18th Street at Chouteau has a rich history of causing traffic flow issues. Due to a quirk in the layout, there was nearly always a sharp jog (or dogleg) to the west as one headed south, then 18th Street continued as Second Carondolet. It was this way as far back as 1875, as shown in the Compton and Dry pictorial map:
Along with 12th (or Tucker) and 14th Streets, these were the main roads in and out of downtown as car and truck traffic developed in the 1920s.
By 1930, former mayor Henry W. Kiel headed the Public Service Commission, with some hard decisions to make. Automobiles were already starting to crowd out public transportation in St. Louis, and the Commission was financially bankrupt. Kiel had to close down less productive lines in order to boost those that were still essential for moving people. In part, he targeted his own neighborhood, Lafayette Square, and recommended removal of both 18th Street and Mississippi Avenue spurs.
This lead directly to some redesign, which was caught by the lens of Charles Clement Holt for the St. Louis Streets and Sewers Department. In a summer morning in 1930, he took a snapshot of work then underway at 18th Street and Chouteau Avenue. In it, he captured many other stories of the time. It’s not a scenic photo, but a working one, so let’s work it….
I’ve marked up Holt’s photograph, and each number tells a story.
1) The St. Louis Casket Company
At 1821 Chouteau, the St. Louis Casket Company was subject of an earlier essay on this blog: https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1916-a-coffin-king-for-governor/. It occupied the six-story former Paul Brown (plug) Tobacco Company factory building in 1902. The casket company was run by Frederick Gardner, who went on to become Missouri governor. Note the shutters on the windows, open to the fresh air and morning sun.
2) Fire Escape
A fire escape is a reassuring thing to see on the side of a multi-story building, unless you’re in a crime film from the 1940s. In that case, you never knew who might be running up and down them. The ability to get from the roof down a ladder to the fire escape was intended to convey safety, but might have cowed the timid. Often counterweights would ease the final section to the sidewalk or alley for a safe landing, but it looks like a hang drop would have been required here. The helical fire escape on the St. Louis Casket Company was an interesting variation on a theme. I’d give them style points, but don’t know what the landing was like.
3) Rubber Tires and Rubber Soles
Here’s a Ford Model T with its distinctive hickory spoked wheels. A man with shirt sleeves rolled up in deference to the St. Louis summer stands with one foot on the running board as he chats up the driver. A sign next to the passenger side of the car advertises “Shoe Doctor Good Repair” with a notice above it for “Shoe Shine.” Whatever brought in a customer with six bits in this, the first full year of the Great Depression, was good advertising.
4) Out for a Jog
As mentioned, there’s always been the jog in 18th Street where it meets Chouteau Avenue. This bothered civic planners, and many ideas over time were proposed to straighten it. There was only a single lane in each direction for busy 18th Street through Lafayette Square, but streetcar tracks still took up the brick center of the road. This was from a discontinued part of the Peoples Railway line. Despite the apparent work on 18th Street in this photo, the tracks remained until 1934, when Henry Kiel, receiver for the bankrupt Public Service Commission, officially abandoned them. This order also closed out the spur that served Mississippi Avenue between Park and Lafayette Avenues. You couldn’t accuse the former mayor of favoritism, as both lines fell within his own Lafayette Square neighborhood. He lived at 1625 Missouri Avenue all his adult life. Another essay in this series features Mayor Kiel. https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/?s=Henry+Kiel
5) The Bread Wagon
The Bond Bread truck is parked while making a delivery to the Louis Market across the street. People will eat almost anything but moldy stale bread. It was difficult for any bakery to consolidate enough locations to create a national network for fresh bread. The first to do it was the Continental Baking Company, maker of Wonder Bread. At that time, its largest competitor was home baked bread.
By 1930, The General Baking Company of New York merged its way into 50 plants serving cities in 18 states. It was the best selling bread in the US, producing over 1.5 million loaves per day. Its flagship product was Bond Bread, endorsed by Hopalong Cassidy, Amelia Earhart, and Jackie Robinson.
As an aside, the expression “greatest thing since sliced bread” has Missouri roots. Sliced bread was first commercially offered by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, MO back in 1928. It used a mechanical slicer invented by Iowa jeweler Otto Rohwedder.
The Chillicothe Constitution Tribune in 1928 noted that, although pre-sliced bread might startle some people, the typical housewife could expect,“a thrill of pleasure upon first seeing a loaf with each slice “the exact size of its fellows.”
6) When Folks Had Change in Their Pockets
A lot going above. At the very left is a common sign indicating the presence of a public telephone. These were money makers for the Bell System. In 1930, a local call cost a nickel, and the average phone had a fixed mouthpiece and wired earpiece. Only 41% of American homes had telephones at the time. Bucking the usual adoption curve, and thanks to the Depression, ownership fell 4% by 1940. Pay phones were a necessity. They hit their peak in 1995 with 2 million operating in the US, but now number around 100,000. We are the last generation that might ever have used one.
