Categories
Demolition LRA North St. Louis Old North

Dummitt’s Confectionary

by Michael R. Allen

Dummitt’s Confectionary on April 22, 2005.

The decaying confectionery building at 1300-04 Hebert Street in Old North arrived in the 21st century, withstanding arson, demolition and disinvestment since its construction around 1870. The building came so close to a day when someone inspired by the new energy of the neighborhood would have come to purchase and restore it. Alas, the owner was the city government’s coldest shoulder, the Land Reutilization Authority, which wrecked the building in May 2005 after its roof had collapsed.

Categories
Demolition Downtown

Herkert & Meisel Building

by Michael R. Allen

The building in 1977. Source: Landmarks Association of St. Louis Archive

LOCATION: 910 Washington Avenue; Downtown; Saint Louis, Missouri
DATE OF CONSTRUCTION: 1874
DATE OF DEMOLITION: 2001

Originally built by Semple Birge & Company as an agricultural implements warehouse, the Herkert & Meisel Building at 910 Washington Avenue was built in 1874 and is depicted in Compton and Dry’s noted 1875 Pictorial St. Louis. (The second floor bay window was added later.) In the last two decades of its life, the building stood as the only building depicted on the atlas standing in the downtown commercial core save the nearby Old Post Office and the Old Courthouse. The building stood as a remnant of St. Louis’s 19th-century wide use of the Italianate style for commercial architecture, a trend that was dwindling even by the time of this building’s construction. As such, it was an exceptional building in the downtown core that deserved careful preservation. However, exceptional commercial buildings have not fared well downtown.

The building’s most well-known use was as headquarters and factory for the Herkert & Meisel Trunk Company, a luggage company that used the building for almost 80 years until its demolition.

Rear elevation, July 1998. Source: Landmarks Association of St. Louis Archive

The demolition of the Herkert & Meisel Building drew little protest.  Development company HRI sought demolition of the building for construction of a parking garage and ballroom building to serve the historic Statler and Lenox hotels that the company was renovating. Once again, the false ideal of “progress” won out, and the building was sacrificed for preservation of supposedly more significant buildings nearby. What an odd foreshadowing of the demolition of the Century Building three years later, except this time the later building died and the building depicted on Pictorial St. Louis was the avowed cause of death.

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Downtown

Kiel Opera House: Construction Photographs

by Michael R. Allen

After two city blocks bounded by Market, 14th, Clark and 15th had been cleared, work started on the foundation for the new Municipal Auditorium and Opera House. Photograph taken on April 5, 1932. (From the collection of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

Construction well underway. Photograph taken on November 10, 1932. (From the collection of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

Looking southwest from the corner of 14th and Market streets. Photograph taken on November 10, 1932. (From the collection of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.)

Laying the cornerstone on November 11, 1932. Mayor Victor J. Miller is at right. (From the collection of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.) The Municipal Auditorium and Opera House would be renamed after Mayor Henry J. Kiel in 1943, after his death.

Categories
Downtown

Personal Politics: Revitalization of the Kiel Opera House

by Steve Sagarra, Special to Ecology of Absence

Photograph of Kiel Opera House by Michael R. Allen, 2005.

The architecture of St. Louis is beyond compare. Unfortunately, the city has demolished more historic structures than many others have ever had — a loss that has affected the marketing of the city in attracting potential residents and businesses alike. Why must these buildings be demolished in order to move forward? The formula of destroying and rebuilding in the name of progress has only further eroded the already dismal character of the city. Rather than demolish the past with a wrecking ball, the city should preserve it for future generations and look to its historic architecture to reinvent the city, just as other cities have done. [1]

Empty since 1991, the revitalization of the Kiel Opera House has consumed Saint Louis politics for years — a self-perpetuating issue that has been a nightmare for all parties involved. Perhaps it is a simple matter of hype over an old and decayed building, which has outlived its usefulness. The problem is, who will be — or better yet, can be — the winner in the resolution of the issue? Has it been strained beyond any possible resolution, or even an agreeable compromise? No matter the outcome, the issue has been hotly debated and marked by a history of personal politics.

