Category: Mid-Century Modern

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

Time for the DeVille

by Michael R. Allen

With the St. Louis Archdiocese awaiting a new archbishop, and archdiocese revenue down to $160 million in 2008 (compare to $252 million in 2007), hope for the DeVille Motor Hotel at 4483 Lindell Boulevard is growing. After all, with a major leadership transition in the works and revenue down, there is a great chance to convince the archdiocese to reconsider demolition of the mid-century modern motel. The Archdiocese may find it more financially prudent to place the building up for sale to raise revenue. The land alone remains very valuable.

Sale of the land would probably not occur until after a new archbishop is installed and after prices rise again. For as imprudent and wasteful demolition and parking lot construction is, getting a low sale price is just as bad. The Archdiocese can wait out market conditions and a change in leadership.

Thus, preservationists have some time to thoroughly explore options that would retain architect Charles Colbert’s curvaceous modern landmark. Serious thought should be given to use, conditions, cost and landmark eligibility. With creative thinking, a solid preservation plan could be on the table in time for the next archbishop to consider. Even then, the Archdiocese might not be ready to make a move — but advocates for saving the fine building would be ready for the time when it is.

Categories
Historic Preservation Housing Mid-Century Modern North St. Louis Northside Regeneration St. Louis Place

Lemonade: A Remade Section 235 House

by Michael R. Allen

A row of Section 235 Houses on North Market Street west of 25th Street in St. Louis Place.

The 1968 federal Housing Act created the Section 235 Program administered by the new Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The Section 235 Program enabled many Americans to become homeowners through its generous assistance: HUD made interest payments to lenders on behalf of homeowners in the program to effective reduce their monthly loan interest. The amount paid was based on the borrower’s income. In the 1970s, when interest rates were often above 10%, this program’s need was clear. The authors of Section 235 intended the program to move low-income residents as well as federal subsidy away from mass housing projects and into neighborhoods and suburbs. Of course, the lofty dreams trickled down into something less idealistic.

In reality, the program was a boon to lenders and builders but less freeing to participants. Section 235 mostly shuffled people around decaying neighborhoods, and its implementation was rarely coordinated with other programs to stabilize these places. In St. Louis, the use of the program was extensive in the 1970s and created several distinct forms spread across north St. Louis and parts of the near south side. One of these is the ubiquitous “Section 235 House,” a two-story platform-framed house with a low-pitched front gable and a second floor that overhangs the first.

There are variations on cladding, but the St. Louis Section 235 Houses mostly resemble each other. The St. Louis Section 235 House mostly interjected intself out of context, alongside historic homes that dwarfed and mocked the banal newcomers. What could have been very modern was often festooned with mock shutters, brick veneer on the first floor (improbably holding up an overhang) and other architectural absurdity. The homes set back too far from the street and from each other to mimic the truly urban forms of the St. Louis vernacular, and tended to stick out as proverbially sore thumbs.

The Section 235 House at 2322 Montgomery.

Meanwhile, other, better-off St. Louisans stayed in the city by moving into Modern Movement high-rise towers designed by “name” firms. Still, owners of the Sction 235 Houses often cast their own designs on the houses, leaving us with a legacy of rebellion against the planned form. One of the best examples stands at 2322 Montgomery Avenue in St. Louis Place. Built in 1971 and now vacant, the house barely registers as a Section 235 House. The overhangs were elminated, the gabled roof removed and rebuilt as an asymmetrical modern roof, and the front clad in a tasteful brick. Someone made this house his or her own, and the result is quite lovely. unfortunately the house, which city records show as owned by Larmer LC, stands vacant. While the house might be out of place in St. Louis Place, it sits on a block that has lost architectural consistency. Preservation seems wise and, to this writer, desirable.

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Historic Preservation Illinois Mid-Century Modern Monroe County Southern Illinois

Losing the Bee Hive Bowl

by Michael R. Allen

The Bee Hive Bowl in Waterloo, Illinois is about to end its long battle with redevelopment. after being listed on the market for over three years, the shuttered bowling alley, located on Illinois Route 3 just north of HH Road, will be demolished for yet another over-sized convenience store and gas station. The old Mobil station next door, a family-run affair housed in a building older than the Bee Hive, was wrecked last year for the same project.

