Category: Historic Preservation

Categories
Central West End Demolition Historic Preservation Hyde Park North St. Louis Preservation Board

Plenty of Demolition Permits on Monday’s Preservation Board Agenda (Updated)

UPDATED: The Preservation Board of the City of St. Louis has published the final agenda for its meeting on Monday.

Among the controversial items are the following appeals of staff denials:

– Demolition permit for a house at 4320 Arco Avenue in the Forest Park Southeast Historic District

– Demolition of houses at 1120, 1124 and 1400 Newhouse in the Hyde Park Historic District

– Demolition of the Blairmont-owned building at 1629 N. 19th Street in the Clemens House/Columbia Brewery National Register District

– Replacement of the historic windows of the house at 59 Kingsbury Place in the Central West End Historic District (the owner has replaced — without a permit — the windows on the Colonial Revival home with Prairie School style windows)

The meeting takes place Monday, May 21, at 4:00 p.m. in the 12th floor conference room at 1015 Locust Street.

Categories
Downtown Hamilton Heights Historic Preservation Midtown National Register O'Fallon SHPO St. Louis County The Ville

Eight St. Louis Area Sites Headed to National Register

by Michael R. Allen

At its quarterly meeting Friday in Joplin, the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation voted to approve the following St. Louis area nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and forward them to the Keeper of the National Register:

  • Holly Place Historic District (prepared by Carolyn Toft, Michael Allen and Tom Duda for Landmarks Association of St. Louis)
  • Plaza Square Apartments Historic District (Carolyn Toft and Michael Allen for Landmarks Association of St. Louis)
  • Glen Echo Historic District (Ruth Keenoy, Karen Bode Baxter, Timothy P. Maloney and Sara Bularzik)
  • Ramsey Accessories Manufacturing Company Building (Matthew S. Bivens for SCI Engineering)
  • Harrison School (Julie Wooldridge for Lafser and Associates)
  • Hempstead School (Julie Wooldridge for Lafser and Associates)
  • Olive & Locust Historic Business District (Julie Wooldridge for Lafser and Associates)
  • Wagoner Place Historic District (Kathleen E. Shea and Jan Cameron for the Cultural Resources Office, City of St. Louis)

All votes were unanimous, although the Plaza Square Apartments Historic District is being sent for substantive review due to its construction date within the past 50 years. Nominations forwarded by the Advisory Council are typically listed on the Register within 45 business days of approval.

Notable among the approved nominations are the Plaza Square Apartments district, a local milestone of midcentury urban renewal and modern architecture. Under national regulations, nominations of properties that have achieved significance with the past 50 years require a demonstration of exceptional significance. Such nominations are infrequent, but contribute to greater recognition of the architectural achievements of the middle of the twentieth century.


Detail of one of the Plaza Square Apartments buildings.

Also interesting was the deliberation over the Ramsey Accessories Manufacturing Corporation Building at 3693 Forest Park Boulevard in St. Louis city, a nomination that raised issues of integrity due to the yet-incomplete removal of the stucco and concrete slipcover added in 1969 that covers the three-story building,. built in 1923 with addition in 1934. Fortunately, Bivens unearthed a wealth of information on the Ramsey Corporation that manufactured the “Ramco” piston ring and showed that the primary elevation is largely intact underneath the slipcover. The McGowan Brothers have an option on the building and hope to restore its original appearance.

One nomination not approved was that of Big Boy’s Restaurant in Wright City. The Council tabled the nomination due to concerns about an underdeveloped statement of significance while generally finding the building eligible for listing. With some improvement, the nomination should be in good shape by the next quarterly meeting in August.

Categories
Events Historic Preservation

Missouri’s 2007 Most Endangered Historic Places Will Be Announced Tuesday

2007 List Announced at site of Endangered Mullanphy Emigrant Home in North St. Louis.

MEDIA ADVISORY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Barbara Fitzgerald
phone: (573)-443-5946
email: preservemo10@yahoo.com

Dr. Cole Woodcox will announce Missouri Preservation’s 2007 Most Endangered Historic Places List at a press conference at the site of the endangered Mullanphy Emigrant Home in North St. Louis at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday, May 15, 2007. The Mullanphy Emigrant Home is located at 1609 N. 14th Street in St. Louis, MO. (In case of inclement weather, the press conference will move to the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group Office at 2800 N. 14th Street in St. Louis, MO.)

