Preservation Research Office
Yesterday evening, a fire raced through the vacant, Land Reutilization Authority-owned four-family building at 4411 N. 20th Street in College Hill. The building’s timber elements quickly gave way to the flames, and within an hour the building was reduced to its still-solid brick walls and smoldering wood inside. Alas, the building is not an isolated one but part of a row of historic buildings, some of which are occupied.
by Michael R. Allen
This unusual cross-gabled house with striking dormers, located at 3839 Lee Avenue in the Fairground neighborhood, is about to be demolished. Once it is gone, an irreplaceable building — seriously, what else looks like this in the entire city? — will be lost and a predictable death pattern will conclude. Fairground and the Third Ward will lose yet another building that could house people, maintain surrounding property values and generate city revenues.
This particular house was first noted as vacant by the Building Division in 1989. The house returned to that status in 1998, and never was occupied again. The downward spiral is evident in the collapsed gable end and mess of bricks below, but also in the ownership. In 2001, after owner Albert Martin defaulted on real property taxes, the house was auctioned by the Sheriff. No one bid. The house reverted to the city’s Land Reutilization Authority (LRA), which did little except keep the plywood boards on. LRA’s lack of enterprise is somewhat understandable given the house’s condition at acceptance. On February 24, 2000, the Building Commissioner condemned the house for demolition. (Even a preservationist is baffled at how long it has taken to get this one down.)
The odd little house on Lee Avenue’s tale is not exceptional, although it should be. A negligent owner let the building fall into disrepair, stops paying taxes, lets it get condemned and then lets it lapse to city ownership. The city lacked the means to reverse long-term decay, and did no marketing of the house. By the time the wrecker put his sign in the front lawn, the story was written and only needed the detail of when demolition would start.
However, this easy and certain death could just as well have been an easy and certain rebirth. The Assessor’s Office shows that the assessed value of land and improvements at 3839 Lee Avenue were a mere $670 in 2000. Again, this is not exceptional. Many houses like this one across the city — but especially in north St. Louis — go to tax sale with low assessments and low tax liens. The economics of preservation of many of these buildings are pretty favorable to a buyer.
Where are the buyers? There are few smart people starting to use the tax auctions for preservation. For instance, artist Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation has purchased at least one Hyde Park building at tax auction for rehabilitation projects. With a plentiful supply of great buildings, many of which could be eligible for historic tax credits, and few competing bidders, there seems to be a hidden buyers’ market in this city. Hidden for long, however, and we could lose quite a bit of St. Louis.
Yesterday the St. Louis Beacon published a great article providing an overview of Pruitt Igoe Now, an ideas competition for the site of the city’s largest housing projects. Here is the official announcement.
Pruitt Igoe Now is an ideas competition launched by a non-profit organization of the same name, located in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. The subject is the 57-acre site of the long-mythologized Pruitt and Igoe housing projects — a site whose future is intertwined with emerging ideas about urban abandonment, the legacy of modernism, brownfield redevelopment and land use strategies for shrinking cities. This competition seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, writers, historians, and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the site and the relationship between those acres to the rest of the city. The deadline for submissions in March 16, 2012. Submissions are accepted beginning now.
March 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of the demolition of the first of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rises, designed by architects, Helmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber, who have long been blamed for the troubled legacy of these towers–problems that are now known to be the result of complex political and economic circumstances. Although later maligned by historians, the Pruitt and Igoe housing projects were the embodiment of modern architectural ideals for public housing, and as powerfully symbolic of St. Louis’ urban renewal as the Gateway Arch would become. For forty years, the site of this complex has been largely untouched, and today the site is an overgrown brownfield forest. As countless other social housing projects across the country are torn down, and rebuilt in the idiom of new urbanism, the site of Pruitt-Igoe remains untouched. What is Pruitt-Igoe now? Can this site be liberated from a turbulent and mythologized past through re-imagination?
This call seeks bold ideas that re-invigorate the abandoned site: ideas from sources as diverse in media and background as possible. This competition imagines the site of Pruitt-Igoe as a frontier: the threshold between North St. Louis, which is showing signs of stabilization after decades of decline, and the new design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Our jurors will select the first, second and third most inspiring proposals and award them $1,000, $750 and $500 respectively. A broad selection of entries will receive honorable mention and inclusion in an online gallery. In April 2012, a symposium on urban dwelling and creative intervention will be held at Portland State University; the advisory committee plans to curate all proposals, and exhibit these at the symposium. The advisory committee also plans to curate select competition submissions into a traveling exhibition that will tour beginning in Summer 2012, starting in St. Louis. The initial setting for display will be publicly accessible and either on or near the Pruitt-Igoe site itself.
