Categories
East St. Louis, Illinois Mid-Century Modern

Seidel’s Apparel Company Building

by Michael R. Allen

This delightful Art Moderne storefront at 239 Collinsville Avenue in East St. Louis was installed in the late 1940’s for Seidel’s Apparel Company, which was in business at various locations in East St. Louis from 1905 until 2004. This was the final location for the store. (Read more about Seidel’s in Chapter 8 of the online edition of W. Edward English’s The Good Things of East St. Louis.)

The boldly modern facade consisted of large plate-glass display windows on the first floor crowned with a pattern-stamped sheet-metal facade covering the second floor. A neon sign with letters running horizontally was in place on the second floor. This sheet metal area was painted aqua blue except for an accent section with raised parapet above the doorway. A large neon sign on a projecting, steamlined sign board with vertical-running letters attached to this accent section, off-center on the left.

In 2005, the owners of Club Onyx bought the building and by the end of September had removed the Seidel’s letters and repainted all of the sheet metal on the facade black. At least they installed a neon sign of their own on the old sign board.

Categories
East St. Louis, Illinois Historic Preservation Theft

Murphy Building Secured

by Michael R. Allen

Someone has finally re-boarded the front entrance to the lovely and decaying Murphy Building in downtown East St. Louis. On March 6, we reported that thieves had removed the boards and stolen three terra cotta keystones.

Categories
Historic Preservation

There IS Something We Can Do About It

History is being flooded, too: Slave records, jazz archives, Jefferson Davis’ mansion: Hurricane Katrina has put them all in peril. by Rebecca Traister (Salon, September 10)

Please, after reading this article, make an effort to visit some place like the Scott Joplin House in St. Louis, the Museum of Labor and Industry in Belleville, Illinois or somesuch. Better yet, ask these places if they need a hand with things. Preservation efforts aren’t just threatened by floodwaters — apathy is still the biggest destroyer of our past.

Categories
Downtown Salvage

Hadley-Dean Building Lobby Lost

by Michael R. Allen

Imagine a strange dream-world. You are in a room, surrounded by shiny glass walls painted with wild ancient Egyptian motifs. A large sun-like disc descends as a chandelier. People of the ancient civilization seem to come back to life on the walls around you. There are lotus-stalk-shaped columns. Walls are inscribed with hieroglyphics. You hear a ding sound, and all of a sudden elevator doors open and office-workers stream out. They pass you and head out a glass door, through which you can see brick wholesale warehouses, office buildings and hotels.

The intact lobby on July 9, 2004.

Can you imagine this scene? Good. That is all you will be able to do to reach the former glory of the lobby of the Hadley-Dean Glass Company building at Eleventh and Lucas in downtown St. Louis, where the dream-world was reality for 76 years. This world, created through the art glass called Vitrolite, was shattered in September 2004 to make way for a restaurant space.

The Hadley-Dean Glass Company built their functional, neoclassical building in 1903 from plans by noted architect Isaac Taylor and draftsman Oscar Enders. Yet the building didn’t acquire its most significant feature, its marvelous lobby, until 1928. The company wanted to demonstrate the decorative potential of the Vitrolite that it sold, and it could not have made a more impressive demonstration. The Marietta Manufacturing Company of Indianapolis, Indiana manufactured the glass, technically called Sani-Onyx glass, while Hadley-Dean distributed it in St. Louis. Designed by Oscar Enders, the lobby became an instant attraction, and remained so for decades. Locals would tell each other of the odd “Egyptian office building” in the middle of plain-old downtown St. Louis.

The Hadley-Dean Building on August 1, 2005. The colorful awnings are part of the Mosaic restaurant’s decor.

A renovation in the 1980’s by McCormick Baron greatly altered the lobby by moving parts of it to a different part of the building. The original lobby featured an open, two-story space with a mezzanine and staircase while the new space was one story. Later, in 2002, owners further removed parts and sold some works through eBay. Still, much of the original lobby remained, creating a fusion of wildly modern space with a stoic facade.

Sadly, new owners adapted the lobby for a restaurant oddly-enough called Mosaic by removing the best parts of the lobby. A few panels remain on doors an in the women’s restroom. Workers destroyed much of the lobby’s Vitrolite through crude removal attempts, but the intrepid salvagers and art deco experts of Broadway Moderne managed to purchase of the mostly-intact great features, including the columns pictured above and the chandelier. Some of those pieces will end up in Miami’s Wolfsonian-Florida International Museum and the proposed National Architectural Arts Center in St. Louis.

