Category: Old North

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North St. Louis Northside Regeneration Old North

Blairmont Goes to the Mall

by Michael R. Allen

The two-and-a-half-story, side-gabled house at 1416 Montgomery Street is Old North St. Louis is fairly nondescript. Its front elevation probably bowed years ago, and was taken down and relayed with a harder modern brick and newer fenestration. The rebuilt front wall is boring, although the side and rear walls show the house to be a late-19th-century house that could be restored to some more appropriate appearance.

But doing that work would take imagination, patience and a faith in the neighborhood’ renewal. You see, this modest dwelling is right across the alley from the so-called 14th Street Mall, the two blocks of commercial buildings fronting a part of north 14th Street closed in 1971 to form a pedestrian mall. The mall conversion killed the vitality of the commercial district, and by the 1990s only a few stores remained open. Today, the only occupied storefronts on the mall are a hair salon and a storefront church. Every other first floor is boarded or broken in, and the upper floors of the multi-story buildings have been empty even longer.

All of this is set to change, though, as a major collaborative redevelopment project is in the works. Most of the buildings on the mall are now owned by a partnership between the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group and the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance, two organizations whose work is often miraculous. Imagine what they might do with 1416 Montgomery Street if they had the chance!

All we can do now is imagine, because at a recent Sheriff’s tax sale the house and its accompanying garage sold to one of the Blairmont companies. Although their purchases in Old North have slowed, they still wanted to buy a derelict building that needs to be included in the 14th Street project.

Perhaps Blairmont can rehab the building better and faster than the partnership. Perhaps I am a dog person. Perhaps someone will rebuild the buildings cleared for the Arch. Perhaps asbestos is actually a nutrient…

Categories
North St. Louis Old North Rehabbing

Our Dirt

by Michael R. Allen

What is shown in this photograph? Does someone in Old North St. Louis own an incontinent elephant? Are Mississippians returning? Is this a previously-unknown north side mountain?

The answer is mundane: It’s a pile of fill dirt in our yard that will be used to level out sinking foundation cavities from buildings that once stood on the lots next to our house. Once leveled, the lots can become a staging area for our mason as he begins the masonry work needed on our house.

The dirt is completing a cycle: it comes from the excavation of a foundation for a new house in Old North St. Louis on North Market Street.

Categories
North St. Louis Old North Rehabbing

How Not to Patch a Hole in the Wall

by Michael R. Allen

Here is a piece of a cardboard package containing a mesh drywall patch. The cardboard was mounted as a patch and covered in drywall joint compound…

…right here, on a wall in the former first floor kitchen at the rear of our house. A fire damaged the first floor in 2003, and the owners made repairs. Many of the repairs are rather shoddy, as you can see. Here, it seems that they removed the old outlet box by making a big hole in the wall. After installing a new outlet box, rather than make proper repairs to the drywall, they hastily patched the mess with this curious method. (The new wiring, by the way, was done well.)

When recently removing tiles and sub-floor in this room, I decided to finally get rid of the bad patch. I will remove more drywall and “patch” with a properly cut piece of drywall.

Categories
North St. Louis Old North Severe Weather

Storm Damage in Old North

by Michael R. Allen

We again have electricity, so I will share two images of storm damage in Old North St. Louis.

Here is the house at 1219 Clinton Street in the south end of the neighborhood. While it was already damaged and the roof had collapsed at the start of this year, its east wall was relatively intact until Wednesday.

Here is a close-up of the damage to the roof of the William H. Niedringhaus Home on Sullivan Avenue (our house).

There’s a photo of the damaged Someone Cares Mission building on Benton Street in the What’s New in Old North blog.

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Benton Park Mullanphy Emigrant Home North St. Louis Old North Severe Weather South St. Louis Switzer Building

Storm Update

by Michael R. Allen

Wednesday night was rough on us. The front quarter of the flat roof membrane on the three-story section of our house blew off, pulling up the recovery layer and uncovering the decking. Water poured in, ruining drywall on the third floor and seeping down into the second floor. Meanwhile, my truck was hit by a street tree that fell and the windshield was damaged.

When I returned home, I was able to get a tarp from a neighbor and make a hasty covering although continued lightning cut short my efforts. Our power stayed on long after most neighbors lost theirs, but went out before midnight. It remains off, although just last night I saw lights back on inside of Crown Candy Kitchen, where perishables had been evacuated by distributors.

