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Architecture Historic Preservation Housing South St. Louis

Lovely Row on Hickory Street

by Michael R. Allen

The so-called Gate District in south city is bounded roughly by I-44 on the south, Jefferson on the east, Compton on the west and Chouteau on the north. In that area, so much fabric was lost between 1970 and the present that whole blocks are devoid of a single historic building. For a number of years, the city planning agency was preoccupied by a concept called a “Town in Town” that consisted of wholesale clearance of town and construction of a new district with a lake, homes, warehouses and the like placed on new streets. This plan was way too unrealistic to come to fruition — didn’t anyone price the removal of every part of infrastructure in the area? — but it was distilled into the Gate District plan drafted by Duane-Plater Zyberk and implemented piecemeal since 1985.

The piecemeal implementation is the saving grace of the planning for this area. Written off as a wasteland by some urbanists, the Gate District actually retains some pockets of fabulous historic architecture. One of these is the north face of the 2800 block of Hickory Street, between California and Ewing. Although four of the eight houses remaining are vacant, and a ninth house was wrecked over the summer, the block face carries with it a distinct vernacular charm.


The inadvertent symmetry of the block is wonderful. The center group of five brick shaped-parapet shotgun houses is flanked on either side by two-story cousins. One other single-story house is located west of this group. The shotgun homes are a proud showcase of the variety of St. Louis masonry — each parapet has different treatment, and all variety comes through different installation of the same bricks. The homes also make use of the Roman arch, dating their construction to 1890 or later. The bookend two-story homes contrast with the others. Although larger, their masonry is more restrained, and they employ flat arches on their front elevations. Each has a front porch. These houses are probably at least a decade newer than their neighbors.

Altogether, the group is quite distinguished and worthy of preservation. To the east are sections of urban prairie that put St. Louis Place to shame, and to the north is the Chouteau industrial corridor that has been encroaching for over half of a century. Part of the Sixth Ward, this area lacks preservation review for demolition. The open land and shifting land use could portend the erasure of this group, or the creation of a new context that marries old and new architecture in urban harmony.

Categories
Historic Preservation People

Jeff Mansell is Landmarks Association’s New Executive Director

by Michael R. Allen

Jefferson Mansell is the new Executive Director of Landmarks Association of St. Louis. Jeff replaces Carolyn Hewes Toft, retiring after 32 years leading our only regional advocacy organization devoted to historic preservation and urban planning. Read more about Jeff below:

St. Louis Beacon: Take Five: Interview with Landmarks’ new director

Landmarks Association: Jeff Mansell Named Landmarks’ New Executive Director

Jeff is going to be a great boss!

Categories
Abandonment Historic Preservation LRA North St. Louis Old North

A Dead House on Clinton Street

by Michael R. Allen

One gets the sense that the city of St. Louis cannot get a high wind without having a historic north side building crippled. This weekend, the remnants of Ike struck Old North St. Louis, causing more damage. Oddly, soon afterwards a truckload of St. Louis firemen arrived and struck the buidling with pressurized water spray for minutes, delving the final blow to the long-suffering house at 1219 Clinton Street. No one knows why the Fire Department showed up and performed pointless and destructive work. The vacant house had its first major blow back in the freak storm of July 2006. (See “A Dying House on Clinton Street”, July 11, 2008.)

Whereas some semblance of the front elevation remained intact throughout years of eroding fabric, now the house is a barely recognizable pile of materials destined for demolition. The loss had been inevitable for some time, although the opportunity for prevention was within reach until quite recently. The trouble with old buildings is that their economic rescue is calculated in price per square of rehabilitation, and once a building slips past a certain price it passes beyond the point of profit or even break-even. If a developer cannot break even, the only imperative for rehabilitation is a moral one. Even those who wish to lose money doing the right thing cannot do so if they don’t have the money. No bank will finance a project that creates negative equity, no matter how much money the building could be worth in ten years.

The house on Clinton had passed the reasonable price-per-square-foot point awhile ago. Compounding its problems is the fact that it’s the last house left on its block, and the other side of its block is faced with residences built in the 1980s.

