Category: Parking

by Michael R. Allen

Recent discussion about development around the intersection of Seventh and Locust streets — prompted by a plan to convert St. Louis Centre into a parking garage — brings to mind one of that intersection’s lost landmarks. The Mercantile Club stood at the southwest corner of that intersection, where now there is a parking lot.

The illustration here appeared in the Northwestern Architect in December 1891, showing the successful entry by Isaac S. Taylor in the Club design competition. Completed in 1892 according to the plan shown here, Taylor’s design beat the work of other architects, including Louis Sullivan. (Had Sullivan won, Seventh Street would have been home to three of his works, with the Union Trust Building directly adjacent to the south.)

Taylor’s design clearly was influenced by the Romanesque Revival architecture of H.H. Richardson as well as the architecture French Renaissance, which favored high-pitched roofs and turrets. The base of the building was Missouri granite, with brick above punctuated with terra cotta ornament.

The site had been occupied by the town home of Henry Shaw, which was relocated to a site on Tower Grove Avenue at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1891, the Mercantile Club was a rising and successful group consisting largely of downtown businessmen, and the site chosen for the club home was in the heart of members’ commercial interests.

Later known as the Compton Building, the Mercantile Club fell in the early 1970s for the current surface lot.

by Michael R. Allen

Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.
Following through the recent downtown demolitions with some link to the Miss Hullings Building tragedy, here are photographs of the slender commercial building that once stood at 1427 Lucas Avenue just a block north of Washington and a block east of the City Museum. The link to Miss Hullings? This building was also designed by prominent architect John Ludwig Wees. The visual link to Miss Hullings is clear: a tripartite division into ornamental base, a more prosaic center and a crown featuring an arcade of Roman windows beneath a brick cornice.

Sure, these weren’t the buildings that Wees put in the front of his portfolio, but they were hardly throwaway designs. Every architect has a way of designing when the budget is lavish, or when it’s severely restricted. Where the architect’s hand comes through the most is in the middle — the work that he or she designs day in and day out. Wees certainly gave his commercial buildings a strongly modern sensibility, meted through a classical screen. The first two floors — the public interface at the sidewalk — exhibits a restrained classicism through a limestone surround, a central cast iron column with Corinthian capital, lion heads inside of wreaths above each storefront and an egg and dart cornice in the limestone surround above the whole assembly.

Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.
The egg and dart is every building’s sad nod toward fate. That pattern enshrines the life cycle of creation and death in a succinct, poetic metaphor. Egg brings life. Dart takes it away.

Alas, the dart of death frequently comes in the form of heavy metal. The wrecking ball took down this splendid essay in commerce around the last months of 2000, when St. Louis Auto Sales successfully obtained an “emergency” demolition permit from the Building Division. A building that once housed Continental Shoemakers and countless dry good companies ranging from leather wholesalers to garment retailers met the dour economics of parking. Not quite an egg there, eh?

by Michael R. Allen

Steve Patterson’s post “Stealing a Sidewalk” shows how the parking lot at the northwest corner of 11th and Locust streets invades the public right of way by paving over what legally is sidewalk space. The post takes me back to the doom and gloom days of the mid-1990s, when the so-called Miss Hullings Building at that site fell to the wrecking ball at the hands of owner Larry Deutch.

Here’s a photograph of the Miss Hullings Building in February 1997, a few weeks after demolition started, taken by Lynn Josse.

The four-story commercial building dated to 1905, and John Ludwig Wees was the architect. The second and third floors’ robust window grid was softened by a more traditionally Romanesque third floor window arcade and corbelled cornice. The scale of the building was a nice complement to the taller buildings on the other three corners of the intersection — the Alverne, Louderman and 1015 Locust buildings.

Miss Hullings operated a famous cafeteria in the building from 1931 through 1993, when Larry Deutsch sought a demolition permit. The staff of the city’s Heritage and Urban Design Commission (now the Cultural Resources Office) first denied the permit, but on appeal to the Commission recommended approval. Commission staff member Jan Cameron laid out reasons for original denial, but added that the building was not among Wees’ finest. Deutsch proposed leaving the first floor walls of the building in place to screen the parking lot!

At a September 22, 1994 meeting, the Commission voted 4-3 to deny the appeal. Commissioners Karl Grice, Fred Andres and Jeff Brambila spoke strongly against demolition. Acting Chairman Susan Taylor joined these three to vote to deny the appeal. Voting against denying the appeal were Sarah Martin, Renni Shuter and Brad Weir.

Brambila said that “this building has a very definite presence and its context to me is extremely strong.” Andres reminded his fellow commissioners that “the [1993] downtown plan specifically says that there should not be further surface parking lots in the core of downtown.” Reading the transcript from this meeting, one finds many quotes that could have come out of the recent Preservation Board meeting on the Robert Brothers’ plan to demolish two buildings that stand two block east at the corner of 10th and Locust. There are great arguments about context, the importance of adhering to downtown planning documents and the imbalanced trade between building space and car space.

The owners next filed suit against the Commission. On December 13, 1995, Circuit Court Judge David Mason ruled in favor of Deutsch’s company, citing the statements by the Commission staff that the parking lot plan met their criteria for redevelopment and that the building lacked sufficient architectural merit for staff to recommend denial of the appeal.

According to Judge Mason’s ruling, “[the building] by virtue of HUDC staff’s representation to the HUDC, had no architectural merit, had an acceptable development plan, had no neighborhood effect nor reuse potential and had no urban design effect.”

The good sense of the Heritage and Urban Design Commission was overturned. Later appeal of Judge Mason’s decision by the Commission was denied, and demolition commenced in January 1997. Years later, we are still living with the court ruling against common sense.