The ramshackle structure itself may be for sale. Immediately to the right of the bell sign is one advertising the availability of this fine location, courtesy of Joseph F. Dickmann and Co. It says,“Buy Here, Make Money.”
Joseph F. Dickmann, Jr was a real estate investor like his father, and brother of future mayor Bernard Dickmann. He was also judge for the Court of Criminal Correction in St. Louis. In November,1936, as he listened to the radio reporting his election to the Circuit Court, he was stricken by a heart attack and died.
His brother served as mayor of St. Louis from 1933 through 1941. Bernard was most notable for clearing 40 square blocks of riverfront for the eventual Jefferson Expansion Memorial (today’s Gateway Arch) and for a landmark city smoke ordinance, covered in another in this series of essays: https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1934-john-a-bryan-on-clearing-the-air/
In the background, along with the crude exhaust pipe indicating a wood-burning stove, a sign invites newsboys to “Sell The Post-Dispatch.” It features the offerings of this humble shack – “Cigars, Tobacco, Candy, Etc.” with “Newspapers” as a sort of footnote. The paint was all probably a decade or more old by 1930.This was a last vestige of an older wooden town giving way to its all brick and stone future. The wood burning stove in a wooden shack full of newspapers doesn’t seem like a sensible idea today.
7) Crackers, Valentines and Child Labor
Back across Chouteau Avenue to the 1811 building due east of the casket company. It’s the old FJ Schleicher Paper Box Company. Here’s a better view of their sign, via another of Holt’s photographs from the same year.
This business began in 1904, specializing in “small containers of fancy design.” It manufactured high grade candy boxes, and specifically, the heart-shaped red foil boxes so popular for Valentine’s Day.
While looking for references to Schleicher, I realized that the later shortage of men during WWII caused newspaper ads to specifically target women. White women, as if they could be so picky in that time…
Indeed, the history says employers weren’t picky at all, as long as employees were cheap and compliant. National child labor laws weren’t put in place until 1938, and it’s a sad tale that when the St. Louis Cracker Company factory next door collapsed in the tornado of 1896, “twenty-seven girls and boys were crushed to death…buried under a mass of bricks and timber forty feet deep.”
There isn’t a lot of background on the St. Louis Cracker Company of 1813 Chouteau Avenue, other than what surrounded the 1896 disaster. These little ads did pop up in the newspapers of 1896.
The cracker trade in this part of the city was big and controlled by a local trust. It’s documented in an earlier essay on this blog: https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1902-the-cracker-castle/ The site became part of a Casket Company building expansion in 1902
8) A Second Photo For A Deeper Dive
This two story building was home to Lindsley’s Lending Library at 1819 Chouteau Avenue. The sign as it appears on the photo gives way to a better version in another shot taken down Chouteau from 18th Street. Not much to reveal about Lindsley or his library, but it may have been a way to get readers with little money to at least come in and buy an ice cream cone. Note the helical fire escape on the front of the St. Louis Casket Company.
Here’s the second photo I’ve pulled some detail from, essentially from the same time period. It’s looking west down Chouteau, from in front of the paper box company:
Long known as a truck route for US Highway 40 and Missouri Highway 50, Chouteau Avenue was also part of an original (optional) southern alignment of Route 66, from 1926 through 1932. It followed the MacArthur Bridge across the Mississippi River, and wound through the city to Gravois, Chippewa and Watson. This was designated City 66.
The engraved stone on Lindsley’s Lending Library credits Herman Haeussler as owner of the building in 1892. He was a lawyer who spent 47 years with the Missouri bar, and is buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery. The architect was Theodore Rapp, also responsible for a now defunct block of homes on Montgomery Street where the NGA is building its new headquarters. Not inspired architecture, but progress doesn’t much care what gets in its way.
9) Then and Now
The best part of digging into an old photo is finding the traces of what remains.
Above and on the left, virtually untouched by the last nine decades, is 1800 Chouteau. Today, it’s home to Pastel Devil Studio, and is holding up very well. In 1884, it was site of the chamber set (think pre-toilet chamber pot days – it was said that a rich man had a canopy over his bed and a poor man had a can o’ pee under his bed) factory of J. Schumacher and Co. In 1893, Emil Delacasa’s Grand Palace Garden “served refreshments and lunches in first class style.” In 1905, the Griesedieck Brother’s National Brewery (18th Street at Gratiot) ran it as a “first class saloon, lodge hall and rooms. It was a grocery for many years; from the 1930 – 1970 as Louis Grocery and through the early 1970s as Renards Market.The upper levels have been residential as far back as 1885.
In 2004, Tom and Merry Dahms set about restoring the building, with a retail space below and two apartments above. It seems recent, but when the city finally closed off 18th Street at Chouteau in 1986, enforcing that closure with the once ubitquitous “Schoemehl Pots,” the future of the space was entirely uncertain. Here’s a photo of an 18th Street dog leg turn from the late 1980s:
Two years later, the area across Chouteau, once occupied by St. Louis Casket Company and its neighbors, were cleared for construction of the new Union Electric (now Ameren) headquarters.