Contrast the house on Clinton with some of the recent products of the ongoing Crown Square project. Four buildings on the 1300 and 1400 blocks of Warren Street are completed. Looking at the photographs below, one sees that these houses fit into streetscapes of other historic buildings. While these blocks are not fully intact, they are intact to the extent where further loss would be much more harmful than the loss of a single house on a block.



With limited funds available and the rules of finance at play, most developers are going to select to rehab buildings like those on Warren over the house on Clinton. By doing so, these developers aren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, many bankers and developers would not even touch houses like those on Warren. The developers who did were non-profit organizations (the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance and the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group). If it takes a non-profit to rehab the houses on Warren right now, it would have taken a charity to tackle the house on Clinton.

None off this explanation justifies the loss of a great house like the one on Clinton Street. Really, the loss could have been prevented if a new roof and boards had been installed three years ago. But who would have picked up the tab? Back then, the house had a private owner who had stopped paying taxes on the property. Alter, the city’s Land Reutilization Authority owned the house. The first part was unwilling to do the right thing, the second unable.

Preservationists would be willing, be we aren’t able. St. Louis lacks a bridge over the the preservation gap between the right thing and the possible thing. Can we build one?

Categories
Historic Preservation Illinois

Illinois Legislature Should Reverse Closure of Sites and Parks

The wonderful St. Louis Beacon has published my commentary on the closure of 13 Illinois state historic sites; read it here.

Categories
Downtown Green Space Parking Planning

Thompson Coburn Garage and the Economics of Parking Downtown

by Michael R. Allen

Today, the St. Louis Business Journal is reporting that giant law firm Thompson Coburn announced today that it has signed a 12-year lease to remain in the US Bank Tower at 7th and Washington downtown. The lease comes with city incentives totalling $700,000 and, most interesting and unusual, a state-financed $15 million parking garage on the site of the Ambassador Building at 7th and Locust streets, currently a lifeless and unattractive “plaza.”

The announcement comes after speculation that the law firm would relocate to the planned Brown Shoe Company campus on Maryland Avenue in Clayton. Clayton is still luring major businesses out of downtown, and snagging some that have also looked at moving downtown. Thus, the announcement is good news for a downtown that is seeing a decline in residential projects and a small, hopeful rise in the creation of rehabbed office space.

The parking garage component is predictable, although undesirable in terms of planning. Sadly, we live in a city with a parking economy built on an inverse ratio of supply and demand. Downtown St. Louis has more parking spaces than residents, and probably more spaces than daily workers. Parking is cheap and easy. Parking is not quite free, like in the suburbs, but in this dense urban core, it barely costs anyone to park at all. In these cirumstances, any major employer who wants copious and adjacent parking gets it — either by building a new garage, leasing existing spaces or moving out of downtown where parking doesn’t cost employees at all.

Obviously, downtown has an excess of parking. Lots are obvious visual blight, but garages aren’t much better. Even with street level retail, a garage doesn’t generate the same level of activity, visual interest and use as a building. That a garage on the Ambassador site is an improvement over the plaza says little about the new garage and a lot about the inadequacies of the protected private plaza.

Pine Street suffers from a glut of parking garages, and has little to recommend it as an attractive street on which to do muchy more than park or grab a quick lunch. Locust Street is much better, although the recent addition of the Ninth Street Garage chips away at its urban character. The Thompson Coburn garage will be two blocks from the Nonth Street Garage, and only one block from one of downtown’s ugliest garages on Seventh Street, the so-called Hubcap Palace at Seventh and Olive streets.

This proximity is not good for developing a downtown that is a compelling, lively, architecturally distiguished place. The economics of parking and land values downtown allow such proximity, while the planning apparatus of city government remains weak. Rather than examine the health of street life or even desirable land uses for downtown, all decisions are subsumed by economic logic. That’s well and good for function, yet we must remember downtown is not simply a series of useful structures, but also the core of our city that defines its architectural character to the world.

Obviously, we need Thompson Coburn and other employers downtown. The firm needs parking. But we all need a downtown that compels the world to respect the great city of St. Louis. (In other words, this had better be the best damn parking garage in the world!)

Categories
Events Media Urban Exploration

"Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness" Screens Thursday

Ever wonder what it’s like to prowl an abandoned asylum in the night? What you’ll find in the darkest corners of Paris’ catacombs? Who is sleeping in an abandoned, moldy “house of the future” on a Florida roadside?

Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness follows people who have sought answers to these questions. One of the best things about the film is that rather than make itself about places that are featured in two hundred photos on Flickr, the director hits at a more elusive aspect of urban exploration: the personalities and motivations of those who self-identify as explorers. The film is more of an inquiry into the handful of explorers profiled, and includes great interviews and some laugh-out-load hijinks.

The film screens at 7pm Thursday, September 11 at the Winifred Moore Auditorium at Webster University, 470 E. Lockwood Avenue in Webster Groves.

Thomas Crone has an interview with directory Melody Gilbert here.

Categories
Architecture Historic Preservation South St. Louis Theaters

New Merry Widow Theater

by Michael R. Allen

Located at 1539 Chouteau Avenue, near the Truman Parkway, stands a somewhat-isolated relic of an urban commercial district that flourished on Chouteau in the LaSalle Park and Lafayette Square neighborhoods. The liveliness is hard to believe now, with the decrepit rear wall of St. Mary’s Infirmary looming behind it, the questionable premises of a grocery store next door, AmerenUE’s hulking campus to the west and the Truman Parkway walling vital Lafayette Square from this stretch. The building has been used for storage for decades, and is now owned by the utility giant across the street. Yet at the dawn of World War II, this neat little moderne building was the brand-new New Merry Widow Theatre, a neighborhood movie house replacing the old Merry Widow Theater one black east.

The theater was not lavish as local theaters were, but that barely mattered at a time when theater chains like Komm Theatres, which built and operated the New Merry Widow, gave even the smallest theater palatial terra cotta, winsome interior decoration and the right atmosphere for a dreamy night out. For a theater named after a motion picture itself (Von Stroheim’s 1925 Merry Widow, which preceded the original theater), style started with the name and worked itself into each detail.

The building permit for the New Merry Widow is dated November 12, 1941, with Stamm Construction Company listed as general contractor and a reported cost of $25,000. Now-obscure architect Jack Shawcross designed the building, making the most of a modest budget. Three portal windows dominate the front elevation like a mutated set of eyes, while four lines of dark brick rise at each side and another line defines the crown. Buff brick is punctuated by carefully-placed slightly-contrasting buff terra cotta. The city issued a second permit on December 23, 1941 for a $500 canopy and marquee; unfortunately, I have not located any photograph showing that feature. Overall, Shawcross manged to make a rather economical building as striking and dashing as anything Cedric Gibbons could concoct — not an uncommon feat in St. Louis.

Inside, a terrazzo-floored lobby led to the 920-seat auditorium, where chandeliers and draped walls added elegance. The theater opened in March 1942, and quickly became one of the mainstays of night life for residents of the city’s first public housing project, the Clinton-Peabody Homes located across Chouteau that also opened in 1942. However, the New Merry Widow’s life span was short. After a name change that dropped the “New” from the name in 1951, the theater was open for only five more years before closing. The new life of the building certainly would have none of the glamour of Hollywood.

Occupancy permits from 1958 show that the Underwriters Salvage Corps used the building for storage of salvaged materials. In 1960, Tom & Sons Truck Repair converted the building into a repair shop. This alteration gave the building the garage door on its western wall and the infill of the original center theater entrance on Chouteau. In 1973, Affton Delivery Service took over the building and by the 1980s the New Merry Widow entered a long stretch of ownership by Hibdon Hardwoods, a wholesale lumber dealer. Although its original use is long gone, and much of the historic appearance eroded, the fine lines of the New Merry Widow are still evident. We’re lucky that the old theater still stands to delight the curious passer-by, and give some sense of the urban culture that once thrived on Chouteau.

Readers might note a formal resemblance between the Merry Widow and the Massac Theater in Metropolis, Illinois. (See “Massac Theater Crumbles in Metropolis, Illinois”, November 13, 2007.)

Categories
Abandonment Architecture Forest Park Southeast Industrial Buildings North County St. Louis County

Industrial Inspiration?

by Michael R. Allen

There seems to be more than a passing resemblance between the Forest Park Southeast hotel designs that Drury Inn presented at a recent neighborhood meeting and the abandoned Lever Soap Plant in Pagedale. The three-dimensional renderings of two hotel buildings planned for a site at the southeast corner of the Kingshighway and I-64/40 interchange are in a conceptual phase, but their apparent industrial inspiration is somewhat encouraging.

