This is the ninth and final part of a series on the evolution of the Gateway Mall, that ribbon of park space that runs between Market and Chestnut streets and from the Jefferson National Expansion memorial westward to Twenty-Second Street downtown. This article began its life as a lecture that I delivered to the Friends of Tower Grove Park on February 3, 2008, and was published in its entirety in the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Missouri Valley chapter in Spring 2011.

The concept rendering for Citygarden.

The 2007 Gateway Mall master plan provided impetus to the development of the two blocks of the mall between Eighth and Tenth streets as the successful Citygarden. Designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz architects and completed in 2009, Citygarden is an interactive sculpture garden that has garnered favorable criticism from the New York Times. Citygarden’s two blocks share the “hallway,” a wide formal tree-lined sidewalk along Market Street recommended by the new Gateway Mall Master Plan. However, the blocks eschew further strict formalism. Linear paths follow the somewhat irregular lines of long-abandoned alleys, while a gentle arc runs through both blocks. The north sides are raised up, with the eastern block containing a waterfall and minimalist cafe building on its high side and the western block rising up to a whimsical forested hill atop which is placed a sculpture. There is a plaza on the western block alive with fountain jets adjacent to a grid of large metal pedals upon one which one can jump to trigger bells at different tones. All of the sculptures can be touched. Citygarden has been so successful that the section of 10th Street between the two blocks remains closed to shield the heavy pedestrian traffic.

The pre-construction plan for Citygarden.

Citygarden’s design discarded rationalist notions of open space and view in favor of a contemporary landscape design theories of the need for activation, asymmetry, whimsy and native plantings. The small size of the intervention — two blocks — creates clear boundaries and edges of Citygarden that drive pedestrians into its space. The success of Citygarden in part comes from employing long-standing observations about the utility of basic urban design features that encourage circulation and building density.

Inside of Citygarden.

In his 1938 volume The Art of Building Cities, Camillo Sitte discusses the great public spaces of historic European cities. According to Sitte, the plan of a successful urban park must be irregular and enclosed with the size no larger than 465 ft by 190 ft. The park width should be equal to the height of the principal adjacent building, while the length should be no more than twice this dimension. Statues or monuments should be located on the periphery to maximize circulation of people within the park. Sitte stated that the park need not have plants or lawns. Unsurprising, Sitte’s ideas of sensitive central city park space germinated slowly in the United States.

Delight among the PoMo masses.

In her classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs compared four public parks within a roughly equal distance of Philadelphia City Hall in the center city. Jacobs found high usage at only one of the four parks, Rittenhouse Square. The reason for its success, according to Jacobs, lay in its surroundings. Rittenhouse Square is surrounded by mixed uses that generate constant foot traffic. The square is a crossing amid a dense urban environment, and proximate to ground-floor activity in surrounding buildings. In short, Rittenhouse Square has the clear and purposeful boundaries and the surrounding human density to be simultaneously well-defined and well-used. Again, Tom Turner summarizes the situation well with the statement: “Success depends on the exact character of the bounding membrane [of a park].”

Aerial view of Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.

After conducting a study of public spaces in New York City in 1980, critic William H. Whyte concluded that “what attracts people most … is other people.” We can construct dazzling follies and plant beautiful gardens on the Mall, but without circulation it will never amount to a decent public space. And it will not generate circulation if its surroundings remain hostile to pedestrian life. Indeed, people do seek other people — at restaurants, at gallery openings, at night clubs and in residential and office buildings. These things are in short supply on Market and Chestnut streets, beyond the few retail spaces north of Kiener Plaza. Citygarden is such a singular park space that it drives its own demand for use, which in turn has boosted pedestrian traffic around it. A converse positive relationship between park and activity of Citygarden also can be seen in a smaller, earlier downtown park.

Strangely, a downtown park that enjoys much casual use throughout warmer months is one facing the mall on Market Street in front of one of the office buildings built in the 1980s. The plaza in front of 1010 Market Street, at the southeast corner of Market and 11th streets, was designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes as part of the building design. The building itself, with its white grid around window ribbons, is a post-modern reincarnation of International Style minimalism. The plaza uses well-defined design elements: a grid of pathways with trees planted in the squares created by the paths. There are a few benches, a lot of shade and defining enclosure provided by building walls. The glass wall exposes a lobby and restaurant space to this plaza, employing visual continuity between interior and exterior common to Modernist-inspired work. This little park is simple, well-designed, comfortable and placed adjacent to traffic-generating use.

The plaza at 1010 Market Street, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.