Continue reading “Personal Politics: Revitalization of the Kiel Opera House”
Categories
East St. Louis, Illinois

The Spivey Building: Death of a Dream?

by Thomas Petraitas

Like most East St. Louis alumni, I was shocked when I heard that the Spivey Building in East St. Louis, Illinois might be demolished. Everyone just presumed that the Spivey Building always was and always would be. Even in its decrepit condition, it remains the city’s most visible landmark.

Recently, I visited downtown East St. Louis and was surprised by the dire condition of the Spivey and by the desolation of its location. From a distance, the building still stands proud and true. Up close, it is a bare shell, rotten and sad. Giving this building some serious thought, I now wonder if it is time to say a sad good-bye to this timeworn symbol of the past.

Spivey’s City of Dreams

In Allen Spivey’s time, East St. Louis was a city of dreams: a place of jobs and optimism. People came from around the world to settle in East St. Louis because of its bright future and opportunities. The residents truly believed the oft repeated motto: “If you can’t find a job in East St. Louis, then you can’t find a job anywhere.”

Mr. Spivey was a civic booster and owner of the East St. Louis Evening and Sunday Journal (later the Metro East Journal). He ran his newspaper from this building and from the adjacent Journal Building (built in 1936). His splendid skyscraper clearly reflects his own commitment to the future of his city, a future that never happened.

Continue reading “The Spivey Building: Death of a Dream?”
Categories
Abandonment East St. Louis, Illinois Theaters

Ghosts of the Screen

by Michael R. Allen


Photographic collage by Eric Seelig.

LOCATION: 8601 St. Clair Ave.; Caseyville, Illinois
ORIGINAL NAME: East St. Louis Drive-In
ORIGINAL OPERATOR: Publix Great States Theatres
DATE OF CONSTRUCTION: 1942
DATES OF ABANDONMENT: 1992 – 2005
DATES OF DEMOLITION: August – December 2005

The decrepit and broken floorboards of the ticket office at the French Village Drive-In near East Saint Louis don’t look like a place of terror. For anyone who has spent time around broken-down buildings and abandoned places, the ticket office building doesn’t seem very remarkable save its streamlined, late Art Deco facade. Yet only a few years ago, in November 2000, police recovered the body of a missing East Saint Louis dentist, Kenneth Long, in this vacant space. His body was stashed in the ticket office — on the floor — where it lay until its staunch smell disturbed residents of nearby homes. The residents called the police, who came to find the gruesome source.

Perhaps it is somehow fitting that the French Village Drive-In was then and still is the property of a church congregation, the Church of the Living God of Fairview Heights. The forces of abandonment forge unlikely and unsettling relationships and transform functional spaces into locations of intense historical mutation. Add to the mix the possibility that Dr. Long himself had seen a film at the Drive-In and that many of his patients had also attended screenings at the Drive-In, and the story begins to raise many connections whose significance is uncertain yet troubling. Here is a place built to stimulate the collective imagination becoming the scene of almost-cinematic carnage: the dead body in the abandoned drive-in theater ticket office. What could be more disturbing or fantastic to anyone who had seen a movie, perhaps one involving dead bodies being discovered in foggy and forgotten places?

Still, the French Village Drive-In retains a more direct importance. From its opening in 1942 until its close fifty years later, the French Village Drive-In — originally named for East St. Louis — provided entertainment and escape to thousands of East Siders. People such as my mother fondly remember a night spent gazing at the huge screen in the middle of farm fields, removed enough from the bustle of East St. Louis to provide some sense of getaway to the filmgoers.

J.P. Dromey of Publix Great States Theatres, Inc. opened the East St. Louis Drive-In as perhaps the first drive-in movie theater in the St. Louis area. The original capacity was 500 cars. It attracted local competition by 1949, when the noted Jablonow and Komm chain opened the now-demolished Mounds Drive-In Theatre at 7400 Collinsville Road. By the late 1950’s, the ownership fell into local hands, that of the Bloomer Amusement Company (BAC) of Belleville. BAC renamed the drive-in the French Village Drive-In, perhaps in response to the growing out-migration from East St. Louis. The theater was successful until the 1980’s, when the multi-theater format and home video technology lured people away from viewing an only-choice film under the sky.

