Preservation Research Officeby Michael R. Allen
In the midst of discussion on this blog about a partly un-boarded broken window on the vacant Fourth Baptist Church at 13th and Sullivan in Old North St. Louis, a new board went up (at right in the photo above). This simple act will prevent vandalism and trespass on the building, ensuring its survival as it awaits reuse.
by Michael R. Allen
Here is the entrance to the Fourth Baptist Church at 13th and Sullivan in Old North St. Louis. You can see that someone has broken the window at right, and that someone has very poorly attempted to board over the damage. Hint: If the broken area still shows, you haven’t boarded over the damage.
In August 2007, someone threw a rock at the window and caused the spider-web-like broken lines. Neighbors tried to get the owner, a nearly-defunct congregation, to board up the broken window. I cut my hand taping the damage to stabilize the glass. Several Citizens’ Service Bureau complaints led to the congregation’s finally boarding up the broken glass. Then, this December, the other side of the doorway gets the same treatment — from vandal and owner. Neighbors still haven’t seen a full repair.
The church building itself is an important landmark, and deserves better treatment. The congregation does not have the funds to maintain the building; they vacated in 2002. Meanwhile, the building has become a nuisance to neighbors as the congregation refuses to commit to selling and won’t make even small efforts to stay abreast of vandalism. Hopefully Fourth Baptist will board up the broken window and sell their church to someone who will invest in the future of the church and the neighborhood.
Looking southeast from the corner of 13th and Mullanphy Streets in St. Louis yesterday evening.
by Michael R. Allen
Above is the grim scene that I encountered two weeks ago after a blustery winter storm: the vacant city-owned building at 2917-21 N. 13th Street in Old North St. Louis had suffered a roof collapse. The building, built around 1880, stands one block north from my house in the densest section of a neighborhood famed for its loss of building density. Mt neighbors and I were aghast to see what misfortune had struck a vacant building already beset by misfortune.
The building and an adjacent building to the north form a graceful row that hugs the sidewalk line. Before, the buildings’ back walls had fallen. Loose bricks on the parapet of the alley side elevation had caused the Land Reutilization Authority to consider emergency demolition, but LRA backed off after the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group reminded LRA that they were trying to market the poor buildings for historic rehabilitation.
Now, the mansard roof with its two dormers had completely collapsed outward and the flat roof above had fallen inside of this part of the row. But again the Restoration Group acted quickly. Development Coordinator Karen Heet fended off the Building Division and managed to get the debris out of the public right-of-way (a favorite demolition excuse) within 24 hours of the collapse.
Karen has posed a very interesting idea for reusing the buildings. A look at the rear of the row helps underscore her logic.
Rather than try to rebuild the buildings, which have lost significant building material, Karen would like to try something else. She suggests demolishing the interiors and retaining only the front and side elevations. Inside, a developer could build a new building on the old foundations using the existing brick walls as facades. The new building could be modular and modern, allowing Old North to offer a different housing unit while retaining the impressive street face of this row. I think that idea is worth attempting.
There are many historic buildings in the city with severe damage that are ineligible for historic rehabilitation tax credits. Some of these buildings are located outside of historic districts and are never going to eligible for such designation. Others are buildings that once were contributing to historic districts but have had so many sections collapse their rebuilding would count as “reconstruction” and not “rehabilitation” and thus would be ineligible for both state and federal historic rehab credits. Still others are badly remuddled old buildings that don’t count as contributing resources in districts.
In such cases, a straightforward attempt at replicating the old building fabric may be cost-prohibitive or simply limiting. The old Archigram concept of using masonry walls as armaments for modular housing offers an intriguing solution to situations where we have a pretty wall and little else. In other cases, more of the original building may be retained than in others. The important thing is that we don’t commit to a dichotomy in which the only common form of rehab is the tax-credit project and the only alternative is demolition for new construction. There is a full spectrum of architectural options, and saving any of the embodied energy in an old building at all is far more green than starting completely fresh.