The Mullanphy Emigrant Home built in 1872 remains endangered after being named to the list in 2006 due to storm damage suffered in the Spring of 2006. The site has been purchased by the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group in an effort to save the property, but was again damaged further by a storm this Spring (2007). Efforts are being made to raise awareness and funds for the stabilization of this historic property. The site does not have electricity, so you will need equipment that works from an auxiliary power source.

Missouri’s Most Endangered List is announced annually during National Preservation Month to emphasize the threatened historic resources in Missouri. Nominations are solicited from around the state and properties are chosen which are considered “at risk.” The risks property face may be from deterioration, neglect, encroachment, potential demolition or a combination of threats. Missouri Preservation is a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to saving historic resources throughout Missouri. Missouri Preservation may be reached at (573)-443-5946 or by email at preservemo10@yahoo.com. Dr. Cole Woodcox of Kirksville chairs the Most Endangered Historic Places Committee and can be reached at 660-785-4410 or by email at
cwoodcox@truman.edu.

Press packets and information on sites listed will be available at the press conference. For information on Missouri Preservation, please visit our website at www.preservemo.org. The 2007 list will be located on the website following the announcement on May 15, 2007.

Categories
Events Historic Preservation

Preservation Week Begins This Friday

This Friday starts Preservation Week, sponsored by Friedens UCC Church in Hyde Park and a happy hour at Blu, one of the midcentury Plaza Square Apartment buildings undergoing rehabilitation.

The calendar in online in PDF format; I will post selected events in plain text in the blog throughout the next week.

Categories
Downtown Historic Preservation

SkyHouse Raising Issues

by Michael R. Allen

The proposed SkyHouse project at the southwest corner of 14th and Washington raises interesting issues. On one hand, we have a 22-story condominium building with a thoroughly contemporary design. While the details of the design aren’t evident in published renderings, the overall streamlined appearance is attractive if not original. This is the sort of building that gets built several times a year in Chicago, and has not been built in St. Louis’ downtown in forty years.

On the other hand, the project would entail demolition of two historic but remuddled buildings: a two-story corner storefront known best as the home of Ehrlich’s Cleaners, and a one-story building to its west. Both buildings have had been clad in stucco, and historic appearance is weak. The corner building does still display the shape of its parapet and its beautiful cast-iron storefront. The buildings join other, more intact buildings around the intersection in proving traces of the sort of scale of commercial buildings that were mostly lost in the twentieth-century building and later parking lot booms. These building set a nice counterpoint to the six- or ten-story wholesale buildings in Washington Avenue and create openings within the street canyon for nice urban views.

The SkyHouse would dramatically alter the feeling of this site by introducing a very different size of scale to Washington. The tall modern mass would also create visual variety and perhaps serve as a more hopeful symbol of the street’s stability than two badly-altered smaller buildings. Certainly, preservation of the two historic buildings is unlikely.

However, whether or not SkyHouse gets built, the proposal should be the start of serious discussion about how we should make the kinds of choices downtown new construction will force. There are many smaller historic buildings, some lacking any official landmark status, whose demolition might create larger sites for bigger development. Yet their loss could also destroy the visual variety and differences in height and building size that make downtown an attractive place. One SkyHouse is great, but ten similar buildings grouped near each other seems a rather gloomy prospect.

Chicago has never really established a cultural preservation plan that leads to comprehensible choices. That city has let developers run cultural preservation policy by default, with mixed results and a rise in visual homogenization. Other cities, like Minneapolis and New York, have found better ways to retain the architectural qualities that define places as special. St. Louis is gifted with a great historic architectural stock, and decisions about its conservation need to be made carefully.

(As usual, there is lively discussion about this project on the Urban St. Louis form. Read it here.)

Categories
Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

Duffy on the Lambert Terminal Renovations

Robert Duffy, former art and architecture critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has a commentary on the proposed Lambert Terminal renovations in the March-April issue of the Landmarks Letter, the newsletter of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis.  Read the commentary here (in PDF format).

Categories
Historic Preservation Mullanphy Emigrant Home North St. Louis Old North

Mullanphy Emigrant Home Effort Unveils Website

The Historic Mullanphy Alliance today unveiled its new website with background in the buidling, information for making donations and updates on the work of the Alliance. The next time someone asks you what happened or why this is important, you can refer them to this wonderfully-designed compendium. (The designer of the site is Old North web whiz Nate Sprehe.)