Why does the demolition of a 1950s-era bowling alley in a small town outside of St. Louis merit my attention? For one thing, the transition tells an interesting story. For another, when I write about happenings in still-rural Monroe County, southeast of St. Louis, I am writing about the land that fostered my childhood. My attachment to the land and places of Monroe County runs deep, and its evolution since I left as a teenager disturbs, delights and intrigues me.

To the point, the Bee Hive Bowl was a county institution. The Bee Hive was Waterloo’s only bowling alley, and one of less than five in the county. Monroe County has always been Friday-night territory. Week nights are work nights for the farmers, especially in good weather. The bars attract small crowds, and the restaurants are closed by 9:00 p.m. But come Friday, people pack the taverns and restaurants to dispel some of the pent-up energy. When I was a kid, getting a lane at the Bee Hive was not easy on a weekend night. That did not matter too much to the adults, who could hang out in the restaurant eating fried chicken and drinking beer.

The sort of company and good cheer found at the Bee Hive was one of those things that connected small-town and country folks in Monroe County with everyone everywhere, at least in the United States. Every town, city and military base had a bar. Most had bowling alleys. Much is made of the correlation between bowling and urban working-class populations, but southern Illinois’ rural working-class (farm laborers and factory workers) loved their bowling, too.

All that has changed, of course. The Bee Hive closed up shop early in the 21st century, joining legions of bowling alleys in small towns and big cities everywhere. (In fact, the Bee Hive outlasted most of the bowling alleys in the city of St. Louis.) Obviously, in cities with diminishing density, the loss of bowling alleys makes sense. But in Monroe County, the towns continue to grow and increase population density. Of course, just like St. Louis, Waterloo has lost many of its manufacturing and well-paid blue-collar jobs. And young people there are as disinterested in a communal pastime like bowling as are youth in the urban neighbor to the west.

Hence, the Bee Hive’s impending demolition is not really the story of the loss of a retro modern building — it’s the story of the decline of a particular part of social life. Without bowlers, bowling alleys are hard to maintain. The new gas station and convenience store also tells us something about Waterloo. I’m not quite sure what that is — such operations are found alongside highways everywhere, and have little that is particularly local about them.

A side note that in intriguing is that the Bee Hive’s lanes now compose table tops at Gallagher’s, a popular restaurant and bar located in a historic building in downtown Waterloo. The owner had a use for the lanes that fit the new social life of the county seat. All is not lost, I guess, and Friday nights in Waterloo must be as fun as ever.

Categories
Architecture Mid-Century Modern St. Louis County

Valley Park’s Modern Post Office

by Michael R. Allen

Valley Park, Missouri has a little Modern Movement United States Post Office that packs a large architectural wallop. Located at 305 St. Louis Avenue, essentially the building is a one-story brick box. There are no frills. The building’s only attempts at style come through function — namely, windows and doors, which every building must have.

Three tall, Roman-arched entrances on one side, trimmed in thick projecting limestone bands that reach up from the ground to form full surrounds. Two windows on the other side, also trimmed in limestone, create a lop-sided counterbalance. Inside of the mightly, heavy Roman arches are upper blinds filled in with small blue tiles whose delicacy contrast pleasantly with the stone surrounds. Power and grace balance each other as a solid doorway to enter the post office also provides the eye with a small delight on entrance.

Much modernism fails at such small but important gestures. This post office does it well, without pretending to be more than what it is — a small, small-town post office. This is the side of modern architecture that pulled the human scale out of minimal expression. After all, buildings are for people. essentially, those which are most functional should be — but rarely are — the most humane. Count the Valley Park Post Office among those that manage to be both.

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Architecture Mid-Century Modern St. Louis County

Albert Aloe Opticians

by Michael R. Allen

En route to another building, I passed the home of Albert Aloe Opticians at 138 West Adams Avenue in Kirkwood. What a stunning mid-century building, replete with its vintage yard sign! The simple geometry of red brick and native limestone provides a backdrop for colorful tile work. I read the colored rectangles like punched out sections of early punched paper data cards. The second floor window ribbon is even shaped like an early computer punch card, with the common tile color suggestive of old paper stock. (Surely some readers will recall the very floppy disks of old.)

It’s as if the architect saw patterns in a punch card and abstracted them into tile work patterns. Either that, or the architect embedded a message in secret geometric code.

