out of the recent Preservation Board meeting on the Robert Brothers’ plan to demolish two buildings that stand two block east at the corner of 10th and Locust. There are great arguments about context, the importance of adhering to downtown planning documents and the imbalanced trade between building space and car space.

The owners next filed suit against the Commission. On December 13, 1995, Circuit Court Judge David Mason ruled in favor of Deutsch’s company, citing the statements by the Commission staff that the parking lot plan met their criteria for redevelopment and that the building lacked sufficient architectural merit for staff to recommend denial of the appeal.

According to Judge Mason’s ruling, “[the building] by virtue of HUDC staff’s representation to the HUDC, had no architectural merit, had an acceptable development plan, had no neighborhood effect nor reuse potential and had no urban design effect.”

The good sense of the Heritage and Urban Design Commission was overturned. Later appeal of Judge Mason’s decision by the Commission was denied, and demolition commenced in January 1997. Years later, we are still living with the court ruling against common sense.

Categories
Demolition East St. Louis, Illinois Historic Preservation Metro East

Gateway Community Hospital to be Demolished, Hope Lingers in East St. Louis

by Michael R. Allen

Last week, cash-rich St. Clair County hired a demolition contractor to take down Gateway Community Hospital on Martin Luther King Drive for the beleaguered city of East St. Louis. This is a sad moment for East St. Louis, although I confess that it’s impossible to count such moments. One year ago, Kenneth Hall Regional Hospital shut down all but its emergency room and some services. Now, the building that houses the city’s second hospital, which closed in 1989, will come tumbling down.

Such are the vagaries of population loss, I suppose, although that does nothing to diminish the symbolic losses or apologize for the public health problems the city faces without a full service hospital. Once upon a time, the city’s leaders were able to build two hospitals: St. Mary’s, which became Kenneth Hall, and Christian Welfare, which became Gateway Community. Christian Welfare Hospital was even able to open its privately-funded modern new facility in 1940, despite the lingering effects of the Great Depression. At the time, the city had not seen a hospital as large or as well-equipped as Gateway Community. The sad fact is that this the high point of medical service in East St. Louis. No larger or more modern facility would come, although Christian Welfare Hospital was later expanded.

The closure of Gateway Community Hospital just shy of the fiftieth anniversary of its building was not a great shock. The hospital had been ailing for awhile. The demolition is not a big surprise, either, since the buildings have been left unsecured and vandalized since closing. Few windows remain, giving the large complex a foreboding and sad presence that few people would want to live near.

Still, the buildings have weathered 19 years of abandonment relatively well. I have toured the interior several times, including this February, and found little more amiss than falling ceiling tiles, stolen wiring and damaged walls. The structural condition is good. This complex surely could withstand another fifty years of use, at the least.

A developer did eye the complex for reuse six years ago, proposing conversion into apartments. That plan withered. No other plan has come since that time, and no one ever thought to nominate the hospital to the National Register of Historic Places. Urban explorers pass through the halls and post their photographs online. Former staff and patients, though, do have fond memories. My mother’s family includes several people born at the hospital.

However, city government is probably relieved that an end is in site for one of the city’s biggest abandoned buildings. History alone is little consolation to those charged with keeping a city livable. There must be something more — and there might be something good in store for East St. Louis if the city doesn’t rush to wreck again.

A Belleville News Democrat editorial (hat tip to the UEU 314) on the demolition is harsh in calling for the city to take down its other landmark buildings. Admittedly, many are vacant and derelict. However, the hope that these buildings will be reclaimed is greater than the hope that they will ever be replaced. To take away the hope of economic development from East St. Louis at this stage of its life seems cruel. Lofts in the Spivey Building would get the city a unique project and some attention. Demolition of the Spivey for a new drive-through bank — not so much.