The competition was created by P.R.O. Director Michael Allen and Nora Wendl, Assistant Professor of Design in the Department of Architecture at Portland State University. Advisors include writer and former Pruitt-Igoe resident Sylvester Brown, Jr., artist Theaster Gates, architect Karl Grice, former St. Louis Housing Authority Chairman Sal Martinez, The Pruitt Igoe Myth producer Paul Fehler, Washington University professor Eric Mumford, Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin and St. Louis Beacon Associate Editor Robert W. Duffy. Jurors will be announced August 1.
Throughout the process, community and stakeholder engagement is crucial. Pruitt Igoe Now doesn’t have a budget for public relations consultants, but it doesn’t have a protected corner office either. Please get in touch and make this a better experience for the city’s future. Leave comments here, email contact@pruittigoenow.org or call 314-920-5680.
Today on the median of Lewis Place, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay joined Alderman Terry Kennedy (D-18th), Lewis Place Historical Preservation President Pam Talley, Health and Human Services Director Bill Siedhoff and Preservation Research Office Director Michael Allen to announce that the city was close to putting together $1 million in home repair funds for uninsured Lewis Place homeowners affected by the tornado on December 31, 2010. (More of our coverage, including photographs showing the extent of damage, can be found here.)
After over six months, some much-needed relief will arrive if the Board of Estimate and Apportionmate approves matching $500,000 in state disaster aid funds with an equal match out of the city’s major projects allocation of Community Development Block Grant funds. MayorSlay.com has details of the program here. Mayor Slay, Comptroller Darlene Green and Alderman President Lewis Reed, the three members of the board, all support the package. While there are still issues faced by underinsured homeowners, today’s announcement signals that major relief is finally on the way.
Some press coverage of today’s announcement:
by Christian Frommelt
My spring 2011 internship with the Preservation Research Office has allowed me to integrate academic interest with the simple desire to become a more dedicated member of the St. Louis community. Engaging with the type of work practiced by the PRO’s architectural historians has given me a rewarding experience not only in architectural history, but also in the deeper significance of historic preservation for the St. Louis community.
Since February 2011 I have primarily worked on building permit research, architectural photography, and building descriptions for the P.R.O.’s large-scale architectural survey of the O’Fallon neighborhood. As a result of this survey project the neighborhood will be recognized by the National Register as a Historic Place by this time next year. My latest contribution to the O’Fallon survey project involved collecting oral histories provided by North St. Louis residents, an aspect of the project that unified a study of the built environment, a deeper understanding of social issues such as demographic shifts in St. Louis, and one woman’s personal experience at the forefront of a transitioning neighborhood in North St. Louis.
Mabel Jones, an enthusiastic citizen of the Penrose neighborhood, was the first to participate in an interview. She outlined her decision to move at age twenty from Whiteville, Tennessee to St. Louis, where she began working in a laundromat and later on the Near North Riverfront’s Produce Row. As she described her marriage and the upbringing of her five children, Mabel highlighted her ability to gradually move from cramped kitchenette apartments west of Downtown St. Louis during the late 1940s and early 1950s, to a new Pruitt and Igoe housing project in 1957, and, a year later, to the type of family home she had always admired in the Penrose neighborhood. Mabel detailed the make-up of her block as it quickly transitioned from a primarily white to primarily black block, and recounted the struggles, and also the pride, associated with being the first black family on a block of respectable single-family houses.
While I am thankful for having gained the ability to identify hipped dormers, quoins, and belvederes, my interactions with PRO staff, residents we met on O’Fallon streets, and community-minded enthusiasts like Mabel Jones, are what transcended the trudge of busy work which so explicitly marks many undergraduate internship experiences. My relationship with other people in St. Louis is what brought out-of-book research to life. As I have learned, the success of local preservationists and architectural historians lies not solely in a knowledge of and passion for St. Louis’ built environment, but also a steadfast recognition of the humanness in preserving our cityscapes. The fabric of the city does not consist merely of the architecture we admire from a distance, but of the people who inhabit St. Louis’ buildings, businesses, parks, and streets we all too frequently bypass.
Christian Frommelt was one of PRO’s interns from January through May 2011. He is the author of the blog Mound City Stomp.
Our friend and collaborator Andrew Raimist is leading the effort to raise funds for a very worthy summer arts program taking place in the fragile but beautiful Hyde Park neighborhood. In (en)visioning Hyde Park, students in 5th through 8th grade will be working to improve their Hyde Park neighborhood and documenting the progress using photography. Students will learn the basics of digital photography from image capture through editing, printing and publishing.
This effort will be lead by teaching artist Raimist with the generous support of other photographers, artists and educators. ReBuild Foundation is the major sponsor of this workshop as part of their Urban Expressions outreach mission.