Yesterday, I stayed home and obtained more tarps from neighbors and set to making a sturdier repair. An ex-neighbor who has been helping friends rehab a building that he sold to them was around and helped me with the work. I used various scrap 2×4’s, 1×4’s and other pieces to nail down the tarps around the edges. I further anchored the tarps with bricks.

At the moment, severe weather has returned and I am at work hoping that my work holds up today. No matter what, we will return to sleep inside of our brick oven tonight to keep thieves away.

Other news from the storm:

Winds took down part of the east wall of the Switzer’s Building on Laclede’s Landing.

Downtown East St. Louis took an incredible hit, with several small historic commercial buildings in states of partial collapse or with severely compromised roofs. The Stockyards area was hard hit, with the old entrance sign bent and the Robertson’s feed store suffering a small collapse. Somehow, the Armour packing Plant and the Murphy Building escaped further damage.

A corner storefront building at Sidney and Lemp in south St. Louis has part of its eastern wall collapse.

Two houses in a lovely Greek Revival row on Howard Street between 13th and 14th streets lost parts of their second-story walls. A commercial building dating to te 1870s in the 1300 block of Benton Street — the old Someone Cares Mission — collapsed; it was already fire-damaged. The nearby Mullanphy Emigrant Home thankfully did not incur further damage.

While officials promised to help evacuate people, seniors down the street at the Jackson place senior center were still sitting around outside while the building lacked power. Ambulances came to the center all day long.

Once again, I was reminded that urban areas have grossly inadequate strategies for coping with summer heat. Winter weather can impair driving, so a lot of emergency planning covers winter storms. Summer heat waves always catch cities off guard, even though they are far deadlier than winter weather.  I can’t believe that over 400,000 people in the region lack power during 100-degree heat.

Categories
North St. Louis Old North Rehabbing

Basement Wall Repair on Sullivan Street

by Michael R. Allen

Last night at around 10:00 p.m. I finished relaying a small section of our foundation wall. This wall is in the original part of our house, on which construction began in November 1885 and was completed sometime in early 1886. I this period, the most common foundation for a typical residential building like ours was one of limestone rubble, roughly coursed and held together with a fill of dirt and lime and then pointed with a soft, lime-heavy mortar.

When we purchased the house, a few sections of our foundation had significant erosion problems due to the intrusion of tree roots, water infiltration and — most common — application of hydraulic cement that fell off, pulling out mortar. After making sure that the tree and water problems were eradicated, I have systematically ground these areas out and repointed them with mortar that’s a little harder than the original type used but soft enough to keep the limestone faces from spalling, a common problem brought on when people point their foundation walls with inappropriate hard mortars or cements.

The area that I finished last night was an area under a window opening where the inner stones had fallen out completely, leaving an area about a foot deep, three feet tall and four feet wide without stone. The cause of this small collapse seems to be due to water infiltration when the basement window opening was left open and crudely boarded (not sealed) for about two years following a fire in the basement in 2003.

First, I cleaned the area of the loose fill mixture and other debris. Then I ground out mortar and fill around the opening to make a good key into the stable sections of the wall. I began laying the stones a few weeks ago, one course at a time because rubble stone needs to set slowly so that the courses don’t fail or push out while setting. I worked in evenings and on weekends. Of course, since the rubble stone was packed in while the entire width of the wall was being raised systematically, I had trouble getting the same stones to fit their places in the wall. I also did not know the original placement, although the outside stones carried traces of a green paint that someone once painted our basement walls (creating another problem for the mortar in the process). How did I get the wall section firm without simply cheating by using mortar to fill gaps?

I turned to the resources at our disposal: the foundation walls of the seven buildings that stood on the lots adjacent to our house that we also own. All of these walls are intact under the ground, and some are clearly visible poking up through the dirt. I mined the top levels of these walls to obtain stones to fit where the original stones could not. Sometimes, I used a hammer and chisel to cut stones to fit.

In the end, I spend many hours and about $25 in mortar to rebuild the foundation area. Time will tell if my work will hold up, but it sure beats the bids ranging from $500 to $1,100 that we had to repair that area. And our bidders proposed using block or other ways of making the job easier for them — but not cheaper for us. I’d rather make a repair using a traditional method and pick up the skills to make it again if need be.

