Categories
Architecture Martin Luther King Drive North St. Louis Urbanism Wells-Goodfellow

Hope on Martin Luther King Drive

by Michael R. Allen

I spent some of my morning talking with a building owner in the Wellston Loop area. He has big plans for his big building, the former J.C. Penney store at 5930 Martin Luther King Drive. (This is the International style gem designed by William P. McMahon and built in 1948.) He envisions the building as catalyst for rejuvenating the area, and seems optimistic despite acknowledging forty years of neglect of the area and of Martin Luther King Drive in general.

The neglect is formidable. On the drive out to his building from downtown, I passed the sites of a dozen buildings that were demolished within my lifetime and whose details I clearly recall. I passed even more buildings that sit empty, or in use, or in some derelict state between. I passed two buildings with significant recent collapses. I passed one row of flats and a corner commercial building under demolition despite being in good condition. I was overcome with melancholy as I considered that many of these buildings won’t survive my lifetime, or even the next decade, and the fifty-odd blocks of a street that supposedly honors to good work of Dr. King will be virtually unrecognizable to me by middle age, and already is unrecognizable to people old enough to recall its heyday.

Even at the time that Franklin and Easton avenues were renamed for Dr. King in 1972, the conditions of the buildings on the street were not great. At the time, some critics felt that the legacy of Dr. King was diminished by placing his name on a street with a sad future. The sad future is now, and the street name certainly seems cynical.

Hopefully, the J.C. Penney building and others on the street will survive, and find good owners, and provide momentum for development along here. Aldermen O.L. Shelon (4th Ward) and Jeffrey Boyd (22nd Ward, including the Wellston Loop), whose wards include most of the street in the city, are pushing for redevelopment that is architecturally sensitive. They can only do what is politically possible, though, before it is up to the market to generate the capital needed to revive sections of the street. May that time come before all is lost on the great street with a great name.

Categories
CORTEX Demolition

CORTEX Claims Another Historic Building

The O. Morse Shoe Company Building at 235 Boyle Avenue in the Central West End, better known as the SKH Paper Company Building, is likely to fall soon for part of the CORTEX biotech development project. Full story here.

Categories
LRA

LRA’s Problem With Marketing: It Needs to Start

by Michael R. Allen

Check out the featured properties list of the city’s real estate agency, the Land Reutilization Authority.

Maybe it looks fine on first glance, if a little short on the number of properties. That number, though, gets even shorter when you look at the little red tags added next to each address. Two of the properties have already sold. One has an offer made on it, although the tag “OFFER” may not be as self-explanatory to a first-time visitor to the website. Another reads “Available,” leading one to question whether or not the other addresses listed are available as well.

Further investigation shows that of the buildings that sold, the sale of 3463 Potomac was recorded December 16, 2005 and the sale of 1919 Agnes was recorded August 1, 2006. The website proclaims its last update as being August 23, 2006, making the presence of the August 1 sale somewhat understandable. Yet there is no good reason why the sale from late last year should still be listed on the Featured Properties pages.

Further investigation reveals that almost all of the current addresses have been on the Featured Properties page since 2004, and that only one or two have been added since that year. In the past, even more “sold” properties cluttered this page.

Are we to believe that the city has no more worthwhile LRA-owned buildings to sell when it gets through with this list?

Of course not; there are thousands more and many of them would sell quickly if one didn’t have to deal with the city to purchase them. The LRA should be constantly rolling in new properties to the Featured Properties page. As soon as one sells, another should replace it. If a sold house needs to remain on the site to show people what kind of properties LRA has sold, it should be moved to an archive page.

Yet even an enhanced Featured Properties page only reaches anyone who can find the page, which isn’t easy to find. What LRA really needs to do is actual marketing.

Here are some suggestions for an LRA marketing plan:

1. Publish the entire LRA property list on the LRA website, complete with a photograph of each building in the inventory and the asking price (which should be $1.00 in every instance).

2. Form partnerships with neighborhood organizations that have proven development ability, such as the partnership being forged between LRA and the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group. The neighborhood groups will create marketing strategies and materials.

3. Eliminate the requirement of an alderman’s letter of support for a sale. Why this is even part of LRA policy is beyond comprehension. (For instance, the Third Ward has the highest concentration of LRA buildings in the city. Good luck getting that letter of support there!)

4. Create an attractive for-sale sign to be placed on each LRA building.

5. Explore the possibility of public-private partnerships that would utilize LRA buildings for Habitat for Humanity and other housing efforts.

6. Create a dedicated staff position for the purpose of sales and marketing. Of course, funding is tight at present but I would argue that selling LRA buildings should be a huge priority of city government and worthy of the expenditure. After all, the St. Louis Development Corporation already spends a lot of city money every year contracting to outside parties for appraisal and consulting work. Why not figure out ways to save money on those contracts to fund a position at LRA?

With some effort, LRA could sell much of its inventory in a few years. Of course, aldermen would lose their ability to give favored developers property, and land banking for large projects might become difficult, but rarely is that approach conducive to smart urban planning. Aldermanic control of development has been nothing but a downfall for the city.