The qualities that make Barnes’ park space functional eluded many of his contemporaries, but they are apparent in the popular Citygarden. Over one hundred years since publication of A City Plan for St. Louis, the Gateway Mall reflects a tortuous implementation and constant boundary changes. However, the quality of design found in Citygarden shows that the flaws of the ideas applied to the mall in the past are not permanent impediments. The Gateway Mall will continue to change as the current Master Plan is implemented, and will lose much of its monumental formalism. Within the next decades, the Gateway Mall will become the embodiment of early 21st century park planning principles. Today’s architects and planners follow many others’ foot steps in trying to envision the string of city blocks between Chestnut and Market as useful, important urban park space. While contemporary park planning embraces many of the theories that criticized previous ideas from the City Beautiful movement, its practitioners are laboring under contemporary economic and ideological circumstances. In some ways, the Gateway Mall is still being shaped according to current landscape design trends rather than as part of a broader planning strategy for downtown. Whether the mall itself gains an identity in the next decade depends on the quality and scope of interventions to come.

Cumulative Bibliography

Wunsch, James. “Protecting St. Louis Neighborhoods from the Encroachment of Brothels, 1870-1920.” Missouri Historical Review 104.4 (July 2010).

This is the eighth part of a nine-part series on the evolution of the Gateway Mall, that ribbon of park space that runs between Market and Chestnut streets and from the Jefferson National Expansion memorial westward to Twenty-Second Street downtown. This article began its life as a lecture that I delivered to the Friends of Tower Grove Park on February 3, 2008, and was published in its entirety in the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Missouri Valley chapter in Spring 2011.

A flier announcing a 2007 event for the master plan process.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and Planning and Urban Design Director Rollin Stanley announced in 2007 their intention to create a Gateway Mall Master Plan in association with landscape architect Thomas Balsley. Their plan would be the first comprehensive plan for every block that had become part of the mall, as well as the rest of Memorial Plaza. Recognizing the design failure of the Gateway Mall, Stanley envisioned a break from the past — a mall friendly to pedestrians and built around uses that attract people. Stanley and Slay went farther than most actors in this drama and admitted that the Mall needed real planning. They didn’t want to extend it or glorify it but improve it.

The eastern mall blocks in 2007. (Source: nextSTL, nextstl.com)

Unfortunately, their plan was too constrained by the old rationalist vision to be a blueprint for major improvement. For one thing, they were committed to preserving every block of the Mall as green space — a questionable proposition in a downtown with as much open space as ours. For another, their plan avoided recommendations for improving the mall’s context. The large-scaled environment around the Mall is as resistant to human action as the park itself; it’s a chicken and egg relationship and the new Master Plan acted like an ostrich.

The master plan's envisioned terminus on the western block.

Still, there were good ideas in it. The plan avoided trying to visually unify the mall, except for a southern bike lane and promenade. The plan acknowledged the variation in block width and the curving streets that make symmetry impossible. Instead, the mall plan recommends creating different zones on the mall — a sculpture garden between Eighth and Tenth; recreation areas and a dog park west of Fifteenth street; an amphitheater-style space on Memorial Plaza; a gathering space in Kiener Plaza.

The master plan's imagined aerial view of the revised Gateway Mall landscape.

The plan tried to match these zones to adjacent uses without looking at the physical connections between. For instance, the sculpture garden introduced a rather romantic vision of human-scaled green space near downtown residences and offices. But it’s flanked to the north and south by large, monolithic office buildings set back from the sidewalk and possessing reflective windows and intrusive driveways. A walk from the north side of downtown to the sculpture garden won’t provide much delight or instruction if it passes by the bizarre sidewalk configuration on the west or east sides of the AT&T tower, for instance.

The master plan recommended more seating, a walking and running path, kinetic art on adjacent buildings, and lighting on the blocks that would make them attractive night time spaces. There was some break-down of barriers with a small restaurant building in the sculpture garden. But in some ways the restaurant and the dazzling contemporary art are low-key, updated versions of the monuments and buildings of the 1919 Public Building Group Plan.

Memorial Plaza as "The Civic Room" in the master plan. View is toward the northwest.

At the Gateway Mall press conference in 2008, Mayor Slay declared a “new era” for the Gateway Mall. This era was new inasmuch as it is based on planners’ admission of the mall’s failure. However, the failure has always been systematic and structural, while the solutions outlined in the new Master Plan were topical and aesthetic. Rather than address crucial problems of identity, circulation and boundaries, the new Master Plan treated those as secondary causes by offering a remedy not to the idea of a Gateway Mall but to its execution.

This is the seventh part of a nine-part series on the evolution of the Gateway Mall, that ribbon of park space that runs between Market and Chestnut streets and from the Jefferson National Expansion memorial westward to Twenty-Second Street downtown. This article began its life as a lecture that I delivered to the Friends of Tower Grove Park on February 3, 2008, and was published in its entirety in the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Missouri Valley chapter in Spring 2011.