Categories
Midtown

Ninth District Police Station

by Michael R. Allen

LOCATION: 3021 Dr. Samuel T. Shepard Drive; Midtown; Saint Louis, Missouri
DATE OF CONSTRUCTION: 1936
DATE OF ABANDONMENT: 1980 – present
OWNER: Washington Metro AME Church

This one-story art deco building is one of six such police district stations built by the city in 1936 and 1937. All are in a similar art deco design, employ similar floor plans and fireproof construction and all were designed by Albert Osburg, chief architect of the city’s Board of Public Service. Osburg had already demonstrated his mastery of the art deco style with his design for the Homer G. Phillips Hospital. These distinctive police stations reveal his keen eye for using the streamline nature of the building itself as both form and detail. Sparsely ornamented, the police stations rely on functional parts – signage, handrails on the steps, the shape of the buildings – to express their machine-age sensibility. Osburg also employed the use of varied angles of bricks in courses above doorways and windows, a common stylistic feature in art deco design. He designed three of these buildings to be clad in buff brick, like this Ninth District station, and three in a brick that is almost gray.

Unfortunately, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department consolidated its nine districts into three “superstations” in the early 1990s, building new and bland postmodern-style station houses. The art deco buildings fell into disrepair, with one (on Hampton Avenue) transferred to new use by the city’s Emergency Medical Services program as an ambulance garage and dispatch center. The others sat empty for years, finding new uses eventually, such as the old Third District Police Station in Soulard that became the home of the Mad Art Gallery in 2000 after nearly twenty years of vacancy.

The Ninth District Police Station has yet to find a new use. Street closings and wholesale clearance have devastated its Midtown surroundings and made it a much less attractive candidate for creative reuse than it would have been in a bustling neighborhood. Nowadays, it sits surrounded by drab parking-lot-ringed low-rise apartment buildings, whose ugliness glares against this fine art deco building. The effect may accentuate its stable and modern mass to the architecture buff, but the effect certainly does not encourage anyone thinking of seriously reusing the building.

In 2003, the building was populated by two homeless people, a black man and a white woman. They lived inside of the side entrance, a fact that two friends and I discovered by peaking through the broken door and meeting eyes with one of the residents. They were friendly people. The man slept through a lot of the conversation, while the woman asked what we were doing there. They both asked us for cigarettes and marijuana, and allowed my friend to photograph them. Inside, their “living room” was very clean; they had swept up a large area of the building for living space. They let us look around the first room from the doorway, but said they couldn’t let us go any further.

“It’s not safe in the rest of the building,” the woman told us.

Fortunately for the station, the Washington Metro AME Church, located in one of the few other older buildings on the block across the street from the building, has since purchased the police station for its parking lot. The church has sealed the building, and may renovate it some day.

Categories
Abandonment Historic Preservation North St. Louis Old North

Good News in Old North

by Michael R. Allen

Some great news: The Old North St. Louis Restoration Group has now closed on both of its loans for its North Market Place development, which includes construction of 41 new homes and rehabilitation of several old buildings. Credit goes to the Restoration Group for rehabbing several buildings that had been approved for demolition and were in advanced states of deterioration.

Look for lots of activity on Benton, North Market and Monroe Streets between Hadley and North Florissant this fall and spring. Rebuilding neighborhood density is always interesting to watch, but rarely heartening. This project is encouraging. While the new homes use some materials that I do not find appropriate, their design, scale and — most notable — lot placement (close to the sidewalk, close to neighboring buildings) are compatible with the neighborhood.

Categories
Demolition East St. Louis, Illinois Theaters

French Village Drive-In Under Demolition

Categories
Demolition North St. Louis St. Louis Place

Crunden Branch Library

by Michael R. Allen

In late August 2005, the elegant Crunden Branch Library (better known in recent days as the Pulaski Bank) at the corner of Cass Avenue and 14th Street disappeared. No magic was involved — just a wrecking crew working without public notice. Residents of the near north side had feared such an event for years but had not been given forewarning. Some didn’t even notice the demolition, instead finding an empty lot covered in grass seed and straw where their old landmark stood.

Photograph from 2001 by Rob Powers.

Yet the old library branch did not fall without a fight. There were valiant attempts by Landmarks Association and north siders to preserve the building. As recently as last year, a major effort to preserve the library branch building was in motion. Three students in a Washington University architecture course offered by Esley Hamilton and Carolyn Toft studied the building for their class project, concluding that the building should be restored to its original use. Student Katie McKenzie then worked on a draft nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.

Photograph from 2001 by Rob Powers.