Throughout its life, the theater’s stylish design enhanced its presence. Being a relatively early drive-in in the St. Louis area, the theater was constructed when patron and proprietor alike still wanted each movie theater, even a drive-in, to look as lavish as the movies it screened. The French Village Drive-In fulfilled these demands with its stately and colorful Art Deco style. The head-house, site of the ticket office, consists of a two-story, narrow center portion with projecting canopy wings for cars to pass through. All of the corners are heavily rounded, giving the building a space-age look that must have seemed quite sophisticated in 1942. Directly behind the head-house — symmetrically aligned — is the trapezoidal screen structure, which presents gray corrugated aluminum walls that are punctuated by lively red rectangles on the main facade.

The screen structure is unique for a drive-in theater in that its builders built it to accommodate stage as well as screen entertainment. The screen is fronted by a long, somewhat shallow stage. The screen is actually one wall of a building that houses a few dressing rooms, prop storage areas and various lighting controls. During the early days of the drive-in’s life, the stage was used often for pre-film and stand-alone live performance.

The screen and stage now look out upon a field of small trees that cloak the comparatively banal projection house. This field in winter appears to be occupied by countless skeletal forms instead of hundreds of east side filmgoers. Of course, the trees are far from deathly as they continue to grow strong in soil that must still be polluted from the exhaust of the thousands of vehicles that people parked there. Traces of the past use are embedded in the very earth here. The blank screen still commands one’s gaze from the field; something kinetic seems imminent there.

In front of the Drive-In is the outstanding although likely not original marquee, a concoction of red and yellow aluminum, neon tubing and the traditional white letter-board space. C. Bendsen Company of Decatur, Illinois made this marquee. The marquee. The marquee frames the words “French Village” in a three-color palate (green, yellow, blue) with accompanying paintbrush. This sign is imaginative — the subtle palate motif rather than an obvious Eiffel Tower image — and shows that the East Side’s aspirations have always been as grand and as accomplished as those of St. Louis. This drive-in is finer than almost any other that has stood in the St. Louis area. Certainly, its architecture proclaims a confident optimism that has been betrayed, however momentarily, by current events.

In the meantime, the French Village Drive-In awaits some future greater than that of body repository. It is owned by a Fairview Heights church that may seek to build a new church on its ground, but it will likely stand for years to come. Perhaps it may even reopen, beating the forces of history that led to its unbecoming and horrific misuse.

From a nearby hillside, one can catch a view that includes the barren theater grounds as well as the Gateway Arch. The French Village Drive-In came into this view first, before anyone would have predicted that anything much more modern could come along.

More information

  • Drive-Ins.com
  • The Web Yard
  • Cinema Treasures

    • A version of this article appeared under the same title in the Fall 2005 issue of the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, Missouri Valley Chapter.

    Categories
    East St. Louis, Illinois

    Parsons Field: Even Teenagers Needed a Place to Play

    by Thomas Petraitas

    The seating stand at Parsons Field, August 2003. Photograph by Michael R. Allen.

    Parsons Field in East St. Louis, Illinois is familiar to virtually everyone who grew up in East St. Louis between 1930 and 1990, as well as to thousands of others in St. Louis and southern Illinois who went there to compete with the city’s powerful high school sports teams.

    Owned by the East St. Louis School District, Parsons Field was the home stadium for football and track events for both East St. Louis Senior High School and Lincoln Senior High School. Olympic gold medal winner Jackie Joyner-Kersee reportedly trained there. Assumption Catholic High School also played its home football games at Parsons Field until it built its own field on its campus. Since Assumption was an all-male school, St. Teresa Academy provided cheerleaders.

    When you consider the different public and Catholic leagues that these schools played in, as well as the inter-school rivalries, you get a picture of the thousands of teenagers from all over the metropolitan area who visited Parsons Field to meet new friends and to cheer their teams.

