Category: Historic Preservation

Categories
Downtown Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

Dorsa’s Letters Return

by Michael R. Allen

The stylized letters that spell the name of Dorsa Building at 1007 Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis have returned. Or, rather, replicated brass letters nearly identical to the original now shine bright against the green terra cotta background of the Art Moderne landmark’s first two floors.

Installation of the letters is part of the rehabilitation of the building being undertaken by the Pyramid Companies. The building and its neighbor to the west are being converted into condominiums. Paul Hohmann, chief architect for Pyramid Architects, is the designer of the Dorsa project who has diligently worked to renew the appearance front elevation.

The Dorsa Building facade — literally, this is a facade — dates to 1946, when the Dorsa Dress Company hired architect Meyer Loomstein to modernize the front elevation of their Classical Revival building, which had been built in 1902 from plans by Eames and Young. Loomstein and sculptor Sasch Schnittman devised a streamline slipcover, with a striking green terra cotta base under a cream stucco body that terminated with elegant fluting at the top. The designers further adorned the building with a large recessed terra cotta “spider web,” the stylized brass lettering and three brass fins above the building’s understated entrance.

The result was a true rarity for downtown — a stunning work of Art Moderne commercial architecture that was as colorful as it was smart. The building turned many heads and sold many dresses. Inevitably, the Dorsa fell into disrepair. The upper two fins disappeared, perhaps taking a trip to the scrapyard. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, owner Larry Deutsch removed the spiderweb and later the letters.

Here is a photograph of the letters in 1984 submitted to EoA by Walt Lockley:


Here are the new letters close up (never mind the clashing lamp post):


Now the building’s fortunes are better, although the fate of its sumptuous interior is uncertain. (Read more about the interior in Toby Weiss’ 2006 blog entry “The Dorsa, ‘The Ultimate in Mode Moderne.'”) The new letters are slightly more shallow than the originals, and Pyramid has opted not to return the spiderweb because they need to utilize the natural light that a large glazed opening provides. However, the return of the letters and fins (due to be installed in a few weeks!) at all is laudable. After all, rehabilitation tax credit programs don’t demand that elements of the building missing at the time of rehabilitation be returned. (Witness all of the rehabbed loft buildings whose owners have not returned long-gone cornices.)

The Dorsa was fortunate to have a caring architect. The energy of Loomstein’s design was apparent even before the return of the letters, but not realized so fully. The Dorsa building wanted to sing its name, and had no voice. Now its melody saunters up the facade in modern splendor.

Categories
Central West End Demolition Historic Preservation

Washington University Medical Center Plans to Demolish Ettrick Apartments

by Michael R. Allen

According to an article by Tim Woodcock in today’s West End Word, the Washington University Medical Center plans to demolish the historic Ettrick Apartments at the northwest corner of Euclid and Forest Park in the Central West End. The historic apartment building was built in 1905 and designed by A. Blair Ridington.

The demolition is part of a campus expansion plan that hinges on zoning overlay legislation sponsored by Ald. Joseph Roddy (D-17th).

Categories
Historic Preservation North St. Louis SLPS South St. Louis

SLPS Proposes Eight More School Closings

by Michael R. Allen

The St. Louis Public Schools will be closing eight additional school buildings and reopening two, pending a vote by the appointed transitional school board and public input.

The schools proposed by district staff for closure are Mitchell School, 955 Arcade Avenue; Gundlach School, 2931 Arlington Avenue; Lyon School, 7417 Vermont Avenue; Mark Twain School, 5316 Ruskin Avenue; Meramec School, 2745 Meramec Street; Shenandoah School, 3412 Shenandoah Avenue; and Simmons School, 4318 St. Louis Avenue. The closures are evenly split between south and north city.

Carver School, 3325 Bell Avenue in north city, and Roe School, 1921 Prather Avenue in south city, would reopen.

This comes on the heels of last year’s round of five closures, which has left several historic school buildings vacant. The district has yet to market some of the closed schools from last year’s round. Hopefully the district will develop a policy for swift disposition of closed schools that includes provisions for timely reuse as well as preservation. The district would do well to seek National Register of Historic Places designation for any closed school not already listed, so that the buildings are “tax credit ready” at the time of sale. While the district may elect to retain several buildings for future use, it already possesses a long roster of vacant buildings and needs to continue to be mindful of the impact of school closings on neighborhoods.

Categories
Historic Preservation Illinois Metro East Southern Illinois

Venice Public School Campus Disappears

by Michael R. Allen


The Metro East city of Venice is continuing to demolish its historic public school campus. The 1917 Venice High School has been gone for a month now, while the adjacent 1938 addition partly remains. Once the Tri-Cities of Granite City, Madison and Venice were thriving cities with populations of workers in the numerous steel mills and metal fabrication shops of the area. Things have been different for awhile now, and Venice’s population hovers at about 2,500.

