Category: South St. Louis

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Benton Park Historic Preservation South St. Louis

Ongoing Work at the Chatillon-DeMenil House

by Michael R. Allen

The Chatillon-DeMenil House, south St. Louis’ oldest house museum located at Cherokee Street and DeMenil Place, recently completed total replacement of its 44-year-old roof.  Even fully-restored buildings need maintenance, and the Chatillon-DeMenil House the existing standing-seam metal roof roof dated to a 1966 restoration and was failing.  Repairs were also needed for the porch columns on the rear of the house facing DeMenil House.  But work had to start at the top, where water enters.

After successful fundraising, the Chatillon-DeMenil House Foundation had the roof replaced this fall. The replacement is a very bright red roof of standing-seam metal. (In a standing-seam metal roof, vertical pieces of metal are joined with raised seams.)  The new roof is faithful to the type of roof put on the house in the late 19th century, after its original wooden shingles were removed.

The Chatillon-DeMenil House is actually the expanded farmhouse of hunter and guide Henri Chatillon, built in 1848.  Dr. Nicholas DeMenil had the symmetrical Greek Revival style front section with its massive columned portico built between 1861 and 1863 (see illustration above).   Architect Henry Pitcher designed the expansion. Currently the house is interpreted as the DeMenil residence with furnishings appropriate to the late 19th century, but its hybrid history is evident and connects the house to many historical events of 19th century St. Louis and the American West.

With the roof again water-tight, the Chatillon-DeMenil House is ready for additional repairs and restoration this year.  The house is closed for January, but tours will resume next month.  Meantime, the Chatillon-DeMenil Foundation continues to raise money for repairs and accept memberships (the basic membership is only $40).  For more information, visit the Foundation’s website at www.demenil.org.

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Collapse Historic Preservation South St. Louis Tower Grove East

Holding Down the Corner

by Michael R. Allen

Perhaps the most precious architectural resources in our neighborhoods are corner buildings. When the ends of a block are vacant, a street’s urban character takes a huge hit. Empty corners signify distress and disuse. Corner buildings in full use show the world the lifeblood of an urban area, and in vacancy at least carry the promise of renewal to come. If the corner building is commercial the potential is particularly rich: there could be a place of commerce, a generator of city revenues and a point of presence that dampens crime.

To cut to the chase, I have been concerned about the corner commercial building at the northeast corner of Michigan and Arsenal streets for some time now. The building, which dates to 1905, has lost some of its character through relaying of the upper part.  Consequently it is a bit plain, but still sturdy, well-built and suited for a corner store. When I first moved to Tower Grove East last year, the building was already vacant. City records show that the building has been listed as vacant since 2008. Not good.

Then, this summer, the outer wythe of brick on the first floor collapsed.  On July 26, the Building Division condemned the building for demolition.  The only action taken then by owner, Yee Real Estate LLC of Chesterfield, was to prop up the remaining part of the wythe with lumber.  Again, not good.  Tower Grove East is a great neighborhood because it has lost so few buildings, and has few empty corners.  That should not change.

Some relief came this week when Yee Real Estate LLC applied for a building permit on December 29 for stabilization work to rebuild the collapsed masonry.  Hopefully the job is done well and soon, and the building is put back to use.


Attention developers: Just across the street at to the east, the residential building at 3114-16 Arsenal Street remains vacant and for sale. Built in two sections, the building has a dentillated brick cornice and, on the east, flat stone lintels.  These are signs that this building precedes much of the surrounding city fabric.  Indeed the eastern half of the building appears to be a building seen in Compton and Dry’s 1875 Pictorial St. Louis.

Nearby Grant School at 3009 Pennsylvania Avenue would not be completed until 1893.

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PRO Collection South St. Louis Tower Grove East

Snow Day on Gravois, c. 1960

Photograph from the Preservation Research Office Collection.

This photograph dates to around 1960 and shows a woman walking north on the west side of snow-covered Gravois Boulevard just north of Cherokee Street. In the background, faintly, the neon-lit blade sign of F.W. Clemens Supply Company can be seen — a sign that remains to this day. Clemens still sells bulk materials like mortar, cement, gravel, minus and sand to contractors and enterprising individuals.