Categories
Architecture Churches Granite City, Illinois Illinois Metro East Mid-Century Modern

Exuberant First Assembly of God Church

by Michael R. Allen

Located at 2334 Grand Avenue in Granite City, Illinois, is the former First Assembly of God Church. While the congregation, which has roots dating back to 1909, has moved to a larger building on Madison Avenue, it still maintains the exuberant mid-century church building.

Basically, this church is the average center-aisle front-gabled church form that has persisted in America since the colonial period. Yet it is adapted to the formalism of its era. The gable is not symmetrical. The entrance is not centered on the gable end but placed to one side on a glass addition.

Most prominent, though, is the use of colored glass. This church comes from a period in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s when modernist architects were abuzz with large, loud color experiments. In 1961, Plaza Square Apartments opened in downtown St. Louis; architects Hellmuth Obata Kassebaum and Harris Armstrong gave each of the six multi-story apartment buildings vertical metal stripes in different vivid, bright colors. Googie designs in restaurants and bus depots abounded. Homes has bright garage doors in green, red, blue and yellow. Young John F. Kennedy was president, the Russian threat seemed diminished and all was well. Why not play with churches, homes, schools and office buildings?

The architect of this church sure did play. We have a beautiful asymmetrical tapestry of aluminum-framed colored panes on the front elevation and striped of color on the sides. Obviously, the colored panes also provided an economical alternative to stained glass, but in way no less stylish.

The church remains a festive point on a tidy, quiet street of well-kept houses. A steel city, Granite City welcomed modernism with open arms, as evidenced by the iconic Granite City Steel Building downtown. This church is one of the best-kept examples of the mid-century modern period in Granite City.

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Architecture Collinsville, Illinois Metro East Mid-Century Modern

Mid-Century Modernism in Collinsville

by Michael R. Allen

Across the street from each other on Main Street in Collinsville, Illinois are two delightful one-story mid-century modern office buildings dating to the 1950s. These buildings aren’t exceptional modern masterpieces, but simply nice examples of vernacular modernism: derived from the International Style and other sources by local architects or builders, highly functional and strongly stylized. These buildings are the modern equivalents of the nineteenth and early twentieth century vernacular storefronts lining other blocks on Main Street.

To the east is a later modernist pharmacy and medical office building — there was a clear and exciting architectural conflation between the clean lines of modernism and the promise of postwar medicine. However, the modern purity erodes here through stylized cursive lettering that softens the severity of the purpose houses inside.

In Collinsville as elsewhere, attemprts to make downtown more modern weren’t satisfactory enough for some businesses. One of those was the Collinsville Building and Loan Association, which in 1969 moved from Main Street to the sprawl of Belt Line Road. The Association still occupies that building, and its New Brutalist body hasn’t changed much.

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Churches Collinsville, Illinois Googie Metro East Mid-Century Modern

Heavenly Bar-B-Q

by Michael R. Allen


This quintessential A-frame work of Googie-tecture stands at the northwest corner of Vandalia (State Highway 159) and Clay streets in downtown Collinsville, Illinois. According to the Conestoga sign on the pole in front, this is Bert’s Chuck Wagon with “Open Pit Bar-B-Q.” The high pitched roof overhangs the building to almost conceal the sides completely. Splayed columns add a whimsical touch, and the gabled entry overhang creates enough head space for a person to walk into the building through the door.

What is most striking is the large gable end facing the corner. The open glass wall provided exposure and a contrast to the heavy, almost foreboding side elevations. Now, that gable end provides a backdrop for religious expression.


The windows of the gable end display a rather expressionistic scene of Jesus Christ on the cross, done in bold colors with dark shadow lines. Disconcerting, though, are the white open eyes reminiscent of the “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip.

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Central West End Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

A New Use for the San Luis

In a St. Louis Beacon commentary, Landmarks Association President William Wischmeyer raises a possible reuse scenario for the mid-century San Luis Apartments on Lindell Boulevard: “San Luis apartments, a Modern gem, can be new again”

Categories
Central West End Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

San Luis Gets Website, Spot on Most Endangered List

by Michael R. Allen

There’s a new website called “Save the San Luis” — referring to the threatened San Luis Apartments at Lindell and Taylor in the Central West End — located at NoParkingLotonLindell.com.

Also, last weekend at its annual membership meeting, Landmarks Association announced that the San Luis was one of the additions to this year’s Eleven Most Endangered Places list.