I am not suggesting that LRA drop its proof of financial responsibility requirement. However, the agency needs to stop using that requirement as a threat. LRA needs to conduct itself to ultimately completely divest its property. LRA properties have a bad reputation as eyesores that are difficult to purchase. In fact, they could be the raw material of urban homesteading and returned to use.

Categories
Academy Neighborhood Demolition North St. Louis

5111 Delmar Boulevard, Demolished

by Michael R. Allen

LOCATION: 5111 Delmar Boulevard; Academy; Saint Louis, Missouri
DATE OF CONSTRUCTION: 1906
ARCHITECT: William Lucas
BUILDER: McKelvey Construction Company
OWNER: Land Reutilization Authority

The death march on Delmar Boulevard (formerly and more properly “Avenue”) continues with the demolition of the three-story commercial building at 5111 Delmar in September 2006. Slowly, the stretch of Delmar between Kingshighway on the east and Union on the west has lost over half of its buildings. This building was rather plain even for this section of the street, but still handsome. It began collapsing from the center and eventually was aided in its self-started collapse by a demolition crew.

The bottom floor contained two storefronts on either side of a neoclassical entrance arch. Above, a mostly non-ornamented wall of brown brick contained a subtle Arts-and-Crafts brick motif to anyone who looked close enough. A projecting copper cornice, long since pulled off by thieves, would have given the building a more refined appearance. The upper floors were apartments and may have been carved into a rooming house, as many such buildings along Delmar were.

Detail of terra cotta entrance ornament (Michael R. Allen).

Nowadays, Delmar is fraught with extreme visual poverty from its eastern terminus downtown to the Demar Loop, where prospects brighten. The city’s great dividing line at times seems as dour and forbidding as the Berlin Wall. Visual beauty on the street could neutralize its terrible reputation as the city’s leading segregation device. After all, that segregation has long since been as much about depravity as it has been about race — south of Delmar isn’t exclusively white, but it is a land where one might have a better chance at feeling like the city has an urban future.

Categories
Central West End Green Space Infrastructure Streets Urbanism

Park Space Isn’t All That BJC Threatens

by Michael R. Allen

If BJC gets to lease part of Forest Park, can the city not require them to reopen Euclid Avenue to through traffic? I am very disturbed that the city would contemplate leasing part of a public park to a private entity for new construction, but I am even more upset that the city has already granted BJC de facto ownership of public thoroughfares through their “campus.”

The park space issue raises a huge red flag with the voters, who overwhelmingly seem to oppose it. I suppose park space is obvious community space that people generally value. Street space, much more fundamental to building good neighborhoods, is also public space and worthy of defense. Yet few people defend streets against closures, cul–de-sacs and such. In fact, some vocal Forest Park Southeast residents oppose the proposed new BJC lease as vocally as they call for making some culvert-pipe barriers permanent closures with gates or walls.

BJC’s rampant expansion is creating a problem far worse than, although reflected in, the proposed lease: the creation of a virtual citadel that will sever connections between the Central West End and Forest Park Southeast (or “The Grove”). This is a terrible thing for FPSE, which is showing miraculous signs of recovery and the resurgence of the Manchester Avenue commercial district. That rebound will suffer if people cannot find FPSE or get to it quickly from other neighborhoods.

If Mayor Francis Slay wants to continue his public-defying embrace of the lease, he ought to demand that BJC provide some thing other than money in return. He needs to make sure that BJC stops closing streets and stops building parking garages that have no street-level retail or office space. Taylor Avenue in particular is a major connector between the CWE and FPSE, yet BJC treats it like their service alley and rush-hour freeway. The worst buildings, garages and lots face Taylor — yet Metro is relocating the Central West End MetroLink station entrance to Taylor from Euclid.

Save our park, and restore our streets!

Categories
Architecture Historic Preservation Midtown

Granite Steps Throw the Sheldon Off Balance

by Michael R. Allen

The Sheldon Memorial in Midtown looks very different right now. One has to look closer and may have to conjure memory to figure out what is different, but the change is glaring: All of the limestone steps have been clad in red Missouri granite!

While this change may not seem big, it completely throws off the synergy between the steps and building. The pale Bedford limestone steps matched the limestone ornament on the building, designed by Louis Spiering and built in 1912. Use of the same material for the high decorative ornament and low functional steps indicated that all material choices were thoughtful and deliberate.

Now, the pinkish steps seem like an afterthought that just don’t quite match the building. There is something about the clash between the granite steps and the brown-toned bricks of the Sheldon that is disturbing.

(Thanks to Bill Seibert for the tip.)

Categories
Architecture Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern

Mid-Century Modern Preservation Efforts Require Rethinking Preservation

by Michael R. Allen

While preservation battles continue across the St. Louis region, those surrounding mid-century modern buildings will probably dominate the next twenty years of the local preservation movement. Given the economic geography of new construction in St. Louis around the middle and later parts of the 20th century, most of the buildings that will be threatened stand in St. Louis County and other suburban areas (with some exceptions).