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Benton Park West Cherokee Street Gravois Park PRO Collection South St. Louis

1950s Parade Scene, Cherokee at Compton

by Michael R. Allen

In November, we acquired a collection of 209 black and white amateur photographs taken in and around St. Louis between 1930 and 1980. Most of the photographs are from the 1950s and a large number feature parade scenes. Today we post two taken by the same photographer on the same date showing the intersection of Cherokee and Compton streets in south St. Louis.

A parade heading west on Cherokee Street near Compton Avenue in the 1950s. Photographs from the Preservation Research Office Collection.
The same view today.

The view in the first photograph shows the north side of the 3100 block of Cherokee Street toward the west end.  At right are the buildings now housing Tower Tacos (3149 Cherokee) and Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts (3151).  At left is the larger corner building where Peridot and the StyleHouse, housing clothing purveyors and St. Louis patriots STL Style and Lighthouse Design.  Kuhn Upholstering Company is long gone.  The Fort Gondo and Tower Taco buildings have lost their shaped front parapets.  Overall, however, the view remains remarkably the same.

The parade turned south onto Compton Avenue from Cherokee Street.
The same view today.

The second view looks north on Compton Avenue. Again, little has changed in the fifty-odd years since the parade passed by — just the removal of awnings. Even parades still pass by on Cherokee Street, at least around every Cinco de Mayo.

Categories
South St. Louis Tower Grove East

Red Brick and Snow

Goodness, does a snowfall bring out the saturated red of St. Louis brick!

Categories
Forest Park Infrastructure South St. Louis

The Harnessed Channel: How the River Des Peres Became a Sewer

by Michael R. Allen

Versions of this article were published in Common Ground, Spring 2003 and the already-missed Creative St. Louis, March 2010.

The River Des Peres channel in the Cheltenham area of the city, 1927. Source: File softhe City Plan Commission.

Along the southwest edge of the city of St. Louis, Missouri runs a six-mile curve of what appears to be a river with paved banks. This river is usually dry and rarely filled to even half its capacity. Covered in rip-rap and white stones along this six miles, the banks form a visual boundary of the city limits — although the actual city line is several hundred yards west. Still, the moat-like river creates an effective border between the middle-class parts of the county and city that occupy either side of it. Yet this river actually unites them, because it carries away all of their wasted water and, deep below its channel, their sewage. The river is the River Des Peres, a harnessed channel that was transformed from a natural waterway into a massive civil engineering project in the early twentieth century.

Of course, the River Des Peres is not simply a deep gorge that carries away waste water from the city and its inner suburbs. In fact, it now lies almost completely underground and is not visible at all. In a 1988 booklet published by the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD), the quasi-governmental agency that has controlled the river since 1956, an anonymous author writes that “the rocky banks of the River Des Peres form a landmark which nearly every St. Louisan recognizes, but few understand.” Few Saint Louisans realize that its 18 miles extend along over half of the city’s western edge, covering a drainage area of 115 square miles and serving a population of over 535,000 people. It enters the city at Skinker Boulevard and Vernon Avenue at the University City limits and then winds its way through Forest Park and into the familiar open section that drains into the Mississippi River. Along the way, it carries both storm water and sewage in separate pipes with connections to most major city and inner-suburban trunk sewers. It is the backbone of the St. Louis sewer system.

Very few residents recognize that the River Des Peres became the backbone of the St. Louis sewer system by having its natural state completely rebuilt so that none of its original features remain. No living person likely remembers the days when all of it was an open and wild, albeit polluted, waterway that St. Louisans happened to dump sewage into. And few accounts describe its earlier incarnation as a pure waterway far from the French settlements on the Mississippi River. In those days, the idea of the River Des Peres becoming one of the largest regional civil engineering projects in the Midwest would have seemed strange. Yet St. Louisans slowly converted the small river into their largest sewer over the course of more than a hundred years, so most of the changes were hardly noticed until the river was already irreversibly controlled by engineers looking to drain unwanted materials from the young city of St. Louis.