Still, the section of Broadway where the public schools buildings stood features many well-kept homes on whose lawns children play. With a moribund downtown and few noteworthy employers, though, Venice’s chief assets may be its location and its stock of small frame homes. The city has a lot of potential.


The demolition of the schools, though, erase some of that potential. The buildings are among a handful of historic landmarks. These were solid buildings with adaptive reuse potential, standing right off of the newly-reopened McKinley Bridge. New use may have been just a few years away.
As of last weekend, when I took these photos, the 1938 addition retained its basic form enough to demonstrate how pointless its loss is. The building features a restrained art deco program of ornament, executed in polychromatic geometry that is gorgeous. The basic body of the building is unadorned machine-raked brick in different shades of brown and red. The bow-truss gymnasium at rear relieves the boxiness of the school building, providing some variation in the form.

Alas, by now the building is further diminished and reuse is a lost dream. Like its earlier neighbor, the building departs the real world to live only in the fickle realm of public memory.

As the Metro East adapts to its post-industrial and decentralized life — a process that will continue and accelerate once the new Mississippi River Bridge is built — we will continue to watch such losses. Without economic hope, there will be no concerted effort at cultural resource planning in the Tri-Cities or East St. Louis. Time is money, after all, and planning takes a lot of time. And money. What incentives exist in the Metro East for careful planning and historic preservation? Few, so long as Illinois remains one of those states without a historic rehabilitation tax credit.

(Kudos to 52nd City, Curious Feet, St. Louis Patina and Metropolitan Rural for covering the Venice High School demolition earlier.)

Categories
Academy Neighborhood Historic Preservation North St. Louis Preservation Board

Fate of Building at Page and Union Deferred Again

by Michael R. Allen


At Monday’s meeting of the St. Louis Preservation Board, the Board voted 3-2 to defer consideration of an appeal of the staff denial of a demolition permit for the building at 5286-92 Page Boulevard. The applicant is the Berean Seventh Day Adventist Church; background on the permit can be found in a post that I made in November. While the November meeting of the Board that considered the matter was packed with congregation members, this month only attorneys William Kuehling and Robert Kinney from Polsinelli Shalton Flanigan Suelthaus appeared to present the church’s case — and yet another rendering of a supposed new building that will replace the existing building (but for which no funds or construction blueprints exist).

Voting to defer the matter were Anthony Robinson, who wanted to hear from the Academy Neighborhood neighborhood association on the proposed new building, Mary Johnson and Alderman Terry Kennedy. Voting against deferral were Mike Killeen and David Richardson. Consideration of the new building is not germane to the Preservation Board’s consideration, which legally applies only to the demolition itself. The building is not located in a local historic district with design guidelines. Instead, it is part of a national historic district where the Board can review demolition permits alone.

Among those who testified in opposition to the demolition was historian Lynn Josse, who wrote the National Register nomination for the Mount Cabanne-Raymond Place Historic District in which this building is a contributing resource and visual anchor. Her words appear here:

By way of background: In 2000, the City of St. Louis funded a National Register nomination in order to protect the Mount Cabanne/Raymond Place Historic District and to encourage the reuse of its valuable historic buildings. The district is listed not only for its architectural merit, which is obvious in this building, but as an example of a compact walkable neighborhood with a distinctly Orthodox Jewish character. The congregation of the B’Nai Amoona synagogue at Academy and Vernon had to live within walking distance of where they worshipped because of Sabbath restrictions, so there was a higher than average concentration of Jewish households and businesses. In most ways though, the neighborhood was like other streetcar neighborhoods of the time. Raymond Place had most of the amenities families needed for daily life within easy walking distance. The building that you’re considering today, by the 1920s was the home of grocery stores, drug stores, a medical office, and a delicatessen – all of which would be vital to the daily life of the neighborhood.

In a district like Mount Cabanne-Raymond Place, it is all too easy to allow the commercial edges to erode and slip away. In this district, we’ve lost at least one of the commercial buildings on Delmar since the listing in 2002. But historically, it is the commercial buildings like this one that made the residential life in the center of the neighborhood possible. Raymond Place boasts a really great collection of architecturally interesting houses, but without the context provided by important commercial buildings like this one, it is just that: a collection of dwellings. Cities are more than that; they are a complex system of people and jobs and transit and housing and recreation and institutions and services and retail. We are doing a good job encouraging reuse of housing, but the neighborhood doesn’t make historic sense and may be less sustainable in the future if you allow the destruction of the small-scale retail spaces that historically have connected people.

Part of what the ordinance directs you to consider is the contribution to the streetscape. This building is the streetscape. For over a hundred years it has defined the corner of Page and Union. Its loss would cause a major gap at the northwest corner of the historic district. Replacing this building with a surface parking lot would be a terrible disservice to the neighborhood. It’s a bad use of land and a terrible waste of an important building that should, according to all of your legal criteria, be preserved.