    Those were fun times. The East St. Louis Senior High School (aka “East Side”) players were known as the “Flyers”, a name chosen to represent the pioneering role the East St. Louis area played in development of the aviation industry. Parks Air College and airport, then located in nearby Cahokia and now part of St. Louis University, was the first federally approved aviation college in America. The Assumption High School kids were known as the “Pioneers” and were taught to avoid conformity while seeking new frontiers. There was a great deal of bravado at each of the area high schools.

    Before television became an obsession, the high schools held their famous Thanksgiving Day football game between East Side and its rival public school Belleville High School West. This was a big, exciting game held every other year at Parsons Field. It’s actually hard to believe that parents let their kids leave the house on Thanksgiving Day, but many of the parents came along. It was a tradition to actually go to football games long before everyone started spending Thanksgiving Day watching football games on television.

    The ticket house at Parsons Field, August 2003. Photograph by Michael R. Allen.

    There were other big rivalries at Parsons Field. Assumption and East Side had an annual game, but were ill-matched. East Side was three or four times the size of Assumption and had more money, better facilities, and a bigger pool of players. On those rare occasions when Assumption triumphed, it was a really big deal. When Assumption beat East Side in 1960, the students were actually given a day off from school to celebrate. Assumption also had a big rivalry with Althoff Catholic High School in Belleville, and played other Catholic schools from St. Louis and southern Illinois as well.

    One of the City’s Many Playgrounds

    I only recently learned that Parsons Field may once have been considered part of Jones Park. Although Parsons Field is located just west of the park, it never occurred to me that they may have once been a single entity.

    Jones Park was an incredible 130 acre park where all the kids and teenagers and their parents spent countless hours. No comparable sized city in America (under 100,000 population) had a larger park. Its list of amenities is impressive: It had a big cement grandstand overlooking Ball Diamond #1, a running track, a public swimming pool, tennis courts, huge picnic areas with tables, a large brick bandstand pavilion/boathouse, huge lagoons for boating and fishing, several softball diamonds, several baseball diamonds, a formal rose garden, statues, a fountain with a nightly colored light display, gardens, public restrooms, a war memorial, concession stands, and lots of places to just relax. There were as many as 400 park benches scattered around the park.

    In 1932, East St. Louis completed Lake Park, another huge city park, after 28 years of planning and at a cost of $5 million. It was the third largest municipal park in the nation (after Central Park in New York and Forest Park in St. Louis). Unfortunately, it was too expensive to maintain so it was sold to the state of Illinois for $1 and renamed Grand Marais. Today it is known as Frank Holten State Park.

    Memories

    Besides football games, Parsons Field was used for other gatherings. I particularly remember a big Cub Scout Pow-Wow I participated in around 1960.

    All the Cub Scout Packs in the city prepared for months for our big pow-wow. We studied about Indians, learned dance steps, prepared crafts, and made costumes. The Indian costumes were simple to make. We wore tight swim trunks with felt flaps in the front and rear decorated with felt cut outs and beads. We made arm bands out of flat Mason jar lids to which we glued feathers and beads. The decorated lid was secured to our bicep by an elastic band. We also wore headbands with feathers, face paint, moccasins, and even made Indian necklaces out of wallpaper beads. We really felt like we were Indians.

    Some Boy Scouts helped us, too. They were the “chiefs” and wore extravagant feather headdresses. They built tepees on the field made out of clothes poles and blankets. My brother was one of the Boy Scouts who helped at the pow-wow, but he denies that it ever happened. We spent the entire day on the field at Parsons Field playing games, dancing, and putting on quite a show.

    Another fond memory is of the visit by the Three Stooges to Parsons Field on a Saturday in the early 1960’s. There was a kid’s parade and then we all walked onto the field following the Stooges who were on a flat trailer being pulled by a car (like a float without the flowers). The Stooges were never very wealthy during their lifetimes and were pretty much “has-beens” by 1960, but we loved them. They gave a nice show and we had a great time. Who knew that they would become cultural icons and that they would still be on television almost fifty years later? In fact, they are on television right now as I write this.