Real Estate Row. The view northward from Market Street along Seventh Street from bottom to top includes the Buder, Title Guaranty, Wainright, DeMenil and Holland buildings. Only the Wainwright remaims. (Source: Scan from Rob Powers, builtstlouis.net.)

At the end of the 1970s, after failing to build the winning design from the 1967 design competition, city leaders did not let the dream of a “completed” Gateway Mall die. There still were blocks of old buildings to clear and new corporate high-rises to attract. However, developer Donn Lipton seized the opportunity of city inaction and in February 1977 submitted a redevelopment plan for the blocks between Seventh and Tenth streets radically different than the Sasaki plan.

Rendering of the Lipton plan looking east from just past Eighth Street. (Source: Landmraks Association of St. Louis.)

Lipton and architect Richard Claybour created a plan for attracting more development and creating park space, using the existing conditions of those blocks. The alleys of each block would become lively enclosed parks, surrounded by rehabilitated historic office buildings and a few new buildings. One could still have stood on the steps of the Civil Courts Building and have gotten an axial view to the Arch, but in the foreground would have been several blocks of integrated green space and vital activities. Here was the chance to take the reasonable idea that downtown needed better green space without using it to tamper with the urban qualities that made downtown what it was. On top of it all, immediate economic development would accompany the introduction of green space. Downtown business leaders submitted their own plan that month to raise $6 million in bonds to complete the mall. Proponents claimed that downtown would stagnate without the completion of the Gateway Mall east of Tucker.

Looking south along Seventh Street, with the Buder, Title Guaranty and Wainwright builings in view. Architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote in 1984: "The preservation of the Wainwright Building becomes meaningless if the maginificent urban structure of which it was a part is destroyed." (Source: St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

Mayor James Conway appointed a task force including Lipton and downtown businesses men to study how best to proceed on the Gateway Mall. The task force hired Sasaski, Dawson & DeMay to complete a report that was completed in September 1978. Sasaki, Dawson & DeMay’s report threw a spanner in the works of the firm’s own earlier master plan by recommending Lipton’s plan as the most economically sensible plan for downtown. Downtown businessmen went on the offensive, however, and persuaded Mayor Conway to throw the task force report away and hire Sasaski again with the order to come up with a workable plan for an “active linear mall” between Seventh and Eleventh streets.

Sasaski’s new vision retained little from the 1967 proposal, instead relying on activating uses like a greenhouse between Broadway and Sixth, an aquarium between Seventh and Eighth and a museum between Eighth and Ninth. The one nod to Lipton was retention of the Western Union Building at the southwest corner of Ninth and Chestnut Streets. However, this preservation plan was based on the expense of relocating the telegram cables rather than interest in retaining any existing buildings. Downtown business leaders next commissioned HOK to plan the specifics of an $89 million Gateway Mall completion.

One of the buildings in the mall's path: The ornate Classical Revival Buder Building at the northwest corner of Seventh and Market Streets. William A. Swasey designed the building, which was completed in 1902. (Source: St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

Alderman Bruce Sommer (D-6th), who represented downtown, opposed the new Sasaki plan and came out in support of Donn Lipton’s plan. In 1981, Lipton picked up more support when Vincent Schoemehl, Jr. was elected mayor. Schoemehl favored the Lipton plan, and his first action was to legally blight the blocks between Seventh to Tenth streets to open them to a formal Request for Proposals. Four plans submitted by the April 1982 deadline included one by Lipton similar to his 1977 plan and one by the new Gateway Mall Redevelopment Corporation that introduced the “half mall” concept.

A Plan for the Development of the Gateway Mall, 1982.

Downtown business leaders led by KMOX Chairman Robert Hyland formed the board of the new corporation and explained the abrupt change of plans: They had considered the options, and with declining city revenues had decided that creating park space alone was financially impossible. What was needed to make park space possible was income-generating activity. Instead of whole park blocks, the corporation wanted to build “half-mall” blocks that situated five-story office buildings on their northern ends and park space on the southern end and middle. The buildings would subsidize the park space and create thousands of square feet of desirable Class A office space. Restaurants and shops on the ground floor would direct pedestrians out onto the park blocks where they could frolic and reflect in a rigidly-designed landscape.

The plan for the half-mall.

The Redevelopment Corporation made no bones about its chief purpose: “attracting more development.” Critics quickly pointed out that the blocks in question were already developed with buildings on their northern – and southern — halves. Why bother?

