The Schweiss House, located at 4 Daniel Road in Ladue, is one of two diminutive houses on geometric modules completed in 1952 by the master modern firm Bernoudy-Mutrux. The other house is the triangular Pinkney House in Columbia, Missouri. (The firm’s Simms House, also from 1952, is based on a parallelogram grid but is not a small house.) William A. Bernoudy and Edouard J. Mutrux’s partnership had formed in 1946 and would last until 1965, with Henry Bauer added as partner in 1955. Together, the pair explored the use of parallelogram and triangular modular layouts for Modern Movement homes both small and large. The partnership’s work in applying geometric modules was inspired partially by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and his Usonian Houses, which include the Kraus House at Ebsworth Park (1949-1955) that dramatically employed a cross plan of parallelogram grids. As with the Kraus House, here the clients would do much of the construction work themselves.
The loss of the apartment building at 3949 Lindell Boulevard (rebuilt in 2009 after a 2007 fire) after a devastating fire on Monday has raised questions about lightweight construction’s fire resistance. Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson has questioned whether the city can stand the risk of allowing the construction of buildings like the lost apartment building, which had an open attic with only drywall partition fire stops. The roaring fire quickly ate these thin, flammable stops, and raced across the top of the building in a matter of minutes.
3949 Lindell Boulevard on fire at around 9:00 p.m. Monday.
The fire chief’s concerns are appropriate. Although no lives were lost, the construction of 3949 Lindell Boulevard clearly was not adequate to resist what started as a small fire on the fourth floor. The wake of the fire might lead to revisions to the city’s building code reminiscent of past changes that have shifted away from requiring fireproof masonry construction. In 1961, the city created its first code that permitted exterior wall systems — “curtain walls” — to not include any masonry. Subsequent revisions have modified provisions in concert with both changes in building technology and the desires of developers who wish to lower constructions costs while shortening building times.
Monday’s fire brought to mind the impact of another disaster on Lindell Boulevard. On September 27, 1927, a major tornado raced northeasterly through the city. Damage on Lindell Boulevard stretched from Vandeventer Avenue west to Taylor avenue, and many buildings were destroyed completely while others were badly damaged.
A playground at Pruitt-Igoe. Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.A Pruitt-Igoe sidewalk tour and screening of the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth will begin at 6 p.m. July 26 at the St. Louis Fire Department Training Auditorium, 1421 Jefferson Ave. in St. Louis (63106). Michael Allen, director of the Preservation Research Office, a St. Louis-based historic preservation and architectural research organization, will lead the tour at 6 p.m.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which will be shown at 7 p.m., uses the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and its residents to tell the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II.
A panel discussion will follow the film screening.
The event is sponsored by the St. Louis Metropolitan Research Exchange and the Institute for Urban Research at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. STLMRE is a consortium of academic scholars from universities and institutions across the St. Louis metropolitan area, including Terry Jones, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and Mark Tranel, director of the Public Policy Research Center at UMSL.
The event is free. Contact Rebecca Pastor at 314-516-5277 or rebecca@umsl.edu to register.
Botanical Grove Happy Hour & Speaker Series With Michael Allen
Wednesday, June 18 from 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. (talk at 6:00 p.m.)
1624 Tower Grove Avenue
Come grab a (free) cold Urban Chestnut brew and a delicious crepe from Holy Crepe Food Truck and listen to acclaimed Architectural Historian Michael Allen discuss the history of the subdivisions around the Missouri Botanical Garden — including Gurney Court. Allen will discuss the Missouri Botanical Garden’s twentieth century effort to develop lands once held for garden expansion into a unique middle-class streetcar suburb that maintains its lovely character to this day.
Pruitt Igoe Now Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, July 25 from 6:00 until 9:00 p.m.