    Not all the memories of Parsons Field are happy ones. In the late 1960’s I remember a game between Assumption and East Side that almost turned into a riot. Since both schools shared the same stadium, they alternated years in which either school was the “home” team. The home team, of course, sat in the grandstand instead of in the bleachers and provided the band which had a specific place in the grandstand in which to locate its instruments.

    During one game when Assumption was the “home” team, the East-Siders decided that they didn’t want the white kids in “their grandstand” and forced the band and the early arrivals to vacate. Since it was very difficult to set up a band in the bleachers, no one knew what to do. As more kids arrived and learned of the hostilities, tempers began to flare and violence seemed to be a real possibility. Adults began to arrive and called the police as the two schools were getting ready to rumble. It was the ugliest high school football game I ever attended. It is probably why Assumption decided to abandon Parsons Field and build its own stadium.

    East St. Louis High School Histories

    (Information below compiled primarily from East St. Louis, Illinois Year-By-Year Illustrated History, by Bill Nunes, 1998)

    East St Louis Senior High: In 1865 the School Board opened an Upper School in the basement of St. Patrick Church. In 1872, the first East St. Louis High School opened in a wooden building at 5th and St. Louis Ave. In 1888, the high school moved to the third floor of the Baptist Howe Institute at Tenth and College. After the cyclone of 1896 destroyed the Howe Institute, the city built Rock High School at 9th and Summit. In 1917, a new high school opened at 10th and Ohio. In 1958, a new $4.5 million building opened at 4901 North State. Its new athletic stadium (replacing Parsons Field) opened there in 1991. The school today has an enrollment of nearly 2000 students.

    Lincoln Senior High School opened as Lincoln School (for African-Americans) in 1886 at 6th and St. Louis in East St. Louis. It was named after Abraham Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Known for many years as Lincoln Polytech, it centered on teaching the practical skills advocated by Booker T. Washington. These skills included plastering, masonry, piano tuning, electricity, orchestra, band, cooking, sewing, carpentry, and plumbing. A new Lincoln School was built at 11th and Broadway in 1905. In 1947, East St. Louis elementary schools became some of the first in the nation to integrate. In 1949, a new Lincoln High School opened at 12th and Bond Ave. In 1950, ten students transferred from Lincoln to East Side to officially integrate the high schools. Lincoln Senior High School merged with East St. Louis Senior High School in 1998.

    Assumption (Catholic Boys) High School was founded in 1929 as Central Catholic High School at Wabasha and St. Clair Ave. in East St. Louis. It moved to 6th and State Streets in 1931. In 1953, it moved to a modern building at Kingshighway and St. Clair Ave. and changed its name to Assumption High School. Heidemann Field (football) opened on its campus sometime after 1970 . The school became co-ed in 1974 and closed in 1989. Its campus was purchased by the State of Illinois and, after major renovations, re-opened as Southwestern Illinois Correctional Center (a state prison) in 1995.

    St. Teresa (Catholic Girls) Academy opened in 1894 as an elementary boarding school for Catholic girls and developed into a four year secondary school during the late 1920’s. It offered college prep courses but was also much like a “finishing school” with outstanding art and drama departments. Located at 25th and Ridge Ave., it closed in 1974.

    Althoff High School at 5401 West Main Street in Belleville opened in 1964 as a replacement for the Cathedral High School for boys. The new school changed its name to Althoff and admitted girls from certain parishes and then became fully coed in 1967. When the Academy of Notre Dame girls high school in Belleville closed in 1972 due to damage caused by ground subsistence, the girls transferred to Althoff. When Assumption High School closed in 1989, 45 of its students transferred to Althoff.

    Thomas Petraitas is the author of Growing Up Lithuanian in East St. Louis.  Contact him at servicecop@sbcglobal.net.