Anyone interested in purchasing and rebuilding the buildings on 13th Street can call Karen at 314-241-5031.
More information on the row, including earlier photographs, can be found here.
by Michael R. Allen
Last week, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation awarded the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group (ONSLRG) $200,000 grant at its fourth annual Neighborhood Excellence Initiative awards. The Restoration Group will use the money to renovate its new office and meeting space in the 14th Street Mall Redevelopment Area and to purchase properties that play strategic roles in stabilizing sections of the neighborhood. These are pressing needs for the group as it begins to operate as a high-profile community development corporation that handles a huge workload.
Currently, the ONSLRG staff does an amazing amount of work with only three full-time staffers operating out of modest rented space. The momentum that ONSLRG has created is impressive, but demanding — the harder the organization works, the more people inside and outside of the neighborhood want assistance with development, nuisance properties and community matters. This award gives ONSLRG capacity to keep up with accelerating interest in Old North.
by Michael R. Allen
Photo by the author.
Defying promises to neighborhood leaders, developer Paul J. McKee, Jr. has purchased another historic building in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. Last Tuesday at a Sheriff’s auction, McKee’s holding company Babcock Resources LLC purchased the home at 1412 Sullivan Avenue, pictured above. Babcock’s bid was around $8,000 with bidding starting at $900.
The 1400 block of Sullivan Avenue is one of the most stable and intact blocks in the neighborhood, with only two missing buildings. Since renovation work began on another empty building on the block, the house at 1412 Sullivan is the only vacant building on the block.
McKee also owns three buildings on the 1400 block of Hebert Street, one block to the north, and a building at 2900 N. 14th street, one block east.
Since September 6, 2007, Babcock Resources LLC has been used to purchase at least nine properties with total recorded sales prices of $380,600. Eagle Realty Company owner Harvey Noble as well as Roberta M. Defiore have signed the deeds for the company. Deeds of trust report that Rice Capital Group LLC and Salvador Equity Management LLC have loaned money for the purchases.
Tonight at a public meeting Metropolitan Congregations United will be discussing McKee’s north side land acquisition project. McKee is an invited guest. The meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. at Holy Trinity Church, 3518 N. 14th Street in Hyde Park.
by Michael R. Allen
Meet the building at 2817 N. 14th Street. This is the sort of buildings that many preservationists would hem and haw about when asked if it would be expendable to redevelopment. This is the sort of building that many Old North St. Louis residents would defend to the moment before the bulldozer arrived.
This 1860s-era row house has some noticeable problems. It’s owned by the city’s Land Reutilization Authority. The front wall is bulged outward, necessitating the bracing that was installed only recently. The roof is sagging inward. Bricks routinely fall from its parapets. The interior is barely recognizable as anything other than a tangle of water-damaged wood. The floors have collapsed, and the walls have descended.
Yet the building still shows its elegant Greek Revival brickwork. Simple segmental arches are repeated over the windows and doorway. A dentillated brick cornice creates a stately crown to the front elevation. The front-gabled roof draws the passer-by’s eye upwards to a small dormer. Long ago, chimneys would have provided more visual interest at the roof.
This building demonstrates the craftsmanship of vernacular architecture from an era with relatively little traces. How can Old North St. Louis tell its story to future generations without it? The neighborhood is unwilling to try.
This building joins over 25 other historic buildings to form the $32 million “Crown Square” project in Old North. This project is spearheaded by the Old North St. Louis Restoration group and the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance — a neighborhood group and a not-for-profit. These are organizations whose missions allow them to take the risk to tell the neighborhood’s story. These are organizations acting long ahead of any moment at which a private developer would dare spend $32 million in Old North. If that day comes, the developer spending that money may own a building like this one. That developer may look for a precedent on how to handle the thorny question of what to do with a half-collapsed old brick tenement.