Here is a close-up of one of the hotels:

Here is the Lever Plant, a lovely composition of industrial economy:
Just sayin’.

Categories
Fire Fountain Park North St. Louis Urbanism

Fire in Fountain Park

by Michael R. Allen

A sweltering, humid afternoon yesterday broke what had been a string of some of the most pleasant St. Louis summer days in recent years. In the Fountain Park neighborhood, the dog day brought more than just unpleasant weather. At around 12:40 p.m., a fire broke out at the abandoned home at 1124 Bayard Avenue. The blaze roared through a modest two-story home that has experiences fire twice before, according to a neighbor.

Neighbors who had been hanging out indoors in search of air conditioning came outside to watch a mid-day spectacle that is unfortunately a common occurrence in much of north St. Louis. Firefighters were quick to respond, and had the fire under control quickly. The firefighters surely earned the respect of the assembled crowd on Labor Day afternoon.

The house was not one of the stunning homes that line Fountain park proper, nor was it the nearby “castle” building. (The sight of dark smoke coming from near that structure made me shiver.) The brick home has acquired permastone on the first floor and flimsy siding above. Still, it had been a solid residence until going vacant two years ago. Its altered facade still made up part of a street scape wall that joins others to form the architectural context of life in Fountain Park. The house had a supporting role to the fancier buildings, but its loss will make the drama a little less full.

The neighborhood atmosphere yesterday was a far cry of the vision of John Lay, the Virginia farmer who platted 158 acres of his land just west of the city limits in 1857. Dubbing the subdivision “Aubert Place,” Lay envisioned a fashionable middle-class enclave centered on an elegant park, like those he had seen in London. Early advertisements suggest that Aubert Place was a country retreat, and certainly the character of this area supported that assertion. Development was slow, even though half of the lots sold at auction in 1857. One reason for slow growth was the distance for public transit, which would not come for nearly another twenty years.

Most early homes here were frame, and only forty had been built by 1883. Still, annexation into the city in 1876 encouraged growth, as did the continued westward growth of the city. Streetcars came down Delmar to the south and Easton to the north, with a line also running straight down Euclid through the heart of the development. Development of the Central West End in the early 1890s coincided with the city’s investment in the park in 1889. The city took the undeveloped central feature of Aubert Place and built amenities, including the fountain that would lead to the gradual name change of the neighborhood. Lay’s charming suburb had been missing the elegance of a well-planned park. With lots reserved for single-family homes and a required twenty-foot set-back, Aubert Place was destined to be genteel. Building was rapid between 1892 and 1897, when two brothers named Davis built many homes. A second boom covers the years of 1903 through 1925, when unrestricted blocks around the original subdivision were developed with two-flats and other multi-family properties. Now known as Fountain Park, the neighborhood thrived with middle-class residents.

In the 1940s, Africa-Americans began piercing the housing restrictions in Fountain Park, at the time when many whites were leaving for more fashionable addresses west and north. A renewal took place, and the community remained strong for several decades until signs of decay crept in. To this day, there is amazing dichotomy in Fountain Park. Many blocks are very well-kept and retain their original beauty, while other blocks are marked by vacant lots, boarded buildings and vestiges of vice. Not surprising, the original Aubert Place is stronger than the outer tier of multi-family buildings. The posh Victorian middle-class suburb is now a problem-ridden 21st-century American urban neighborhood. That is to say, that for every day like yesterday, it has another good day. And for every beautiful home on Fountain, there’s a house like 1124 Bayard.

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    Historic Preservation Illinois Southern Illinois

    Illinois Closes Cahokia Courthouse, Fort de Chartres and Other Sites

    by Michael R. Allen

    Unbelievable — according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency is forced to close five historic sites due to budget cuts by Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich. Five are near St. Louis, and are popular destinations for families and student groups from the St. Louis area:

  • Fort de Chartres
  • Pierre Menard Home
  • Cahokia Courthouse
  • Fort Kaskaskia
  • Vandalia Statehouse

    What becomes of these highly significant places? Stay tuned.