    Categories
    Demolition Eminent Domain Gate District

    Peerless Restaurant Supply Building

    by Michael R. Allen

    In these days of biological terrorism and digital warfare, money is rapidly flowing from the United States government and private donors into all sorts of research into biological weaponry. St. Louis University is participating in this boom by constructing a new Level-4 biolab right at the bustling intersection of Grand Avenue and Choteau Avenue. Well, okay, not exactly right on Grand. The ten-story laboratory will sit behind a carefully-groomed sea of bollards and barriers, dubbed by the deceivers and the deceived as a “plaza.” The building’s relationship to its city environment will be as detached as that of the average American researcher from the human “collateral damage” of the latest “smart” war.

    The central corridor in particular has been besieged by such buildings until there literally is no sense of place left on most street corners. Sadly, even major intersections — would-be locations for great visual interest — have been spoiled by the occupying forces of visual cleanliness. The demolition of nearly the entire central corridor, a plan began with the horrible Mill Creek Valley clearance of the 1950’s, continues despite the supposedly greater understanding of urban design on the part of our city planners. In place of a dense and connected series of commercial strips and flats has risen a disconnected and uninspired grouping of institutional and corporate mexa-complexes, cheaply-built suburban-style housing, fast-food outlets and surface parking.

    One thing that is nearly extinct in much of the central city is the small business. The new vision for this area enforces a strict use segregation outside of the residential portions (Central West End, Downtown, Midtown). City planners don’t want to see an errant diner or locksmith alongside their gleaming hospital towers and biolabs.

    The St. Louis University biolab will occupy ground that the University has already cleared over the years — except for that one remaining small business, Peerless Restaurant Supply at 1124 S. Grand Boulevard. Peerless has occupied its modest, two-story commercial building since 1974 and has brought in some foot traffic to the ailing neighborhood around Grand and Chouteau. Not anymore. After a protracted legal fight against SLU’s use of eminent domain, Peerless has reached a settlement with SLU and is vacating its fine building. The building will be gone by year’s end, and the neighborhood will lose one of its last remaining small businesses.

    Peerless Restaurant Supply will be relocating to St. Louis County, which often is the beneficiary of relocation from the city’s central corridor.

    At least the graceful Arts-and-Crafts style buildings of the Pevely Dairy complex still stand at Grand and Choteau, saved by their compatible single use. As things stand, their preservation is essential to providing any visual beauty to one of the city’s busiest intersection. The biolab’s tendencies will be a powerful sight requiring a mighty antidote like the Pevely complex.

    Categories
    Downtown Parking Streets

    Downtown Parking

    by Margie Newman (Special to Ecology of Absence)

    In downtown St. Louis, employees of the convention hotel and SBC find that parking at meters along 10th Street all day is preferable to parking in the garages. I watch them feeding the meters as they expire; yesterday, one of the hotel workers explained, as he was changing dollars for quarters at Breve, that it’s cheaper than the garage.

    His choice is rational, but bad for retail businesses, like our art gallery, which need the meter spots to turn over. Of course, the real problem is that the city’s parking enforcement currently does not include enforcing the two-hour limit posted on the meters.

    Inquiries to our alderman and to the parking czar, Larry Williams, over the past few months have resulted in no change to this failure to enforce, though I did get a call from a city PR consultant, explaining that they don’t enforce it because the tickets get thrown out in court. Huh?

    Such lame responses to basic, obvious needs — needs addressed long ago in other places that are functioning and growing — quite simply wear me out. Taking the time to point out such obvious issues to reluctant-to-change city officials is an endless and exasperating job. The early entrepreneurs in a revitalizing retail district bear enough risk as it is; asking us to shoulder this sort of foolishness
    is asking too much.

    Too often, I feel like the first soldiers on the beach at Normandy. When we get shredded by the shrapnel, maybe they’ll figure out some of these basic operational issues, so the next wave will survive longer.

    Margie Newman is co-owner of Gallery Urbis Orbis at 417 N. 10th Street and a downtown resident.

    Categories
    Century Building Demolition Downtown

    Unsafe Stay Away

    Photographs by Eric Seelig

    October 2004.

    Before the demolition.