Lafayette Square Holds its Own
By 1987, the traffic formerly borne by 18th Street had moved over to Dolman Street. The rerouting affected 1,900 cars per day of Union Electric traffic. Vernon Cochran of UE called it a “mishmash of lanes without signals.” Said he, “ I wouldn’t want my wife driving through either. You see people staggering around Dolman at all hours.”
Alderman Marit Clark of MacKay Place, an invested resident and former president of the neighborhood organization, expressed little sympathy. “They are afraid of the rough-looking neighborhood; they have to see poor people, people drinking, people who may urinate in front of you. Well, I’m sorry but that’s life. It is a little inconvenient, and things are going to get better. These people are a bunch of crybabies.”
Less than a year later, the Board of Aldermen approved a $2.8 million bill for creation of a road to connect downtown with the interstates. The sponsor was Clark’s successor, Phyllis Young.
The city routed traffic away from 18th Street when Truman Parkway replaced Grattan Street in 2004. It was a boon for cars and trucks, with only two signals along its length. But as Urban Review STL observed in 2006, the absence of trees and the unimpeded thoroughfare “almost guarantees that no one uses the walkways along Truman Parkway.”
Here is a photo from July 2000 showing the area just east of 18th Street on Chouteau; more barriers, a stoplight to nowhere, and 1800 Chouteau boarded up.
A 2001 TIF was put to work in 2004 to clear and landscape the area above into a small east-west green space and parking lot. This was assurance enough that government folks couldn’t change course again and put 18th Street back into play. Within the last decade, Dolman Street has heavily infilled with new homes of historic design, and 18th Street is a highly walkable stretch closed at either end of Lafayette Square.
That also ended any talk of a North-South Connector from downtown to I-44 and 55. The short stretch of the parkway goes from just south of Union Station to points of entry for I-55 south and I-44 west.
A Personal Plea For Aesthetics
Speaking of infrastructure, in the original photo, it also looks like the new electric lighting going in was either the first lighting on this street, or replacing earlier gas lighting. Either way, the granitoid posts and graceful fixtures represented a modern look for the day. It would be a wonderful thing if Lafayette Park could someday get its ‘cobra head’ lighting replaced by historic replicas, like Compton Hill Reservoir Park recently received.
Epilogue
A funny thing is that, on Truman Parkway, a remnant of the original dog leg turn persists at Chouteau. Oh, it now bends to the right instead of the left, and is a sweep instead of two 90 degree zags, but stubbornly continues to resist straightening:
So there you have it; Subsequent street closures at Whittemore, Mackay and Albion Places, Rutger, Dolman, Carroll and Hickory Streets effectively insulate Lafayette Square from the traffic flow of urban St. Louis. If it retards the development of more commerce, well, there’s a QuikTrip at Chouteau and Jefferson that I’d wager would have had tougher sledding to approval at Chouteau and 18th Street.
Thanks to research sources:
Mayor Dickmann detail from https://dynamic.stlouis-mo.gov/history/peopledetail.cfm?Master_ID=983 and death of his brother from St. Louis Globe-Democrat of November 5,1936.
The original photo of 18th Street and Chouteau Avenue is from St Louis Public Library: https://cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/lemen/id/1422/rec/134
The view of Chouteau looking west is also from the St Louis Public Library: https://cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/lemen/id/1647
Trying to follow highway naming and alignments through St. Louis is a fool’s errand. Nonetheless, this fool found some good guidance from Joe Sonderman’s book Route 66 in St. Louis (Images of America; Arcadia Publishing; 2008)
Telephone ownership numbers from Statista, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-with-telephones-in-the-united-states-since-1920/
Source for information on fatalities from 1896 tornado at St. Louis Cracker Company was “Disaster at the Cracker Factory;” St. Joe Weekly Herald; June 4, 1896. Photo from “The Great Tornado At St. Louis;” 1896; LF Hammer, Jr.
A source for information on Bond Bread was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_Bread
St. Louis map with dogleg Chouteau makes at 18th Street from Rand McNally; 1963.
The want ads for working girls are from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1943.
Marit Clark interview highlights from Christine Bertelson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Approval of work creating Truman Parkway from Karen Koman of the St.Louis Post-Dispatch; June 7,1987.
Thanks to Wardwell Buckner for photo of 18th Street at Chouteau in 1987, and Doug McDaniel for photo of Chouteau looking east in 2000.
Review of Truman Parkway by “Steve;” July 7 1986; https://www.urbanreviewstl.com/?s=Truman+Parkway
Mike,
Every picture certainly does tell a story. We’ll done!
I, too, resist straightening.
Dan
“Every picture tells a story, don’t it!”
Thanks, Mike.
Keep turning over stones, brother. Stuff we didn’t know. Stuff it’s cool to know.
Great! The photos and narrative are really interesting!
I love reading about St. Louis history!
Do you have any information on the Waltke Company? Invented Lava soap. Thanks so much!
Sent to you directly under separate cover.