Categories
Downtown Historic Preservation North St. Louis Preservation Board

Preservation Board Meets Monday, Demolition Permits on Page and Olive Return

by Michael R. Allen

Since the St. Louis Preservation Board did not have a physical meeting last month, this month it will meet twice. The first meeting is Monday, January 7 at 4:00 p.m.

Two of the agenda items are repeats of demolition permits:

– 5286 Page Boulevard. The Berean Seventh Day Adventists’ appeal of staff denial of a demolition permit for this two-story commercial building was continued due to the church’s presentation of new evidence in November. The Board continued the hearing of the appeal in order to afford Board members and Cultural Resources Office staff more time to review the evidence. (Read more here.) Staff still recommends upholding the denial. The church has no good case for removing the last historic building at the important intersection of Page and Union — a building structurally sound and listed as a contributing part of a National Register historic district.

– 2217-19 Olive Street. The owners of this building want to demolish it for a parking lot. The two-story commercial building is a contributing part of the newly-listed National Register district called the Olive and Locust Historic Business District. In September 2007, the Preservation Board unanimously rejected the appeal of a staff denial of a demolition permit. (Read more here.) Now the matter is back as a “New Application” because the applicant is not the owner but the Building Division, which claims that building is in danger of collapse. Swayed by the evidence, the Cultural Resources Office is recommending approval of the demolition permit.

The agenda begins with three preliminary reviews of new construction in the Benton Park and Lafayette Square local historic districts.

The meeting takes place on the 12th floor of the Locust Building, 1015 Locust Street downtown. Testimony may be submitted in writing via email to Adonna Buford at BufordA@stlouicity.com.

Categories
Abandonment Architecture Gate District Historic Preservation South St. Louis Storefront Addition

Just Another Vacant Building?

by Michael R. Allen

I don’t think there is such a thing as an average run-of-the-mill vacant building in St. Louis. For instance, look at this building located at 2831 Lafayette Avenue:


On first glance, the yellow-toned plywood sheets and blue awning jump out from a nearly all-white building. Looking at the building longer, details emerge. Behind that projecting storefront is a different, older building. The building appears to be an old house. A close look brings out clues.

This two-story building has a pretty sandstone front; the large filled-in window openings must have been gorgeous when they were glazed. Underneath white paint and stucco repairs are fine carved details around the windows. The sunbursts centered over each window are impressive and typical of the finely detailed nineteenth century stone masonry we have in St. Louis. Right at the top are sill brackets, showing that the building once stood another story taller. The presence of such fine details, the use of sandstone and the style of the facade suggest a construction date in the 1880s. In fact, building permits show that this block face was built out with houses (mostly single-family and many with significant construction costs) between 1880 and 1895. There are three permits for three-story houses: in 1880, 1889 and 1894.

Owners added the storefront addition at 2831 Lafayette by the 1930s, although fire insurance maps show that the building retained its third story into the 1960s. The first floor of the building was in use a dry cleaners as soon as the storefront was finished. Apartments were above. Essentially, the building joined many others in the city located in well-to-do walking neighborhoods that changed dramatically in the early twentieth century as the upper and middle classes migrated west to quieter streets farther from downtown. The large houses of the migrating residents often were divided into rental housing or businesses; many were expanded, and altered and some were eventually demolished as new commercial uses moved into once-genteel neighborhoods. One under appreciated result of these changes was that population density increased. This building is a frank reminder of twentieth century changes in use and demographics on the near south side.

Deed research could clear up which one corresponds to this house. For now, I am glad to have given it a long look and learned that the old building tells an unexpected story. While the house has lost its third story and its original appearance, the remaining traces still provide beauty. There is no reason that future reuse of the building could not highlight the remaining traces and incorporate them into a new design. While the building is rendered ineligible for any landmark designation through loss of historic appearance, there are many futures for it beyond simply tearing it down.


All over our city are similar old houses — many with storefront additions, missing floors, mangled entrances and strange alterations. These are the buildings that cannot be considered contributing to historic districts but who still lend historic character to our streets. Historic rehabilitation tax credits will never be available for these buildings. Some would knock them over, because of the financial problems of rehabbing them without tax credits. Hopefully others will see that, however twisted or obscured, these buildings still have architectural potential — and still tell the stories of their construction and show the scars of changing use. This stretch of Lafayette Avenue gains far more character from 2831 Lafayette in its current state than from the new homes of the Gate District, or the Holiday Inn.

Categories
Historic Preservation Mayor Slay

World Leadership Award Nice, Progress Made Great

by Michael R. Allen

Historic preservation has led to St. Louis winning a World Leadership Award in the category of housing. The award specifically recognizes the heroic efforts of St. Louisans in revitalizing vacant historic buildings. While Mayor Francis Slay and Planning Director Rollin Stanley went to the award ceremony in London to claim the award, it really belongs to everyone working to revitalize the city — residents, rehabbers, developers, preservationists, architects and, I suppose, politicians.