One of the buildings in the way: The Liggett (later International) Building at the southeast corner of Eighth and Chestnut Streets. Eames & Young designed the building, which was completed in 1907. (Source: St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

The result was predictable: civic leaders derided the Lipton plan as last-minute (even though it had actually been first in this recent round of planning debate) and insufficiently grand. They stood by the rationalist urban planning vision of order through total replacement, but with an almost absurd new twist of replacing urban building stock with new building stock to “complete” a linear open mall. After intense lobbying by labor interests caused Mayor Schoemehl to reverse his position, Schoemehl helped put together the new Pride Redevelopment Corporation. In October 1982, the Board of Aldermen approved a redevelopment agreement with Pride Redevelopment Corporation by a vote of 26-2.

One of the buildings in the path: The Lincoln Trust (later Title Guaranty) Building, a modern office building with its light court exposed on the Chestnut Street elevation. Eames & Young designed the building, which was completed in 1899. (Source: St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

An arduous two-year battle followed to preserve the buildings in the mall’s path. Three large historic office buildings, the Title Guaranty, Buder and International buildings, were demolished by the end of 1984. (Landmarks Association of St. Louis had moved its office to the Title Guaranty Building to show its conviction in preservation of the buildings, was forced to relocate ahead of the wrecking ball.) Destruction of several smaller historic buildings, known as Real Estate Row, took place in the next two years. All of these buildings were deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service. They provided visual context for the landmark Wainwright Building, although Mall proponents somehow declared the loss of context an improvement. However, preservationists created Market Preservation, Inc., a new advocacy organization that fought to save the buildings. Market Preservation lost the battle but waged the strongest preservation effort in the city’s history, and for good reason. The demolition of historic buildings for the mediocre Gateway One building and its anemic plaza inverted the whole purpose of parks: to provide public beauty. The public beauty of great architecture was destroyed to create a privately-controlled visual offense.

Demolition of the Buder and Liggett buildings by explosive blast, 1984. (Source: Landmarks Association of St. Louis.)

Pride's gift to the city: Gateway One "On" The Mall.

The half-mall block quickly garnered infamy. The office building built on the northern side of the block, Gateway One on the Mall (designed by Robert L. Boland, Inc.), was an uninspired mass that ended up being 15 stories and dwarfing the Wainwright Building. The park on the southern end was marked with plinths advertising the office building at Market Street, making it seem like an extension of the building’s private world. The block seemed like an intrusion into the Gateway Mall, not its logical completion.

The row of small-scale commercial buildings in the 800 block of Chestnut Street that were demolished for a parking lot. The St. Louis Architectural Art Company recovered the St. Louis Title Company Buidling facade, which is now installed inside of the City Museum. (Source: Landmarks Association of St. Louis.)

Plans fizzled for developing the next block west in the same manner, although that block was cleared for use as surface parking lot. Kiener Plaza was extended west, with 6th Street closed, in 1986 to include postmodern Roman ruins with a cascade called the Morton D. May Amphitheater (designed by Team Four). How this related to the earlier statue of the runner in the circular fountain remains anyone’s guess.

The Western Union Building stood at the southwest corner of Ninth and Chestnut streets. (Source: Landmarks Association of St. Louis.)

Ending where he started with downtown planning, Mayor Schoemehl announced plans in 1992 to finally “complete” the Mall before he left office. He intended for the city to acquire the two blocks between 8th and 10th streets and to demolish remaining buildings, including the landmark Western Union Building. In 1994, the landscaped blocks opened and only added to the visual confusion.

The blocks between Eighth and Tenth streets after completion. (Photograph by Rob Powers, builtstlouis.net.)

With empty center lawns and flanking rows of trees (asymmetrical here), the plan seemed a rehash of the Sasaki, Dawson & DeMay plan. Upon seeing the plans, architect Gene Mackey called the mall a “series of unconnected, unrelated blocks.” So it was. A brief bright spot occurred in the winters of 1999 and 2000, when the city opened a highly popular temporary ice skating rink on the block east of the Serra sculpture.

Nearly every day I pass by this lonely two-story frame house at the northwest corner of North Florissant and Newhouse avenues in Hyde Park. While this stretch of North Florissant has its gaps, the east side is a nearly-continuous line of flats, houses and storefronts. Pietkutowski’s is not far. Yet this house stands alone at the intersection. Original weatherboard siding peaks out from failing rolled asphalt siding that mocks red brick (note the faux keystones on the front elevation!). Above, the slates on the mansard roof are in place, shedding water as they should. The side entrance is covered by a Craftsman-influenced open hood, a later addition marking stylistic changes since the nineteenth century when the house was built. Many frame houses in Hyde Park have been lost, and few have the solid and straight lines of this one. Yet I suspect one day my travels will take me past its grave-site, mud marked by bulldozer tracks.