Old North St. Louis Restoration Group Gallery, 2700 N. 14th Street (at Montgomery)
The Old North St. Louis Restoration Group hosts the first exhibition presenting the winner and 31 finalists in Pruitt Igoe Now, an ideas competition that examined the future of the 33-acre forested vacant site of the former housing project. Entrants in Pruitt Igoe Now came from a wide variety of disciplines and explored futures that included design intervention, urban redevelopment, agriculture, cultural memorialization and forest management. The program includes remarks from Bob Hansman, Associate Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and a competition juror, artist and cultural activist Juan William Chavez, creator of the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary, Michael Allen, Director of the Preservation Research Office and competition manager, Nora Wendl, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Portland State University and finalists in the competition.
(Preservation Research Office provided pro bono staffing for Pruitt Igoe Now. Alyssa J. Stein, intern, deserves many thanks for her work on the competition.)
NORTHSIDE WORKSHOP AFTER PARTY
The Northside Workshop, located at 1306 St. Louis Avenue on the same block as the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, will be open from 9:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. with an after party following the exhibit opening. There will be music, refreshments and tours of the north side’s newest art space.
On June 25, the Pruitt Igoe Now design competition (staffed by the Preservation Research Office) announced its three winners, selected from its thirty-one finalists. The scope of the initial 346 submissions that envisions a new life for the 33 vacant, forested acres of the Pruitt-Igoe site included many submissions that examined the preponderance of vacant land around the site. These submissions generally tended to look at the southern end of the St. Louis Place neighborhood, just across Cass Avenue from the site, or the eastern end of JeffVanderLou, just across Jefferson.
One of the competition finalists, a video submission entitled “LandRun,” whimsically suggests that the vacant land in and around Pruitt-Igoe be opened to development via an annual “land run” reminiscent of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. That event brought sudden and frenetic development, with the cities of Guthrie and Oklahoma City ending up with over 10,000 residents in one day. The impetus for settlement was the availability of plentiful undeveloped publicly-held land. North St. Louis around Cass and Jefferson remains partially settled, and has been settled through urbanization in the 19th century, but it now has vast acres of unused land. (Admittedly much of what was publicly-owned land when Pruitt Igoe Now opened in 2011 is now owned by one developer, Northside Regeneration LLC.)
“LandRun” envisions a lively and diverse re-settlement effort, and casts its prediction toward hand-tended agriculture instead of dense urban development. With the North Side Regeneration project in the area, there won’t be a land run in the area around the Pruitt-Igoe site. Yet other parts of the city, and East St. Louis, have tracts of non-taxed land currently costing local government money to maintain. Large-scale redevelopment has proven to be a perpetual myth whose pursuit only drains tax dollars and population. The 1889 land run divested the federal government of the costs of long-term land ownership while stimulating economic development and tax revenues. Could St. Louis dream of doing the same through a Land Reutilization Land Run?
Congress first authorized the federal historic tax credit for fiscal year 1978 in order to provide a return of 20% of the qualified expenditures of rehabilitating historic buildings to developers whose projects produced income. In creating the program, Congress recognized both the needs of older towns and cities with aging historic buildings — passed over by decades of federal mortgage guarantees that sucked wealth out to suburbs — and the demands of a nation facing high costs of energy and the limits of natural resource depletion, which could turn to its existing buildings.
The Historic Tax Credit Coalition’s Third Annual Report on the Economic Impact of the Federal Historic Tax Credit, released this month, reports that the program has been a success. Between fiscal year 1978 and fiscal year 2011, $99.2 billion has been invested in historic buildings. Over 2,200 jobs have been created due to the program’s stimulation of construction work and materials fabrication — not to mention its sustenance of professions including architecture, finance and law. One of the figures from the report shows the huge, positive impact on the program since its creation and just in the last two fiscal years alone.
The federal historic tax credit’s use provided a boost to Missouri’s economy as well. According to the report, in fiscal year 2011 the program led to $368 million of investment in Missouri. That investment created 2,500 jobs and $163.2 million labor income amid a recession that has seen a slowing of new construction. Coupled with Missouri’s model state historic rehabilitation tax credit, the federal historic tax credit is a jobs leader for the state — and a mechanism that has led to resource conservation, historic preservation and retention of sense of place.
Garden Chapel photograph by Michael R. Allen.