While there are definite reasons to be skeptical about the organization that grants the awards (Steve Patterson has those reasons covered), there is no doubt that the accomplishment is very real. According to Mayor Francis Slay, more than 20,000 housing units have been rehabbed in the city since 2000. The turnaround is dramatic, and the visible results in the city rewarding to generations (including mine) who lived through darker days. While the losses continue, and politicians and urban planners sometimes seem to be the last people to get the news that historic preservation and unique character are fueling our renewal, things haven’t been this good for old buildings in decades. We are making a lot of progress.

The roots of this resurgence go back to 1996 when a group of St. Louisans, with attorney Jerry Schlichter at the forefront, pushed to make historic preservation economically sensible. These folks successfully lobbied the Missouri General Assembly to enact the country’s most progressive state historic rehabilitation tax credit. This credit was a boon to St. Louis and the entire state. Preservation used to be the lonely battle of historians and neighborhood activists. Now it’s the common parlance of developers, realtors and bankers — the people who control the historic buildings. For over a decade, heartbreaks have been healed. Preservationists have gladly seen many of their gloomy predictions proven wrong.

The battles continue, of course. The playing field is different in many ways. Demolition is still a problem, and historic landmark status has become a double-edged sword that cuts historic buildings that won’t ever get it. North city likely will bleed buildings for the next two decades. But a preservationist now has some pretty impressive case examples of the viability of preservation. We don’t need an award to reap the benefits of changed political and economic circumstances, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Categories
Historic Preservation

Eleven Most Endangered Places Report Online

Landmarks Association of St. Louis has published its year-end report on the city’s Eleven Most Endangered Places. Read it here.

Categories
Central West End DeVille Motor Hotel Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

Modern Motor Hotel in Central West End Faces February Demolition

by Michael R. Allen

Here is the building now known as the San Luis Apartments, located at 4483 Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End. Just west of the Cathedral, the building is owned by the Archdiocese of St. Louis and used as apartments for the elderly. The Archdiocese plans to demolish the building in February for a surface parking lot despite no pressing problem with the apartments, which are generally loved by residents for their excellent location. Residents are being relocated to many different places, none of which is as transit accessible — an important criterion for older people who do not drive.

The news of the Archdiocese’s plan surprises many Central West End residents who are aghast at the idea of creating a surface parking lot facing well-traveled Lindell on the same block as the elegant Cathedral. Many are astounded that the Archdiocese would proceed to demolition without any plan for future development of the site, leaving a gaping hole for an indefinite period. The Central West End Association and Alderwoman Lyda Krewson (D-28th) have yet to make official statements on the proposed demolition. However, oppositional voices are stating to cry out. Last week, the West End Word ran a letter to the editor from STL Style‘s Randy Vines.

Real estate moguls Harold and Melvin Dubinsky working with Paul Kapelow took out a building permit for a motor hotel on September 25, 1961, with construction estimated at $2.75 million. New Orleans firm Colbert, Lowery, Hess & Bouderaux designed the curvilinear, E-shaped modernist hotel. On July 3, 1963 the hotel building was granted an occupancy permit and shortly afterward opened as the DeVille Motor Hotel. The hotel was part of a national boom in “motor hotels” located in urban areas. Hoteliers sought to revive urban markets by building multi-story hotels with ample covered parking on lower levels. Many had bars, including popular tiki lounges. These buildings employed modernist styles to symbolize their cleanliness and newness as well as their utility. One could park right in the hotel and avoid walking city streets carrying luggage — no doubt a concern in the dark days of American urbanism, and perhaps still. Designers are better at hiding the parking in today’s urban hotels, but the idea of integrated parking, lodging and dining remains the same.

The design of the San Luis Apartments is strange and cool, if not cutting edge. The curved smooth white concrete towers cloak services while providing textural contrast to the aggregate body of each wing. The parking is recessed enough that it does not overpower the building; recessed walls on the first floor actually minimize its presence. The bays of aluminum-framed windows on the sides of the central, taller section and end of each wing are balanced by the ribbons on the inside walls of the wings. What could have been the tired bulk of a typical motor hotel — like the Howard Johnson by the airport — is relieved through division of the building into a series of forms of different height and footprint. This is no thoughtless slab. In fact, the modern lines interact quite well with the later and more accomplished Lindell Terrace (built in 1969 and designed by Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum) across Taylor Avenue to the west.

Unfortunately, due to recent age, the San Luis Apartments are not considered a contributing resource to the Central West End Historic District. Thus the building is not eligible for historic rehabilitation tax credits. However, the buidling is included within the boundaries of the Central West End Local Historic District so there is legally-mandated preservation review of the demolition.