On Monday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article by reporter Tim Logan that raised the issue of the city’s lack of citywide demolition review. The article, which ran on the front page above the fold, took as a starting point the sudden, lonesome death of the Avalon Theater on South Kingshighway. Since the Avalon was outside of one of the city’s preservation review districts, it bit the dust — or, rather, became dust bitten by passers-by — without any review.

Multi-family buildings in the 5000 block of Winona Avenue, in the Southampton neighborhood.

Logan’s article included a promising set of quotes from two aldermen. The first came from Carol Howard (D-14th), who represents the eastern part of the Southampton neighborhood where the Avalon was located. The demolition experience has spurred Howard to seek demolition review for her ward, one of south city’s only wards that lacks review. Howard also endorses a return to citywide review, which St. Louis had before 1999. “It’s a tool, I think, that makes for better decisions,” she told Logan.

A view that could be read as dissenting came from Alderman Antonio French (D-21st), whose constituents include this writer. French’s first bill upon being elected in 2009 put the 21st Ward into preservation review for the first time since 1999. Yet the alderman wants to remove review for part of the College Hill neighborhood added to his ward in redistricting. French wants to concentrate preservation efforts on the intact largely Penrose and O’Fallon neighborhoods in his ward. “What works for Penrose and O’Fallon may not work for College Hill,” said the alderman.

The buidling at 1431 Prairie Avenue in College Hill is one of the last buildings left on its block.

Am I the only person who sees that both Alderwoman Howard and Alderman French are right? St. Louis does need citywide review, and building conservation strategies for depleted neighborhoods like College Hill — where many blocks are devoid of more than five or six historic buildings — need not entail preserving every remaining historic building.

Yet the crux of these two points’ convergence is that these decisions need to be made by qualified professional planners working in the interest of all city residents. Aldermen who serve geographic areas whose boundaries change every ten years, who lack training in urban planning and historic preservation, and who have to seek re-election are not the best people to make decisions for the long-term interests of the city’s built environment. Yet aldermen create the legislation under which review takes place, establishing guidelines that represent the public interest.

Alderman French might be suggesting that a citywide demolition review ordinance be informed by theories of planned shrinkage. Again, having professionals examining demolition seems like the best way to make that happen. Citywide review does not mean preservation of everything in the city, it means a system in which preservation planning is made under legal criteria interpreted by professionals who are free from political motivations. Applicants for demolition, aldermen, neighbors and preservationists will have a predictable public process with the same rule for every building.

If that sounds familiar, it’s what this city had before the Board of Aldermen passed the current preservation ordinance in 1999.

The Castle Ballroom stands at the northeast corner of Olive and T.E. Huntley streets.

A lot of what you need to know about the Castle Ballroom can be read on its exterior. The commercial first floor of the building indicates its historic place on a busy streetcar line. Graceful double-height arched windows above the first story reveal a ballroom which extends almost from the street to the alley. The lively Renaissance Revival brickwork indicates the aspirations of the owners in 1908 — this is a proper dance academy, not a warehouse. Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence isn’t part of the building itself, but in the enormous expanse of lawn across the street. The Castle Ballroom had epitomized early 20th century elegance, but half a century later it was only spared from the nation’s largest urban renewal slum clearance project by virtue of being on the north side of Olive rather than the south side. Put all of these pieces together, and you’ve got the story.

In just over four decades of operation, the Castle Ballroom witnessed and responded to wave after wave of changing taste in music and dance. Herman Albers and Cornelius Ahern constructed the building in 1908. Architect J.D. Paulus designed the building. They had previously operated the dance academy at Cave Hall, the above-ground entertainment center associated with Uhrig’s Cave at the southwest corner of Jefferson and Washington. When the old Cave Hall was demolished to make way for the Coliseum, they took the name with them.

Derivative of cave Dancing Academy postcard, c. 1910.

Mr. and Mrs. Albers and Mr. and Mrs. Ahern themselves supervised the dancing at the new hall, and the Uhrig’s Cave Orchestra followed them to the new location. By this time, traditional tastes in music were giving way to a new sensation — ragtime. The syncopated rhythms of the ragtime music invited a daringly different style of dancing. Scandalous new “animal dances” (the Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug, and Grizzly Bear, among others) were popularized at the highest levels of society. In 1911, Chief of Police William Young instituted a Morality Squad to inspect public dance halls and stop the vulgar new dances wherever they occurred. Newspapers gleefully covered the controversy, their condemnations illustrated with titillating line drawings of couples in unseemly poses. Alexander DeMenil, always a spokesman for Victorian values in the Edwardian age, wrote that the dances were a symptom of society’s decadence. “We do today openly and publicly what we would have been ashamed to do in secret ten years ago,” he wrote in 1913. “Far from being ‘new,’ these dances are a revision of the grossest practices of savage men.”