With a historic rehab tax credit proposed for Illinois, the News-Democrat would do better to put its editorial efforts behind bills in the state legislature that would create a transformational incentive for East St. Louis. The suggestion that there should be no hope that a once-great city can save its beautiful landmarks is absurd. There are numerous developers who have been interested in East St. Louis’ unique, but many have walked away because of the lack of a Missouri-style incentive for tackling large buildings. Let’s work to provide an incentive before we throw our hands up in the air. The worst days for the city are long past. East St. Louis deserves a future.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Green Space

The Buildings that Stood on the Old Post Office Plaza Site

by Michael R. Allen

Today at 4:00 p.m. the Old Post Office Plaza will formally open. (More on the design later.) Located on the 800 block of Locust, the site was most recently occupied by surface parking. Yet there was a building standing there as recently as 2002, when demolition commenced on the building shown at right in the photograph above. The photograph, taken by Landmarks Association of St. Louis in 1980, shows that the block facing the Old Post Office was once typified by relatively narrow, short commercial buildings — exactly the kind of buildings that allowed small business to thrive downtown. The view above is looking west toward Locust’s intersection with Ninth Street.

These buildings were not celebrated like their larger, more obviously important brethren. The Old Post Office, Arcade Building and Century Building are household terms to preservationists, but few chronicle the lost small buildings that gave downtown variety in architectural style, form and scale of commerce. In 2009, we have so few left that many people can’t remember days when even streets east of Tucker had many great small buildings. These were reminders of downtown’s own rise from the heart of a small city to the center of a metropolitan region.

When I first started coming downtown as an adolescent in the early 1990s, I remember small buildings on Market, Locust, Clark, Washington and other streets, occupied by small businesses ranging from high-volume fast food restaurants to dusty bars. These gave downtown a character that unitary visions like tall office buildings and plazas have erased. While the Old Post Office Plaza takes no buildings down directly, it does take away a site where new commercial infill could have been built. Alas, we also are still taking down small downtown buildings, too, as the Hotel Indigo project one block west of the Old Post Office Plaza illustrates.


On the other end of the block, toward Eighth Street, stood the St. Nicholas Hotel. Built in 1893 and designed by Louis Sullivan, the hotel was not a small building, but it was no giant compared to later downtown hotels. The St. Nicholas met a strange fate when it was remodeled into the Victoria Building, an office building, in 1903. Eames and Young redesigned downtown’s third Sullivan masterpiece, creating a hybrid building that historian David Simmons and others have praised as a noteworthy work in its own right. Whatever one thinks about the alteration of the hotel, we all can agree that its demolition in 1974 was a senseless loss for downtown. During plaza construction, debris from the hotel’s demolition was unearthed, reminding us of the plaza site’s history.

There are merits to the Old Post Office Plaza, and the site will enter into a new life. Erasing surface parking downtown is always an improvement. Yet the plaza is another reminder of the lionization of large scale projects over preservation of the small things that make downtown a pleasant living environment.

Categories
Demolition Hyde Park North St. Louis

Treasurer’s Office Takes Down More of Hyde Park History

by Michael R. Allen

Did you ever see this lovely building at the southeast corner of 20th and Farragut streets? Too late now. While you soon can park on top of the site in a city-funded parking lot, you won’t be able to ever look at this corner store in Hyde Park again. Demolition of this building and two others on north 20th street between Penrose and Farragut — all contributing resources top the Hyde Park Historic District — started in February and wrapped up this week.

How did demolition pass by the Cultural Resources Office and the Preservation Board? As is often the case, the Building Division issued an emergency demolition order (on December 16, 2008) that trumped preservation review. Never mind that these buildings were sound under both the city’s preservation ordinance and public safety laws. The Building Division deemed that their sound condition somehow was an imminent danger to public safety. Or, perhaps, imminent danger to the neighboring occupant of the old Penrose Police Station at 1901 Penrose: the parking meter division of the City Treasurer’s Office.

The building at the northwest corner of Penrose and 20th streets.

