Preservation Research OfficeWe are pleased to join the Landmarks Association of St. Louis and nextSTL in sponsoring a design charrette for the Pevely Dairy plant at Grand and Chouteau. The charrette takes place next Saturday, November 19, from 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. Details appear on the flier here.
Following up on our recap of last week’s Midtown music and architecture tour, here’s a short video by Kevin Belford that makes the case for the importance of the Palladium.
by Michael R. Allen
Last week, St. John Vianney High School demolished the venerable Brownhurst mansion in Kirkwood. The demolition was no surprise, given that the Marianists had set September 9 as the date for a “serious†buyer who would relocate the large house. The terms of the order were not met, although there was a chance for preservation more serious than anyone expected.
Although Brownhurst had sat vacant for 22 years on the Vianney campus, suffering neglect, and although the Marianists pushed a rather difficult demand that any buyer relocate the house, an anonymous philanthropist stepped forward. This person would have given $2 million toward renovation of Brownhurst as a non-profit incubator — a gift that seemed to reconcile the Marianists’ concern that there was no feasible or fundable reuse of the house and the Kirkwood Landmarks Commission’s steadfast efforts to save Brownhurst.
Yet the Marianists rebuffed the offer, and set Brownhurst on a path toward demolition. The Shingle Style house, built in 1890 for Daniel Sidney Brown, is now just a memory to its generations of admirers. Even to the very end, the house showed that demolition was a wasteful and willful act – the solid stone masonry, intact original shingles, porch columns and sash and countless bits of the graceful character of the mansion were defiant reminders of the solid beauty in our midst.
Brownhurst’s architect remains a mystery, according to architectural historian Matthew Bivens, whose research on the house has been extensive. Those who have destroyed the house, on the other hand, are well-known. While their actions are reasonable within the framework of maintenance of the private school campus, the underlying framework deserves scrutiny.
Vianney’s mission is education, not expansion and preservation of protected land. Yet its stewards have placed their real estate ahead of their mission and stewardship of the larger values of their society. Brownhurst was a work of architecture that was of value not just to Kirkwood but to the region. Upon purchase, Vianney ought to have embarked upon a plan to either do right through ownership, or to find a party that could.
Instead, the school invested in the rest of its campus, and let a local landmark decay to a severe point. Then, at the eleventh hour, the school cast aside a generous and impressive offer to allow the community to maintain Brownhurst. Here the school’s mission – education, which includes imparting the traditions of art and history – would suggest that preservation was more important than concerns about the “campus.†After all, a campus is just malleable land, while a beautiful building is a tangible and visible reminder of the potential of the human mind.
Alas, in this day and age, educational institutions seem more intent on amassing and protecting real estate than in ensuring that their missions are enjoined to the values of their communities. Whether Brownhurst “served” Vianney would have been a decent question had Brownhurst been a pole barn, but given the house’s historic and architectural pedigree, utility ought to have been only a secondary consideration. If our region’s institutions subsume great architecture to the myopic logic of use, the preservationist’s task is clear: preventing these works from ever being owned by institutions who judge commitment to community, culture and heritage by the crude standard of momentary utility.
by Michael R. Allen
On Saturday night I sat in the balcony watching some 250 dancers heating up the floor at the Casa Loma Ballroom. Even my two left feet were itchin’ to join the action at this weekend’s Nevermore Jazz Ball and St. Louis Swing Dance Festival, a multi-night, multi-venue extravaganza. Credit goes to two of this town’s most go-getting young people, Christian Frommelt — former PRO intern — and Jenny Shirer, for bringing the scene to our town in a big way.
On Friday, Kevin Belford and I had a small part in the weekend’s festivities as guides for a tour of musical and architectural heritage sites in midtown. Many of our guests were from out of town, so we enjoyed getting to promote neglected aspects of our cultural heritage to them. If St. Louis could tell the stories that Kevin Belford has told in his book Devil at the Confluence and elsewhere, our national image would be much different — and far more compelling to cultural tourism.
We started at the Castle Ballroom, originally opened in 1908 as Cave Hall, and wended our way across the fields of what was Mill Creek Valley. There we chased the ghost flats of musicians as well as the glory days of Laclede Town. Back up to Locust Street, we saw how St. Louis’ music industry lived side-by-side with the rising automobile age in the early part of the twentieth century.
Our tour ended at the Palladium, built in 1913 as a roller rink but most significant as a ball room later known as Club Plantation. While the Castle Ballroom is now on the path to finding a good owner and new life, the Palladium faces the threat of demolition and the interest of the Veterans’ Administration that wishes to expand the Cochran Veterans Hospital to the north.
From Preservation Action
One of the major components of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s restructure plan, Preservation 10X, includes a focus on the identification of and subsequent advocacy for 100 “National Treasures.” These resources are meant to be historic places of national significance, or that raise national preservation issues.
Since this program is going to be a major initiative of the Trust, and many individuals have been providing suggestions as to what the name should be, the Trust has decided “…to use data-driven research to help in making this name decision to give us the best chance for success.” In short — they want input! According to an announcement by President Stephanie Meeks, “…the name needs to be a proper noun (no verbs). It needs to be short and memorable. It needs to convey the importance of these places and signal the commitment of the Trust to their protection. We are asking friends close to the Trust to provide name ideas that we can test in our upcoming research. If you have suggestions, please send them to names@nthp.org by November 23.”
by Michael R. Allen
This is the former Greyhound maintenance building (built around 1950) at the northeast corner of Cass Avenue and Hadley Street, currently being demolished by the Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT). While the building’s loss has been shown on MODOT’s plans for the new bridge landing on Cass Avenue since 2005, the actual demolition could not be more clearly pointless.