Unfortunately, the nomination met with significant opposition from Alderwoman April Ford Griffin (D-5th), who has long favored demolition of the building for plans that may include construction of a new strip mall anchored by Walgreens. With the building owned by the city’s Land Reutilization, Griffin was basically the owner of the building and her will was finally carried out. At its May 2005 meeting, the Preservation Board recommended against listing the building on the National Register, but the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation approved the nomination anyway and the building will be listed on the National Register post mortem.

What a sad end for such a triumphant building, the city’s first north side library branch built through Andrew Carnegie’s grant to the city. Eames & Young designed the richly-ornamented Beaux Arts style building, and construction began in 1908. Murch Brothers built the building, which cost $51,000 to build. On September 11, 1909, the library was opened with its official name: the Frederick Morgan Crunden Branch Library.

Photograph from 2001 by Rob Powers.

This name honored the life of Crunden, an educator who became head of the fledgling public library system in 1877. At that time, the library was a private members-only entity affiliated with the St. Louis Public Schools, and its members were mostly teachers and professors. Crunden vowed to change that by transforming the club-like library into a vast democratic system he sometimes called the “People’s Library.” As any resident of the city knows, he was successful in establishing a fine citywide library system before his retirement in 1909.

The building was a fitting tribute to the erstwhile librarian. Its simple, low rectangular form with hipped roof was purely classical in form, while its faces expressed a more fanciful classicism. The brick walls were laid with an odd bond pattern: two stretchers with no visible mortar joint and a single header. The glazed terra cotta entablature, later damaged by thieves, featured a shell and dolphin motif that evoked the stability and permanence of the ocean with some whimsy. The north and south elevations had different articulation. The windows on the east and west walls were designed to house busts of famous St. Louisans. Inside, the first floor was a completely undivided reading room — the only of the Carnegie-funded branches with such a plan.

Photograph from 2001 by Rob Powers.

After many years of use, the Public Library decided to move the library branch due to perceived “encroachment of industry” on this site. In 1953, the library sold the building to Pulaski Bank and built a new building at 2008 Cass Avenue — adjacent to the Pruitt-Igoe housing project — to house the Crunden Branch Library. This incarnation of the branch closed in 1981, with no replacement, but the building at 2008 Cass still stands. Pulaski Bank made significant alterations to the building, removing entry foyer and enlarging the window openings. The bank opened the building as branch on December 31, 1954, but this branch was not open for more than 25 years. As a civic gesture, Pulaski Bank kept the basement auditorium open to use by civic organizations.

In December 1995, the Land Reutilization acquired the building and its fate seemed sealed. City planners have called for wholesale clearance of this area since the late 1950s. The few remaining historic buildings here are those that are privately owned, but even some of those could fall to make way for a “connector” ramp from Tucker Boulevard to a new highway bridge spanning the Mississippi River. One wonders what will become of the Cass Avenue Bank one block west of the library branch. Readers can be assured that the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise at Cass and Tucker will be preserved, though.

Image from September 15, 2005 by Michael R. Allen

Categories
Demolition Lafayette Square South St. Louis

House at 1100 Dolman Street

by Michael R. Allen

The house still standing (at right) on March 14, 2005.

This old house at 1100 Dolman Avenue in Lafayette Square, at right in the photograph above, suddenly collapsed in August 2006, after years of vacancy and furtive rehabilitation efforts. Rest in peace.

Categories
Abandonment Demolition Fire Martin Luther King Drive Wells-Goodfellow

5900 Block of Martin Luther King Boulevard

by Michael R. Allen

South face of the 5900 block of Dr. Martin Lutherk King Drive, 1998. Photograph by Don De Vivo.

Don De Vivo took these photographs of this St. Louis block in 1998, capturing conditions that have only worsened in the course of seven years. This block is part of a long commercial corridor on Martin Luther King Boulevard that straddles the cities of St. Louis and Wellston, an industrial suburb experiencing severe economic depression. De Vivo, a developer and real estate broker who owns six properties on this block, has been working to stabilize the physical conditions here and renovate his buildings since 1986, when he made his first purchase in the Wellston Loop area. Recently, De Vivo and others formed a nonprofit development corporation, the Wellston Loop Community Development Corporation, to jump-start redevelopment of the commercial district on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the Wellston Loop.

Note that the large commercial building seen recently burned in February remains partly standing in October. This building is adjacent to a former branch of the J.C. Penney store, built in 1948 as a rare example of a well-defined International Style building in a neighborhood commercial district. The J.C. Penney store building still stands, although it has been ravaged by years of abandonment.

Photographs from February 2, 1998

Photographs from October 8, 1998