Souvenir image from the Cave Dancing Academy.

If the moralists thought the ragtime dances were bad, what came next was much, much worse. Jazz music invited even more jumping and gyration. Instructors of traditional ballroom dance banded together in self-defense, encouraging additional legislation to eradicate dances such as the “Camel Walk.” The new ordinance was designed to “reach the irresponsible dancing teachers who, because of the money there is in it, will teach any kind of wiggle.”

After his partner’s death, Albers changed the name of the venue to Castle Ballroom. In doing so, he embraced a more modern image for the academy. Vernon and Irene Castle had been the greatest names in dancing until Vernon’s death in a training accident during World War I. The Castles earned their success by taking modern dances and making them completely respectable. Today, the name “Castle” may sound like a reference to the building, but in 1922 the allusion to the famous dancers could not have been missed.

The dawn of the Jazz Age spelled the end of the great ballroom dancing academies of St. Louis. As early as 1922, dance instructor Alice Martin claimed to have “practically given up teaching ballroom dancing” because of the “vulgar extremes of these times….” By 1930, most teachers of ballroom dancing had stopped advertising. The Castle’s newspaper advertisements increasingly emphasized the hall’s availability for rental.

Impressive corbelling on the Olive Street elevation of the Castle Ballroom.

In 1934, Herman Albers closed the Castle and filed for personal bankruptcy. The end of Prohibition had played a role, his attorney noted, since people now danced at cafes where liquor was sold. He also blamed the widening of Olive Street and a change in streetcar stops. His comments to the Globe-Democrat overlook an obvious demographic shift in the neighborhood.

In the second and third decades of the 20th century, the immediate neighborhood of the Castle Ballroom, especially the blocks just south, had transitioned from an almost completely Caucasian neighborhood to one that was dominated by African American institutions. The fabled Mill Creek Valley neighborhood developed the city’s greatest concentration and number of black residents. When the Castle re-opened in 1935, it was advertised as “THE MILLION DOLLAR DANCE PALACE – Exclusively for the Best Colored People of St. Louis.” The hall again held dances on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights, but they were advertised to a different clientele.

Advertisement that appeared in the St. Louis Argus on October 25, 1935.

Manager Jesse Johnson was frequently touted in The St. Louis Argus as the city’s top black promoter. A favorite house band was Eddie Randle’s St. Louis Blue Devils. According to one account, it was at the Castle Ballroom that the teenaged Miles Davis first auditioned for the band. With Eddie Randle (playing regularly at the Castle as well as other venues around town), the young prodigy received his first experience playing in a professional band. By the end of the 1930s, Johnson brought in more national acts, including Duke Ellington. Under other management, the entertainment included Fletcher Henderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Domino, and Count Basie. Through the 1940s, the Castle featured local and national touring acts and hosted many private events for black organizations.

The early 1950s brought the Mocambo Club (named for a famous Los Angeles hot spot) This club lasted barely a month before a dispute at the bar turned into a sensational shootout which claimed the life of the owner and a local underworld figure. The Globe-Democrat reported that there were thirty people present but only one witness. When the club reopened under new management, it was still able to attract national favorites such as Louis Armstrong and the Ink Spots, both in 1952.

The final days of the Castle Ballroom coincided with a civic effort toward slum clearance. Mill Creek Valley at this time retained the deteriorated housing stock of the 19th century, densely packed with African Americans who were allowed few other living options. The neighborhood had a high crime rate, high infant mortality rate, and low indoor plumbing rate. One planning document described the neighborhood as “100 blocks of hopeless, rat-infested, residential slums.”

A bond issue for clearance and redevelopment failed in 1948. Amendments to federal law in 1954 allowed the Mill Creek Valley to become an urban renewal project, and voters approved matching local funding in 1955. Original plans called for 4,200 families to be relocated from a 107-block area. Roughly 2100 buildings plus accessory structures were to be demolished.

Heritage House under construction in Mill Creek Valley, 1965. Olive Street is at the bottom of the frame, with the Castle Ballroom just outside of the shot to the right. (Globe-Democrat Collection.)

The northern boundary of the clearance area was Olive Street. Beginning in 1959, nearly every home, church, and business in Mill Creek was demolished. Thriving commercial districts, significant institutional buildings (including the Pine Street YMCA) and untold homes were knocked to rubble and sent to the landfill. The vast majority of Mill Creek residents were not resettled in the new housing that was built across from the Castle.