One of the best features of the site is the graphic used here that shows the progress made in fundraising. Through the site, one can get not only the message but proof that progress is being made.

Here’s the address for the site: SaveMullanphy.org

(Image above from SaveMullanphy.org.)

Categories
Documentation Historic Preservation People Salvage

Richard Nickel, Thirty Five Years After Death

by Michael R. Allen

Chicago salvager, photographer, historian and activist Richard Nickel was killed thirty-five years ago on April 13, 1972 while salvaging at the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Thirty-five years later, Nickel’s legacy is evident in the contemporary preservation movement. Today architectural salvage, systematic photographic documentation, appreciation of commercial and industrial buildings and concern for the effects of widespread demolition are widely understood as important components of historic preservation — even if not as widely implemented as they should be.

Edward Lifson, himself an interesting interpreter of architectural history, commemorates the anniversary of Nickel’s death and celebrates the new book Richard Nickel’s Chicago in a segment from NPR that ran earlier this week.

Although not as famous as many contemporaries, Nickel sparks an intensity in people as they consider his haunting images, fiercely-argued writings and the awareness he kindled in people still alive today. Years later, for American historic preservation, Nickel stands as a pioneer whose accomplishments have not been fully considered (or even recorded) and whose ideas will provoke our minds for generations.

Categories
Historic Preservation Mullanphy Emigrant Home North St. Louis Old North People

Creating a Preservation Fund

by Michael R. Allen

In a post entitled “A Dedicated Fund For Historic Preservation In STL?” at STL Rising, Rick Bonsach raises the point that St. Louis lacks a dedicated emergency historic preservation fund. The existence of such a fund would have aided Old North St. Louis with stabilizing the storm-damaged Mullanphy Emigrant Home (pictured above in the “better” days of December 2006).

Bonasch suggests that the topic be discussed among those who attend tonight’s fundraiser for the Mullanphy (at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood from 5-7:30 p.m.; details here).

The discussion should continue past tonight. With rising interest in historic preservation in north side neighborhoods hampered by strong weather, arson and metal thieves, such a fund could establish a sustainable effort to ensure that some funds are available for emergency stabilization. Such a fund could empower neighborhoods who might otherwise consider demolition as the only practical option. Many neighborhoods on the north side are far from having strong markets for historic buildings, but with assistance will undoubtedly reach that point.

The first response to Bonasch in his comments section is dismissive and seems to presuppose government footing the bill for the fund. Bonasch replies that he envisions the private sector administering the fund. After all, the Mullanphy effort has yet to collect a dollar of city money — and probably will not. The momentum is building regardless.

(Some have joked that instead of a preservation fund what is most urgently needed is an advocacy group against our new forms of severe weather.)

Bonasch’s post raises interesting questions:

Does St. Louis have the energy and vision to continue working for emergency stabilization efforts after the Mullanphy is rebuilt?

Can we sustain the effort foe years to come?

Can we successfully collect money for the effort in the absence of a targeted project like the Mullanphy?

Are there existing organizations or people who may have established a suitable foundation for such work?

Should city government be involved?

Would St. Louisans be willing to have any tax money go into the creation of such a fund?

Are their existing municipal funds that could be used for stabilization instead of demolition?

Categories
education Historic Preservation People Regionalism

This Week in Preservation Education

On March 13 and 14, I was fortunate to take part in an interesting architectural education program involving students from O’Fallon High School (Illinois). The 10th grade honors geometry and art students — led by teachers Kelly Wamser and Debbie Raboin — are studying and researching historic St. Louis buildings and architecture with the aid of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation. The program this week came about through the excellent work of Lynn Josse.

The goals of the program include research, photography, presentations and — most interesting — 3-d scale models of buildings being studied. The students toured various buildings downtown and midtown with Lynn and historian Mimi Stiritz, and studied information put together by their teachers and Foundation volunteers. At lunchtime both days, the students came to City Hall where I spoke in the Kennedy Room about my work with Landmarks Association of St. Louis and how preservationists are actually architects of the future.

Programs like this are the backbone of effective historic preservation efforts. Without public education, our ideas will never become widespread. That education must be geared toward those young people nearly at the brink of lives spent shaping the world. Notable also is the great collaboration in the effort — two architectural advocacy organizations, a Metro East school, several building owners and St. Louis city government coming together to make something happen shows that at least some people get the “big picture” and are willing to share that view.

I look forward to seeing how these efforts transfer into the students’ work, this year and beyond.