Continue reading “The Harnessed Channel: How the River Des Peres Became a Sewer”
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Demolition Gate District Historic Preservation South St. Louis

Two for One on Lafayette Avenue

by Michael R. Allen

In September, I wrote about the storm-damaged collapsing eastern house in a row of three historic houses on the 2800 block of Lafayette Avenue (see “Rowhouse on Lafayette Avenue Slated for Demolition”, September 10). The Building Division quickly condemned for demolition the 19th century house as an emergency public safety hazard, and demolition commenced last month.

The result shows the pitfalls of our current policy for abandoned buildings.

There is no mistake that the wreckers hired by the Building Division did their job, but that job itself is not all that needed to be done. What is left behind by the crew an adjacent row house now weakened to a point where it too may start suffering structural problems.  The first problem is that the side wall, of soft brick never meant to be exposed to weather, is now uncovered.

On the front elevation, as I predicted, the wreckers could not easily deal with the fact that the front wall of the row was laid as a continuous bond with no easy seams. The wrecking job led to loss of face brick and of part of the wooden cornice of the neighboring house. The loss of the cornice is inexcusable since a simple straight saw cut could have been used.

Again, I am not insinuating that the wreckers did anything wrong. Trouble is, they did what the city hired them to do. The city did not hire them to make sure the neighboring building was stabilized, or to do anything beyond removing 2804 Lafayette Avenue.

That task seems particularly short-sighted when one views the newly-exposed east elevation to find a gaping hole in the foundation wall.  I have no clue how this hole was created, but I do know that it leaves wooden joists unsupported.  Without support, those joists will eventually fall, and pull the walls downward with them.  This hole should be patched in with masonry of either stone or concrete masonry units, but if anyone complains the most likely result will be that a city crew will cover it with plywood.

Clearly, the Building Division’s demolition policy leaves unresolved issues when one building in a row — and despite perceptions there are many row houses in the city — gets wrecked but the row stands. The neighboring house now has been destabilized and joist collapse, front wall spalling and other maladies will set in. Hopefully if it gets demolished, the occupied house next door will be protected from careless damage.

Photograph by Jane Porter of Landmarks Association of St. Louis from the National Register nomination of the Barr Branch Library Historic District, 1981.

Before the demolition, the potential of this fine row of houses on Lafayette reminded me of another row, also on the south side of Lafayette between Jefferson and Compton avenues. The photograph of Barr’s Block above shows its deteriorated condition in 1981. The seven-house row built in 1875 by merchant William Barr (of Famous-Barr fame) was in dire condition when it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Barr Branch Library Historic District in 1982. That designation made the row eligible for the federal historic rehabilitation tax credit and led to the row’s rehabilitation.  (One building was later demolished.)

Today Barr’s Block has been rehabilitated again, reverting to town houses from its previous incarnation as rental housing. While Lafayette Avenue in the Gate District may have lost building density and be marred by much vacant land, there remain many historic buildings and the potential for urban infill. The location is amazing. Why the row to the west — not part of any historic district — has been left to die is incomprehensible.

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Fire Shaw South St. Louis

The Lost Twin at Shaw and 39th

by Michael R. Allen

At the northeast corner of 39th and Shaw avenues stands a three story brick building at 3867 Shaw Avenue that has been fully rehabilitated.    The building sports newly-painted wooden replacement windows and a developer’s sign out front.  Where once its red-brown brick walls showed signs of the grime of age, now is is clean testament to a building’s redemption.

The building, which dates to 1914, is a handsome example of our city’s eclectic Craftsman vein of building and the concurrent rise of mass-produced building products.  The Hydraulic pressed brick, the machine-cut limestone that sparingly adorns the wall and the galvanized metal cornice with its perfectly stamped brackets all show the creative potential of machine age ingenuity.  The stone entrance set into jack-on-jack brick (brick laid corner to corner) within a round-top relieving arch is a particularly fine feature.

The building at 39th and Shaw also stands as the remainder of a set of perpendicular twins that doubled the density of the corner parcel. The twin neighbor of the same age met a horrible end just a few years ago yesterday. I took the photographs here on October 31, 2004.