The City Treasurer’s Office has owned the lots on which the buildings sat for years. While these buildings could have been sold to tax-paying developers, the Treasurer’s Office decided to instead wreck them, remove taxable improvements from the land and keep the land under city ownership. Perhaps there is an ultimate development plan (hopefully not a parking lot, which would be absurd). For now, though, there is just another vacant lot in an area where there seem to be more vacant lots than buildings.

The lost buildings formed a remarkable group worthy of protection, and I regret never photographing them until demolition had commenced. The corner storefront at 20th and Penrose dated to 1895 and, while not overly ornamented, had a handsome cast iron storefront and chamfered corner. I don’t recall much about the house across the alley to the north, but its history was interlocked with its lavish neighbor to the north, shown in the first photograph above. That house, located at 4220 N. 20th, was home of Charles A. Roettger, who developed the storefront at 4222-24 N. 20th in 1907. According to its permit, the new building cost $9,800 to build — no small sum then.

To design this building, Roettger employed a distinguished north St. Louis architect, Otto J. Boehmer. Boehmer designed the perpendicular Gothic sanctuary of Friedens United Church of Christ (1908) nearby at the southwest corner of 19th & Newhouse streets. Boehmer also resided at 3500 Palm Street in Lindell Park from 1914 through 1933 — the house now occupied by former mayor Freeman Bosley, Jr., son of the alderman who represents the site of the new parking lot. The contractor for the new building was also a north side of German ancestry: Leo Motzel of 2217 College Avenue.

The corner storefront was a masterpiece of vernacular use of the Tudor Revival style. The corner turret, tiled roof with its false dormers, half-timbering and copper cornices are all fine decorative elements that created one of Hyde Park’s most picturesque corner stores. The building housed Frank C. Roettger’s (Charles’ brother) meat shop at the corner for decades following its construction. Another early tenant was Flora Loewenthal’s cigar shop at 4222 N. 20th.

The city directory listings name tenant after tenant in these buildings. The names shift from German-American to African-American at some point, until the word “vacant” pops up. Reading the names in the city directory and thinking about the loss of the buildings, one tracks not simply a loss of architectural stock, but a loss of life — lost names, lost uses and lost activity.

Categories
Demolition DeVille Motor Hotel land use Midtown Streets Urbanism

Dead Zone

by Michael R. Allen

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the site on Locust Street where the livery stable demolished by St. Louis University in 2007 once stood. The site would be located at the northwest corner of Locust and Josephine Baker Avenue, except that the university requested that Josephine Baker be removed.

The occasion was the filming of This Was the Future, a short documentary on the efforts to save the DeVille Motor Hotel (more on that film later). For the film, interview subjects were invited to select a site where a historic building once stood that is now an empty hole in a vibrant area. While it is hard to choose from some of the harsh empty lots we have in this city, I settled on what has to be one of the worst urban planning disasters in recent years.

The two-story livery stable building was a bridge between the emergent renewal in the Locust Street Business District and the more established revitalization of Grand Center. Grand Center’s motto is “the intersection of art and life,” an acknowledgment of the power of crossroads. Here stood a building that was a crossroads, and now we have an asphalt chasm, and not even a literal crossroads since one of the two streets here is now gone.

Even as a warehouse, the livery stable exuded more life than the parking lot on a busy night. On a Saturday afternoon, not a single car was parked on the lot, and few were parked at nearby meters. Clearly, the lot is there for special events. However, trading the potential of daily urban activity in a rehabilitated building for the occasional overuse of a parking lot makes no sense in a central city location. Not at all.

The side effect of the livery stable debacle is the spatial segregation (through building density) of Grand Center from the emergent area on Locust and of Renaissance Place (through removal of Josephine Baker) from St. Louis University and Locust Street. Human-scale urban renewal has finally come to Midtown on Locust Street and at Renaissance Place, and a potential connection between those successes is lost, and replaced with a land use that not only divides but is totally alien to the surrounding urban fabric. We could have done so much better.