The ballroom as it appears today.

Today, the Castle Ballroom is one of the last buildings in the area to retain a strong association with the African American community that once surrounded it. The second story ballroom has not seen dancing since the 1950s, but now it has another chance. The building is on the market and substantial historic tax credits are available for its restoration. Several potential buyers have come forward, but none have committed yet. (If you’re interested in purchasing the building, visit the realtor’s web site at www.leighmaibes.com.) Public interest is also increasing, with recent appearances on music history tours by Michael Allen and Kevin Belford. Landmarks Association’s hard hat tour this past Saturday sold out, and a second tour is scheduled for February 4 (details here).

Our full nomination of the Castle Ballroom is on the State Historic Preservation Office web site here.

One day after my call for an imaginative path away from demolition of the Avalon Theater, wreckers started destroying the south city landmark. This morning, after considering it since December 22, the Building Division approved the demolition permit. Down came theater walls and steel trusses, headed up to North Broadway scrap yards.

If the Avalon had been protected under the city’s preservation ordinance, the demolition permit would have required the additional approval of the city’s Cultural Resources Office. Failure to get that approval would have caused a denial of the application.

Unfortunately, the 14th Ward is not in preservation review, and the Avalon had no local or national landmark status that would have led to review under the preservation ordinance. Yet the Avalon was eligible for National Register of Historic Places listing, on its own or as a contributing resource to larger districts.

Had the Avalon demolition been proposed prior to 1999, there would have been preservation review. The city’s preservation ordinance once applied equal review to all buildings across the city. That system was predictable to residents, property owners, city officials and preservation advocates. Under the previous preservation ordinance, many buildings were approved for demolition. Others were spared.

Today, disparate outcomes remain the case under the city’s ordinance, but in a different way. If a building is located in one of the city’s 20 wards whose aldermen opt for demolition review, that building stands a good chance of being spared when demolition is proposed. If a building is not, well, it is likely to disappear without so much as a photo on Flickr.

Yet the Avalon Theater had such visibility and affection in this city that its loss id not going down quietly. Across social media today, news of the start of demolition spread. News of proposed demolition had just started spreading. This could have led to public input in the process prescribed by the city’s preservation ordinance, and it may have led to a denied application.

After all, the ordinance exists to protect those buildings of significance to the entire city — and one of the last remaining neighborhood movie houses is exactly the sort of building the ordinance is designed to protect. The debate we should have had would have centered on the standards of the ordinance — not on Greg Tsevis and his family’s ownership or an elected official who has no authority over the demolition permit. That is the sort of debate we will have next week when the Preservation Board considers demolition of the old Southern Funeral Home on South Grand. Alas, the Avalon was at least as worthy.

Is the Avalon Theater poised to be revitalized as a two-screen neighborhood cinema, a concert venue or a cafe with three-seasons dining in a re-purposed auditorium? Unless the owners drop a pending application for demolition, the answer is “we will never find out.”

Avalon rendering by Jesiey Mead.

On December 22, owner Greg Tsevis applied for a demolition permit for the shuttered Art Deco movie house. So far, the Building Division has not approved the application (#495332). Yet there is nothing standing in the way of approval — the Avalon lacks any protection from demolition under the city’s preservation ordinance. The Avalon Theater is not a City Landmark, is not listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is not located in one of the 20 city wards that have preservation review. The 14th Ward, where the Avalon is located, is one of only two south side wards without demolition review. (Alderman Stephen Gregali kept the 14th Ward out of preservation review and his successor, Carol Howard, has not placed the ward under review.)

Demolition seems a hasty move given that the Avalon has only been listed on the market since August at $250,000, after having sat for years with an unrealistic asking price of over $900,000. Since the price dropped to a reasonable amount, several parties have tried to assemble rehabilitation plans for the Avalon. Yet all would-be buyers need historic tax credits to make the costs of rehabilitation work, and the building needs to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places first. The process of listing can take up to six months. No one will close on purchase without securing rehabilitation financing.

Bad timing may give South Kingshighway a long-term vacant lot instead of a cool, vital neighborhood business. The reuse potential of the Avalon is solid, and its prospects of National Register listing strong. Yet facing code violations and pressure from the city, the owner is choosing to destroy rather than repair. Of course, without the building, the property tax assessment drops — along with any leverage city officials have on Tsevis. Here is a case where citywide demolition review would prevent a small tragedy. Alderwoman Howard, for her part, won’t try to block demolition.