By then, projects like Crown Village and the investment of the community in its history will set a pretty strong precedent for doing the right thing. The right thing here is to safeguard the traces of a community’s heritage that will inform future generations who will live inside and alongside historic buildings in Old North.
Carson Minow’s latest video for St. Louis Traffic is about Old North St. Louis. Check it out here. Thus continues the continued interest in Old North by the editors of MayorSlay.com. Hopefully that is an indication that our current mayor understands a thing or two about the urban character of the near north side.
by Michael R. Allen
Photo from What’s New in Old North.
Old North St. Louis has made a big step in the effort to stabilize the imperiled Mullanphy Emigrant Home. The foundation of the south wall of the Mullanphy Emigrant Home is in the midst of reconstruction this week. Once the foundation work is completed, masons can begin laying the block that will form the new inner wythes of the walls; face brick will come later. Hopefully by winter’s onset the roof of the building will be supported by masonry walls.
Remember that the greater the progress made, the greater the cost. The effort to stabilize the landmark continues to seek donations.
More from What’s New in Old North: Mullanphy Foundation Begins to Rise
by Michael R. Allen
Detail of commercial building at 2712 N. 14th Street.
A land assemblage project has led to large-scale development in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. Construction is almost fully underway at Crown Square, better known as the “14th Street Mall” redevelopment project. The moribund 14th Street Mall had long been an impediment to redevelopment of the historic neighborhood, with a pernicious spread of abandonment out from its center at the intersection of 14th and Montgomery streets. Since the closure of 14th street in 1975, the commercial district lost viability and eventually almost every commercial and residential tenant.
The abandonment of buildings led to fires and demolition into the late 1990s. Since the “mall” began as a thriving urban commercial district, ownership was never consolidated. In the years of decay, divided ownership and some land speculation proved as big an impediment to revitalizing this area as the abandonment.
Several years ago, the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group formed a partnership with the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance (RHCDA) to acquire properties around the mall for redevelopment. This move was debated within the community and initiated by the neighborhood organization, which sought the strategic partnership with RHCDA.
The assemblage strategy was to overlay the area. Basically, if a property was vacant, the partnership made an attempt to acquire it. If it was occupied, the partnership did not. The partnership expressly avoided the use of eminent domain, rumor-mongering or threats in their assemblage operation. In fact, they did most of the necessary assemblage without a redevelopment agreement that would have granted condemnation rights.
Also noteworthy is that the overlay approach was based upon full respect for the traditional lot sizes of the neighborhood. This restriction would force the partnership to do development on the intimate, urban scale of Old North St. Louis. However, the partnership intended to not only respect the scale of the neighborhood but its architecture as well. The plan of the partnership was to rehabilitate each of the nearly 30 buildings acquired, and later build on vacant land.
The goal of historic rehabilitation both honored the community’s pride in its heritage and allowed for utilization of an important financing mechanism: the state historic rehabilitation tax credit. That tax credit was key to ensuring that this project was economically feasible. The uncapped historic rehabilitation tax credit has seeming infinite use in north St. Louis and other areas where large-scale renewal is needed.
In the end, the partnership acquired about ten acres within a 25-acre redevelopment area. The remaining acreage includes streets and alleys — also key components of community renewal — as well as property owned by rehabbers, homeowners and businesses that are now stakeholders in the Crown Square project. As soon as assemblage reached desired levels, the partnership secured a redevelopment agreement with the city of St. Louis and sought financing to make the neighborhood’s dream come true. This is the project that should have been the basis for a smart distressed areas development project.
The result is a $32 million project that will create 78 residential units and 26,000 square feet of commercial space within a 16-block area. In a historic neighborhood with small blocks on a street grid, that’s a large project — and a great model for future endeavors in north St. Louis. Hopefully, the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit and the scale of development that it stipulates does not discourage people from learning lessons from Crown Village.
Follow the fast-paced construction work at Crown Square on the What’s New in Old North blog.