Categories
Infrastructure North St. Louis Old North

Trash Collection and City Block 1130

by Michael R. Allen

The Refuse Division missed pick-up of the one refuse dumpster on City Block 1130 — our block — starting on Friday, May 19. They missed pick-up on the following Tuesday and Friday. By Tuesday, people had started dumping trash into the yard waste dumpster on the block. We simply walked our trash to a business-sized dumpster the next block west that sits behind a vacant lot where a storefront building stood until the late 1980’s.

Complaint to the Citizens’ Service Bureau led to the trash in both the refuse and yard waste dumpsters being collected yesterday evening.

The incident reminded me of how depopulated Old North St. Louis remains, and how similar conditions are here to those found in the small towns of southern Illinois where I grew up. In both places, one must not expect any luxury or regularity to life, even in trash collection. There simply are not enough people in either place to keep things on schedule. Times like these can set people into a rage, and lead some to abandon a neighborhood. To a country-born fellow like myself, I simply shrug at the uncollected waste and take my trash to the next dumpster. Where I grew up, we burned our trash outdoors!

The 1897 Whipple fire insurance map shows 14 buildings on the irregularly-shaped City Block 1130 (almost a triangle formed by 14th, Wright and Sullivan streets). Today, there are four. (We own one and the sites of six others.) A quick estimate of households in 1897 is twenty-two; today, there are three. One dumpster for three households is a luxury by 1897 standards. Perhaps today it is, too — although I hope that the Refuse Division is not trying to phase out collection on our block.

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

Emigrant Home, Turnverein on Missouri Preservation’s Most Endangered List

by Michael R. Allen

Missouri Preservation, formerly the Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation, announced its 2006 Most Endangered Historic Places list at a press conference in Fulton last Saturday.

Among the thirteen places are the storm-damaged Nord St. Louis Turnverein and the Mullanphy Emigrant Home on the near north side of St. Louis. Another St. Louis-area building made the list: the Mark Sappington House in Crestwood, built in 1840 and threatened with demolition for a strip mall.

The list may draw greater attention statewide to the plight of these buildings. Across the state, St. Louis has a strong reputation as a leader in historic rehabilitation efforts, so people may take our forward movement for granted. The truth is that the city’s north side continues to lose buildings at an alarming rate with no end in sight. Hopefully the inclusion of the near north side buildings will show people that great architecture requires political and economic maintenance, even (especially?) in a city on the rebound from decline.

Thanks go to Karen Bode Baxter for nominating the Turnverein and the Emigrant Home at the last minute.

Categories
North St. Louis Northside Regeneration Old North

1445 Monroe: A $250,000 House?

by Michael R. Allen

There is an old front-gabled, one-story shotgun house in Old North St. Louis at 1445 Monroe Street. This little home is clad in a permastone-like material but retains pretty elaborate wooden tracery along the front gable. I would guess that the home dates to the early 1880s.

This house sits directly across the street from the block face where a partnership between the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group and the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance has rescued three buildings from vacancy, including two old buildings that needed front walls rebuilt. This partnership assembled financing using 11 different sources of funding and spent over $250,000 per finished unit in the ongoing restoration of buildings like these.

Meanwhile, Noble Development Company purchased the house at 1445 Monroe on March 9, 2006, and the house is now vacant. Noble Development Company is apparently part of the “Blairmont” family of companies (link to an in-progress site of documentation) and now owns around 250 properties. While responsible developers are spending $250,000 per unit on buildings in need of intense rehab, the guns behind Blairmont won’t even spend $1,000 on each of its many properties, that include overgrown lots as well as buildings like the James Clemens, Jr. House.

Then again, someday people may be paying $250,000 for a house at 1445 Monroe — but not the modest but lovely house on the site now. Perhaps the street name will be changed by then. #14 Ingenuity Drive, anyone?

Categories
Demolition Historic Preservation North St. Louis Old North

Mullanphy Emigrant Home Owner Has Applied For Demolition Permit

by Michael R. Allen

Paul Hopkins, owner of the Mullanphy Emigrant Home, has applied for a demolition permit for the building. One month has passed since the building was hit by a storm, and no firm plan has emerged for the building.