This program takes place in collaboration with artist Theaster Gates’ CityStudioSTL’s rehabilitation of a vacant Hyde Park home to create a community gathering place.
A full-color book of the students’ photographs, drawings and writings will be professionally published. Each student will get their own copy to have in hand when school begins in the fall. This experience will enhance their educational achievement and self-confidence.
Grassroots support for this program will provide immeasurable benefits to the students, their families and their neighborhood. Your backing demonstrates widespread commitment to the underserved children of North St. Louis.
Learn more here.
by Michael R. Allen
Coming Soon. So proclaims this small plastic sign, affixed by screws and washers to the front wall of a north St. Louis building. There’s a dumpster out back, so the sign definitely is telling it straight.
The building is a sturdy two-family with a lovely pressed-metal cornice. What makes the rehab so remarkable is the building’s location. This building stands at 2417 Cass Avenue, across the street from the untamed site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. There are only three buildings left on this block face, spaced out considerably. This block is one of ten that the city tried to clear completely in the late 1980s as part of the failed Commerce Business Park plan. Much of this pocket of St. Louis Place was removed, leaving just a handful of buildings and so much vacant land the area has been dubbed the “urban prairie.”
Amid these challenges, owner Grace Baptist Church, which occupies another building on the block face, is working to bring the building back to life. One of the incongruities of thinking about shrinking cities is the persistence of neighborhood economy and reuse demand in depleted neighborhoods. Where there’s a long-term store of value — a building — there may well be a will to make it into wealth. Basic market economics seem to be more enduring than cyclical urban planning interventions.
by Michael R. Allen
A version of this article first appeared in the Winter 2009 NewsLetter of the St. Louis Chapter of the Society Architectural Historians.
There is ample recognition of the significance of mid-century motels along roadsides across America, where motels used colorful signage and design to beckon to weary Americans enjoying their automotive freedom. Perhaps because of nostalgic idealization of the motor court and the “open road” and perhaps because of the stigma that postwar urban renewal efforts have attained, local history overlooks the significant wave of urban motel construction that took place in St. Louis between 1958 and 1970.
The 1958 opening of the Bel Air Motel on Lindell Boulevard renewed the building of lodging in the City of St. Louis while introducing a hotel form new to the city, the motel. St. Louis’ last new hotel before that was the nearby Park Plaza Hotel (1930), a soaring, elegant Art Deco tower built on the cusp of the Great Depression. However, another hotel built before the Depression was more indicative of future trends than the Park Plaza. In 1928, Texas developer and automobile travel enthusiast Percy Tyrell opened the Robert E. Lee Hotel at 205 N. 18th Street in downtown St. Louis (listed in the National Register on February 7, 2007), designed by Kansas City architect Alonzo Gentry. While the 14-story Renaissance Revival hotel was stylistically similar to contemporary hotels, it introduced the chain economy hotel to St. Louis.
by Michael R. Allen
In May 2010, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan visited the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Afterward, he shared his thoughts with St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial writer Eddie Roth. Roth produced a lovely short video combining many striking images from the Post archive with Donovan’s comments. Donovan’s statements about the Pruitt-Igoe legacy are smart and eloquent, although his insistence on the wisdom of demolishing all American high-rise public housing is questionable.
One thing that all interpreters seem to agree upon is the complexity of Pruitt-Igoe’s legacy. The differences lie in whether the design itself could have been salvaged and made to work. Rampant dismissal of the design has led to a strong and largely unquestioned narrative about the causal relationship between high-rise apartment buildings and the conditions of poverty. With almost all of the towers in this nation gone, we seem to be faced with a culture of poverty only stronger and wider than when Pruitt-Igoe’s last tower was opened in February 1956.
by Lindsey Derrington
Working in conjunction with 5th Ward Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin and the non-profit group Community Renewal and Development, Inc, the Preservation Research Office submitted a National Register nomination for the St. Louis Place Historic District earlier this year. We are happy to report that the document was approved by the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation this past Friday, May 20th, paving the way for its review by the National Park Service and its ultimate listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
This process often involves streamlining nomination drafts in cooperation with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in order to more effectively illustrate a district’s significance. We originally argued that St. Louis Place was significant as an example of mid-19th century community planning and as a north-side hub of German and Irish immigrant cultures. However, SHPO staff found that evidence of the Irish presence in the neighborhood has been so drastically diminished that it should be cut from the nomination. In light of the tragic 1986 demolition of the Church of the Sacred Heart, the focal point of St. Louis Place’s Irish community, we have to agree. Yet many landmarks do remain, from the Sacred Heart School (now the Black World History Museum) to the grand mansions along St. Louis Avenue built by some of the city’s most prominent Irish citizens.