Between the hours of 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. on October 26, 2004, the St. Louis Fire Department responded to three alarms within a four-block radius. Three buildings — all owned then by the Garden District Commission — were ablaze: a two-flat in the 4000 block of Folsom Avenue, a house in the 4000 block of McRee Avenue and the three-story apartment building at 1854 South 39th Street. All would be demolished in subsequent months.

The twin neighbor was obviously damaged severely by the fire. Rescue would have been possible, but expensive since the roof and top floor had completely collapsed at the building’s north end.

Demolition of the apartment building at 1854 S. 39th Street took away one contributing resource from the Shaw Historic District as well as the existing residential density of the site. Perhaps some day the site will again give rise to a building. Mean time, the next door neighbor stands as a reborn twin separated at death.

Categories
South St. Louis Tower Grove East

New Tower Grove East Neighborhood Website

St. Louis’ Tower Grove East Neighborhood — where the Preservation Research Office currently is located — has a new website, built and designed by neighborhood resident Joe Millitzer.

Check it out at www.towergroveeast.org

Categories
Abandonment Collapse Gate District South St. Louis

Row House on Lafayette Avenue Slated for Demolition

by Michael R. Allen

Only one of these three row houses at the southwest corner of Lafayette and California avenues in the Gate District is occupied. The photograph makes that obvious.  Built circa 1883, the row is one of the remaining historic buildings that provides architectural character to Lafayette Avenue west of Jefferson — character that, although diminished through substantial demolition, connects this section of the south side street to its eastern and western parts.  Lafayette Avenue has its gaps, but never on its entire run through the city does it lack any part of our city’s built heritage.

Yet all is not well with this row.

Last month, during heavy rain, a large crack developed in the eastern wall of the row’s easternmost house. Then the back section of the wall collapsed, leaving a gaping hole and the house without needed structural support. The wooden joists in brick row houses almost always run perpendicular to the side walls, so damage to these walls can be fatal.

Located at 2804 Lafayette Avenue, city records show that the house is owned by Mark S. Phillips care of Edward Wandrick. The Building Division has listed the house as vacant since 1998, and its adjacent neighbor as vacant from 1989-1991 and again since 2007. Yet given the rough condition and length of abandonment, one would be excused for mistaking it for a Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) building.

On September 7, Building Commissioner Frank Oswald approved an emergency demolition for the damaged eastern house. Of course, the house could be salvaged even now. After all, the side wall is only half-gone — a condition that means, of course, that it is half intact. And the other walls of the house are sound. A problematic factor for demolition is the connected middle house. Not only do the buildings share a common party wall, but the front elevation of all three houses is laid continuously. There is no straight seam between the row. Removal of part of it could destabilize the rest without masonry repair, and emergency demolitions don’t have masonry repair budgets.

Of course, the fate of the building has been under the control of its owners, and they have let the building quietly ride its course. If the building were owned by the LRA, perhaps other options would exist right now should the Gate District neighbors and the area’s alderwoman, Kacie Starr Triplett (D-6th), wish to pursue them. Perhaps the building would be rehabilitated instead of facing its death knell, or perhaps it would have been wrecked years ago. The only certainty is that preservation of long-vacant city buildings is far from scientific. Fortune, in the forms of passionate buyers or harsh sudden winds, make or break St. Louis’ fragile buildings.

Although fortune has often cast a frown on the immediate area around the row on Lafayette, there is significant urban fabric remaining. Although the corner parcel next to 2804 Lafayette has long lost another dwelling and a corner store, across California to the east is a line of commercial buildings in good repair.  South on California are a few residential buildings and then Interstate 44.

Across the street from those buildings is the imposing red-brick, Romanesque Revival Hodgen School of 1884. Designed by Otto J. Wilhelmi, the school may very well have educated young people who were raised at 2804 Lafayette. The closed school building awaits reuse.  Hodgen’s large school yard was created by razing a line of commercial buildings, an action which created a gap in the Lafayette Avenue street line.  One more gap is on the way.