The Garden Chapel (Church of the Open Word) 1040 Dautel just north of Olive in Creve Coeur is planning a outdoor workday on Saturday, July 14, starting around 6:00 a.m. until noon depending upon the heat and weather.
Garden Chapel photograph by Michael R. Allen.
The Garden Chapel — which hosted our May lecture on St. Louis County religious architecture by Esley Hamilton — is a small but significant work of mid-century modern ecclesiastical architecture designed by the firm of Schmidt & Black and completed in 1958.
Garden Chapel photograph by Michael R. Allen.
The planting area near the entrance has become overgrown with weeds. Three large dead pine trees have been removed. We desperately need help getting large weeds out and small trees cut down and good small trees trimmed. Any and all help will be appreciated!
For more information, contact David Baumgartner at dave_n_rose@sbcglobal.net.
Over the weekend, several friends alerted my attention to a rather naive essay in the Daily Mail showing “abandoned” St. Louis buildings. Two of these friends own one of the houses depicted in the arresting images by Demond Meek thay provoked the articles, entitled “City of ghosts: Haunting abandoned buildings of St Louis after the city’s population FELL by 70 per cent in a century”. These friends are rehabbing a small house in Old North St. Louis that may seem neglected to a passer-by lacking the local knowledge that helps differentiate the holdings of slumlords and city agencies from the hopeful projects of urban caretakers.
The one-and-a-half story house in the 1900 block of Palm Street was included in the Daily Mail article. This 1972 photograph from the Heritage/St. Louis survey shows how is once appeared, and hints and how it will appear again.
The Daily Mail article makes a generic argument about St. Louis not caring about its beautiful buildings, but its reporter chose the wrong photographs to make that point. The first image used shows a building in the 1500 block of Palm Avenue owned by the city’s Land Reutilization Authority, but available for rehab through a partnership between LRA and the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group. The second photograph depicts the massive Second Empire Loler Residence at 2135-37 St. Louis Avenue in St. Louis Place, dating to 1871 and definitely in need of care. Yet that need is partially addressed by a new historic district designation for St. Louis Place that makes rehabilitation tax credits available for the house.
The other houses include my friends’ “cottage”, a few buildings owned by Northside Regeneration LLC — which now apparently is studying rehabilitation of many buildings — a foreclosure or two, some LRA-owned houses and even one house on Chambers Avenue in Old North that is occupied. I wonder whether an the residents of that house have seen the essay and what they would make of being included in an international chronicle of the ravages of abandonment. Whoever they are, their presence is keeping that building off of the list of endangered north side homes.
A few years ago, the New York Times used a photograph of Old North St. Louis to demonstrate the ravages of abandonment in this city. Oops. The photograph that august paper chose for its urban-decay-in-St. Louis article showed a historic two-story house at the corner of Monroe and 13th streets. Today, that house has been stabilized and made ready for rehabilitation by the Old North St. Louis Restoration group using a grant from a large national bank. Oops, again.
I doubt that the Daily Mail will follow up on its article, but if it does it should look again. Behind some of the buildings in this weekend’s articles are people who care about the future of the buildings depicted. Their stories would add some complexity to the supposed ruins, and some sense of moral urgency. Perhaps readers in London can afford to sublimate the gaze upon vacant St. Louis buildings, but St. Louisans cannot — and, largely, do not. The real story, underreported even locally, is that people do care about these buildings.
Pecha Kucha Night #9 takes place one week from today, on Thursday, July 12 at 6:30 p.m. The venue of the city’s hottest salon for sharing ideas, projects and passions is the Contemporary Art Museum, 3726 Washington. Preservation Research Office Director Michael R. Allen will be the emcee for the event.
Ahead of the event, we recommend brushing up on the history of the Contemporary Art Museum building, a landmark of the very-recent past designed by Brad Cloepfil. One way to start is a video taken during a thoughtful and energetic discussion that happened at CAM last year. Last May, Cloepfil joined Bruce Lindsey, Dean at the School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis, and Paul Ha, Director of CAM for this event on May 26, 2011.