For one additional westbound lane of Cass Avenue, an entire building gets taken down — at public expense. This building and another one to its north are in great shape, with brick walls and steel roof trusses. These one-story clear-span buildings would make excellent retail stores (a supermarket in this building would be pretty cool), offices, warehouses or even just garage space. However, MODOT’s allocations are generous enough to remove considerations like wisely using existing resources, or not buying nearly entire city blocks in order to get a 20 foot easement.
Then again, with the loss of the Brecht Butcher Supply Company buildings to the west in 2007, and subsequent demolition of nearly every other building north of Cass Avenue from 14th to 10th streets, the demolition fulfills the eventual clear-cut of the south end of Old North St. Louis. Whether new buildings take the place of the old is uncertain, Crown Mart and scrap yards notwithstanding.
by Michael R. Allen
Last week, St. Louis Place lost one of its few remaining corner commercial buildings to a fire. The vacant three-story building at the southeast corner of 20th and Warren Streets was deteriorating, and had recently shown signs of a failing I-beam over the storefront. Still, the fire and the totality of destruction were startling. This was the end point of a street wall that was largely intact, so the hole is starkly apparent.
The adjacent four-family building survived. Both of these buildings were built circa 1890, and were fairly typical vernacular masonry buildings. The corner building, with its partially mansard-roofed third floor, galvanized cornices, foundry-bought iron columns and chamfered store entrance was not unique to the neighborhood, the north side or the city. Yet in an age when there were dozens of this type of building in this neighborhood, instead of less than a dozen, its fate would not have been noteworthy. Nowadays, its loss inflicts a huge blow to the neighborhood.
The building was included in the 1986 addition to the Clemens House-Columbia Brewery Historic District, a National Register of Historic Places district first listed in 1984 (see the nominations and maps on this page. At the time of listing, most corner buildings of this type in this part of the St. Louis Place neighborhood were already gone.
The corner storefront was located in the Union Addition, laid out by Col. John O’Fallon and other investors in 1850 — five years before this area would become part of the city of St. Louis. Development was slow in the area south of North Market Street, because the city reservoir was drained in 1871 and its ruins not demolished until 1887. That same year, the Visintandines (headquartered in the Visitation Academy at Cass Avenue and 17th Street) subdivided the land between Mullanphy, 17th, Madison and Hogan streets. Upon removal of the reservoir’s earthen walls, and the platting of four new city blocks on its site, development of buildings along 20th Street (then 17th Street) took off. Additionally, the Columbia Brewery broke ground on its impressive new plant at 20th and Madison Streets in 1890. A streetcar line ran along 20th between Cass and North Market Streets in the middle 1890s, making this area more attractive for corner stores and commercial sites.
A historic photograph in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri likely depicts a corner commercial building at the southeast corner of 20th and Montgomery streets just a block north of the now-lost building. While there are differences in details, the configuration of the storefront and the use of painted advertisements is similar. This photograph dates to 1955, when these buildings and their shopkeepers were essential parts of neighborhood life.
By 1997, the Building Division listed the building at 20th and Warren on its vacant buildings list. Owner Lillian Reeves stopped paying property taxes after 2008, meaning that the building would have soon gone to tax auction. Sadly, a chance at a new life for the building was close at hand.
Deb Sheals, Chair of the Public Policy Committee of Missouri Preservation, sent out the following statistics on Missouri’s state historic rehabilitation tax credit program.
Between creation of the program in 1998 and September 2011, the Department of Economic Development measure the following activity directly created by the program:
The Missouri Statewide Preservation Conference is next week in Joplin, but it’s not too late to register. Details and schedule here.
by Michael R. Allen
On Friday I participated in a mobile workshop on the South Grand business district that was part of the annual conference American Planning Association Missouri Chapter. The workshop started with a driving tour from the Chase Park Plaza (conference venue) that included Kingshighway, Southwest Garden, Shaw and Tower Grove Park. After the tour, over lunch at Mojo, participants heard about area history from planner and historian Mark Abbott and the current streetscape project from Rachel Witt of the South Grand Community Improvement District and Mary Grace Lewandowski of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments.
Then the group headed out for a tour of South Grand guided by Andrew, Rachel and myself. While many excellent buildings were included alongside the quickly-nearing-completion improvements to Grand’s sidewalks, the stand-out of the tour was an alley. That is right — the tour ended at the alley between Humphrey and Utah streets west of Grand.
The reason for including the alley, as Andrew Murray eloquently stated, was that it demonstrated very basic principles of sustainability in the built environment. Alleys are instruments of vehicular utility, and their presence in St. Louis is taken for granted. However, many are in rough shape because their paving bricks have been layered with asphalt pavings. City alleys often settle with the bricks, and become uneven and difficult to maintain. Meanwhile, they deflect water onto parking pads, into garages and onto streets.
This alley in Tower Grove South has been returned to sound condition in a way that is both historically and ecologically informed. Alderwoman Jennifer Florida (D-15) and the Streets Department found funds to rebuild the alley by paving it with historic paving bricks, gloriously purple-red and gently chipped through decades of urban life, reclaimed from the alley itself. Set on a new substrate, the bricks are level but also are water permeable. The only deviation from historic conditions is that the design included a concrete perimeter to buffer the paving from existing outbuildings and curbs.
This alley not only is “green” but also reflects its historic character by bringing its original paving material back to the surface. The result is durable and attractive, and maintenance simple. Sustainability need not be a headlong rush into trendy new building technology, when time-proven materials and methods are at hand. Our tour ended by reminding participants that existing infrastructure already embodies today’s planning standards. Modular water-permeable paving? We already did that — one hundred years ago.