Meantime, the South Kingshighway Business District could be getting a big hole in the streetscape with no timeline for redevelopment. That seems a bigger detriment than a run-down theater whose brief run on the market at a decent price attracted substantial interest. Rehabbing the Avalon Theater will take time, money and vision — but the result will be worth the short term in which the building sits empty. If Tsevis can afford demolition, Tsveis can afford basic mothballing and removal of the marquee.

When the Avalon opened in 1937, the 647-seat movie theater was one of dozens of neighborhood movie theaters in the city. The Avalon’s design, by architects A.F. and Arthur Stauder, was refined if not lavish. The floral terra cotta panels set against a patterned, variegated brick wall and the distinctive stepped parapet link the building to the Art Deco movement in American design. For its era, the Avalon was a handsome building among many. Today, the city has lost many neighborhood movie theaters, especially those from the 1930s built in the Art deco style. The Avalon’s significance today is high, and as stewards of the city’s future, we should recognize and honor that fact.

The demolition application may sail through, or it may not. Perhaps a strong offer for the building will come in at the last minute. Perhaps city officials will realize that demolition is the worst option at the moment, especially from an economic development standpoint. Perhaps the owners will see that the value of the property will drop the second the site is cleared.

One of the Avalon's polychromatic terra cotta panels.

Having seen the Stauders’ hand-drawn rendering of those terra cotta panels, I know for a fact that wilder dreams have been had about the Avalon!

This is the sixth part of a nine-part series on the evolution of the Gateway Mall, that ribbon of park space that runs between Market and Chestnut streets and from the Jefferson National Expansion memorial westward to Twenty-Second Street downtown. This article began its life as a lecture that I delivered to the Friends of Tower Grove Park on February 3, 2008, and was published in its entirety in the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Missouri Valley chapter in Spring 2011.

In March 1966, an undeterred Mayor Alphonso Cervantes traveled to New York City for the public announcement of a national design competition with a $15,000 prize for a master design for the entire Gateway Mall. The city and Downtown St. Louis, Inc. sponsored the design competition. Fifty-seven firms or individuals submitted designs before the winner was announced in June 1967.

View toward the Old Courthouse from Seventh and Chestnut, in 1968, showing the future site of the Morton D. May Ampitheater. (Preservation Research Office Collection.)

The boundary of the competition was set with the Old Courthouse at the east and the proposed North-South Distributor (roughly Twenty-Second Street) at the west. the competition was the first attempt at a master plan for a landscape that was merely six years old in the minds of planners. By this time, downtown had lost so much building stock and street life that the old rationalist rhetoric about alleviating the ills of the central city would have been ludicrous. Instead, Cervantes and civic leaders began to talk up the effect of the Gateway Mall as an instrument that might lead to building up the core. With the Mall extended, they argued, Chestnut and Market streets would become desirable sites for the sorts of large corporate headquarters St. Louis desperately wanted to attract. The rhetorical emphasis shifted from social to economic benefits, but the rationalist framework remained latent.

One of Sasaki, Dawson & DeMay's dramatic renderings of the Gateway Mall concept published in Architectural Forum.

A parade passes by the corner of Eighth and Market streets in the 1950s. All of the buidlings seen in this photograph would be demolished by 1984. (Preservation Research Office Collection.)

However, the designers tried to avoid the shortcomings of the City Beautiful park planning by including new shops on Chestnut and Market facing the mall in the recessed ground-floor arcades of anticipated new buildings. Sasaki, Dawson & DeMay realized that the park space needed constant day time pedestrian traffic to be active. The firm even includes revision of the Memorial Plaza area to include sunken flower gardens on blocks around the Soldiers’ Memorial.

Other ideas in the winning proposal have become perennial. The plan called for a major tall office building west of Twentieth Street atop the depressed lanes of the would-be North-South Connector. This tall building would be a “visual termination at that end.” The idea of a tall office building terminating the western end of the mall resurfaced in 2009 in the Northside Regeneration proposal presented by developer Paul J. McKee, Jr. The other idea that the landscape architects presented that has resurfaced was the idea of building a two-level underground parking garage beneath the six eastern blocks of the mall. This garage would have been directly connected to the depressed lanes of Interstate 70 by ramps. Most recently, the design competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial has revived discussions about putting parking under some of the Gateway Mall.

Richard Serra's sculpture Twain occupies the mall block between Tenth and Eleveth streets.

Oddly, city leaders made little attempt to fund the ambitious large plan. The Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority finally obtained a federal grant for land acquisition and park construction. After acquiring one block, between Tenth and Eleventh streets, and implementing a greatly simplified version of the Sasaki plan there in 1976, civic leaders abandoned the latest design after negative public response. Soon after, the completed block was graded and redesigned as the site of Richard Serra’s sculpture Twain.