Any preservation effort that will aim to defend the outstanding modernist buildings of this area will need to be pan-geographic. The effort will have to involve individuals and groups comfortable and ready to make alliances into the suburbs, and into Illinois. In turn, new allies will have to be ready to support battles ongoing in the city of St. Louis.

With the parochial attitudes of many cultural actors here, one may have cause to be pessimistic about the prospect of the local preservation movement trying to save mid-century modern buildings. Of course, even before the bias toward certain political boundaries comes a more pernicious bias against any building not “historic” by the art-historical terms embodied by most local, state and national landmark designations.

What is needed before too long is rejection of the strictures of profession and political boundaries so that a truly regional effort to preserve all of the valuable architecture of this region can be born. While there are ethical and ecological reasons to favor the dense urban core of the region, culturally significant works of architecture are everywhere. The mid-century buildings tell a different story than the 19th century masonry buildings that are ubiquitous here — one of an optimistic embrace of technology and open space. We all know that story has become tragedy, but certain buildings that are part of the story are aesthetically unique landmarks that are needed in today’s world when we have descended even further into the abyss of suburbanization.

Time has changed the way in which architectural historians appreciate the buildings of the mid-century era. Now it’s time for the preservation movement to do the same, in St. Louis and elsewhere.

Categories
Downtown

KielCenter Acquires YetAnother FunnyName

by Michael R. Allen

Did ScotTrade champion the 1923 bond issue? Did Savvis use his stature to endorse much-needed reform to the government structure of St. Louis?

Of course not. These are accomplishments of Henry Kiel, Republican mayor of St. Louis from 1913 until 1925. The eponymous Kiel Opera House and Auditorium, built in 1934, has stood diminished in both building and name for years now. The city wrecked the auditorium section of the building in 1991 to build the new Kiel Center hockey arena, and the leaseholders of the arena soon sought to lease naming rights. The creepy-sounding Savvis purchased the name in 2000, and the compound-named ScottTrade just purchased the name and is calling the arena “ScottTrade Center.” When Savvis purchased the name, Bi-State Development Agency had to rename the Kiel Center MetroLink station “Civic Center Station.”

Perhaps if the company names that have appeared on the arena were less ridiculous than “Savvis” and “ScottTrade,” I would believe that the arena bore a respectable name. As it is, I am embarrassed to think that my city would have the name “ScottTrade” on a building that is technically a public building and that once was named for one of the best St. Louis mayors ever.

Of course, the name sale generates revenue for the owners of the arena lease, who in turn can generate sales tax revenue for the city government and economic activity. But should the name of a public place ever be available for purchase? While some fees are generated, the purchaser of naming rights is using a building belonging to the public to support a perpetual and prominent advertisement. The gains to ScottTrade upon the new name are far greater than any to the general public — and that’s an arrangement that runs counter to the legacy of Henry Kiel, who oversaw the largest public works effort in the city’s history. How ironic that his name would be stamped out for the clumsy, generic corporate moniker ScottTrade.

Categories
Fire JeffVanderLou North St. Louis

Houses at 3654-60 Cook Avenue

by Michael R. Allen

The fire marshal’s car sits in front of the houses on Cook Avenue after the fire on August 28.

On the night of August 28, 2006, a fire struck the two turreted houses at the southeast corner of Cook and Spring avenues. These two houses are splendid examples of how the Romanesque Revival was interpreted by local architects and made part of the city’s turn-of-the-century architectural vernacular. They also illustrate the St. Louis tendency to group houses that re so similar to each other that at first glance they seem like copies, while in fact the details and ornament are completely different even as materials, style and proportion are synchronized. According architect Paul Hohmann: “The buildings are actually two pairs of townhomes, for a total of four units. The two portions are connected only at the center, with the projecting fronts separated to appear like two large mansions. … Unfortunately the way the two halves were joined at the middle at the third floor would have provided an easy conduit for a fire to spread from either side.”

Continue reading “Houses at 3654-60 Cook Avenue”
Categories
Fire Granite City, Illinois Industrial Buildings Metro East

The Remains of the National Enamelling and Stamping Company Plant

by Michael R. Allen

This engraving of the National Enameling and Stamping Company plant appeared in the company’s 1903 catalog.

In 1895, the St. Louis Stamping Company opened its new 550,000 square-foot plant in Granite City. The facility was designed by architect Frederick Bonsack. In 1899, the company’s name changed to the National Enameling and Stamping Company (NESCO). Production continued at the plant until 1956, and subsequently the buildings were used for storage.

On October 27, 2003, the plant mostly burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze. Among the items stored inside were thousands of tires and propane fuel. The buildings had creosote-treated wood block floors that were gentle on workers’ feet but highly combustible.

A detailed version of the story of the founding of Granite City and NESCO can be found here. Here are two views of the remains of the NESCO plant. The five-story building is the end part of the western wing of the building, seen at the right of the engraving above.