July 10, 1931. The Great Depression was in its second full year. Nationwide unemployment stood at 16% (it would rise to 25% by the end of 1932), and year over year growth constricted by 8.5%. Even the news seemed slow that Friday. The afternoon’s Post-Dispatch noted Secretary of State Stimpson, concluding disarmament talks with Italian dictator Mussolini. The German Reichsbank, reeling from its efforts to pay postwar debts and struggling to remain solvent, sought an international loan of $400,000,000 from the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the Federal Reserve Bank and World Bank.
The birth of staring at the tube
US Vice President Charles Curtis appears either engrossed in, or perplexed by the “electrical scanning device” before him. This was long before The West Wing premiered, so he could be excused for lack of familiarity. Then again, if you’d been the owner of a new Apple II in 1983, you might have looked a lot like Charles Curtis, staring into the face of an unwritten future.
Hard times and fast crimes
A bank robber was killed in mid-holdup in Tennessee, while Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde (left), and Baby Face Nelson all ran loose through the Midwest. A witness to a St. Louis saloon brawl killing died by drowning, a day before testifying. A New York City graft suspect, due to testify in another case, threw himself in front of a subway, and died with the subpoena in his pocket.
How ’bout them Cardinals
At Sportsman’s Park, Jessie “Pop” Haines shut out the Cinncinati Reds for six innings and the “Fordham Flash,” Frankie Frisch went 2 for 3 as the Cardinals won 2-1 before a crowd of 23,000. Frisch made the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947, and the Fordham University Athletics Hall of Fame 23 years later. Tough school…
Going places by Autogyro
Nicola Tesla celebrated his 75th birthday. The AP observed him still hard at work, on “a power of great strength from a source he is not yet ready to divulge.” This was not atomic energy, as Tesla claimed to have smashed atoms many times while measuring no “appreciable release of energy.”
In the photograph above, an autogyro whisks Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut from Capitol Plaza to his golf club in a brisk eleven minutes. Two years later, the character King Wesley makes a conspicuous entrance to a wedding party in the terrific movie, It Happened One Night. Wesley makes it look pretty easy to pilot in his tie and tails. Could this be the future? Nah, it was just a cinematic escape from the overriding reality of unemployment and soup kitchens.
What’s with the 3 pound cans of malt syrup?
Malt sales, not much of a commercial factor today, remained brisk, as prohibition still had two years to run before being repealed in 1933. Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Pabst, Coors and Yuengling, among many others engaged in selling malt and yeast. There was little specific value, beyond a constant claim of “good health” ascribed to these products, It is known that both are vital to producing home brew. Hobbyist brewers and vintners abounded in those days.
A specific scene from Lafayette Square
July 10, 1932 presented a mild weather day for mid-summer in St. Louis. The temperature in the city reached a pleasant 85 degrees at 2 pm.
This photograph was taken that afternoon by an employee of the St. Louis Streets and Sewers Department. He was engaged in a multi-year task, led by Charles Clement Holt, to photograph city infrastructure. The project coincidentally documented much about people’s lives in the early part of the 20th century. Holt’s crew wound up taking over 6,000 photos, of which about 300 remain. One features Park Avenue looking west from the middle of the Lafayette Square business district. It is a high-resolution shot, and rewards close viewing. This essay goes into some of the detail that can be teased from the scene. (The original is HERE.) Here are several examples for your consideration.
The trace of the artist
The first noteworthy thing is the accidental self-reference in the photo. On the right side closest to the viewer, both doors of a car from the City of St. Louis General Service are ajar. This is because the occupant opened his door, got the heavy wooden camera from the back seat, and set up to take the photo as youngsters on the sidewalk look on.
A detail with a fan tail
Directly across the sidewalk are parked two cars, each of which has, instead of a hood ornament, a motometer. This was a simple invention, part radiator cap and part thermometer. The car nearest the viewer, the one with the Hollywood “eyelids,” has a conventional Ford Boyce motometer, common on Ford Model A’s. The winged creature had a thermometer on the backside that a driver could view to determine whether his radiator was nearing a boil over. The car next to it has a more stylish peacock version of the same product, as seen in these photos:
Bonham’s in Los Angeles recently auctioned a motometer in excellent condition for $1,375.00. By the late 1980’s, radiator caps had become non-functional hood ornaments, but those signifying status brands like Mercedes and Cadillac were often stolen. Manufacturers eventually did away with them, but collectors remain fascinated. This blog boasts an incredible retrospective of ornaments from various car manufacturers: http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/08/hood-ornament-identifiaction-guide.html
A strange interlude
In the background of the cars is a wooden partition with a handbill announcing the Mary Hart presentation of Strange Interlude. This was a stage melodrama from playwright Eugene O’Neill. It consisted of nine acts, and ran a full five hours. First opening on Broadway in January 1928, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama that year. One review observed the play to be “filled with illicit sex and stream of consciousness monologues.” An hour long intermission at the midpoint of the performance allowed patrons time for dinner. For the curious, MGM turned a heavily abridged version into a 1932 film, starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer.
Built in 1917, St. Louis’s Orpheum Theater offered vaudeville shows until sold to Warner Bros in 1930. It then became a movie theater, and did well in that capacity until the 1960s. Two decades later, the Orpheum was restored as the American Theater, and hosted stage shows and concerts. Later sold to the Roberts Brothers, a Chicago group acquired it in 2012, and further news is scarce.
Reminders of tough times
In the window closest to the Strange Interlude handbill, you’ll see a __IM HOLINESS MISSION. Enlarging it reveals a note about “services.” Scatttered food riots occurred in the US during 1931, and New York City recorded 95 cases of death by starvation. Using a “captive audience,” like the New Life Evangelistic Center employed for years, people down on their luck (quite a bit of urban America, actually) could eat for free if they first sat through a religious service. This speaks to the nature of the Square in 1931. It was a far cry from its prosperity back in the 1880s.
Similarly, the repair shop banner you see further down that side of the street speaks to the fact that our “disposable society” wasn’t even a concept in the early 1930s. Anything that could be reused or fixed, was. This led to a glimmer of employment for people who understood electricity, or mending, or the reselling of used odds and ends. No pawn shop in sight here, but the Great Depression was the beginning of pawn as a mass form of lending. People would hock their goods in hopes of doing better as a result of the money. A further hope was that a good break would enable them to reclaim their stuff. It seldom worked that way, as people are optimistic by nature. The Depression lasted until global war at the end of the 1930s stimulated the US economy out of it.
The Bell system
If you look just beyond the “Repair Shop” banner, you’ll see a telephone logo on a white background. This points to the relative scarcity of phones in 1931. Many things are becoming hard to recall, with all our cell phones do today. Once, we needed paper calendars, wrist watches, notepads, newspapers, radios, maps, cameras, flashlights, and photo albums. Many current users rarely use their iPhone as a phone, preferring IM, or text, or a post to social media as primary communication. Note what you’re doing now, for instance.
In 1931, phones were hard-wired to a building, and if you needed one, signs on certain businesses, indicated the presence of a device capable of local or long distance calls.
St. Louis never wanted for shoes
Across Park Avenue sit a pair of shoe stores. In the background, the Red Goose Shoe Company represented a St. Louis firm begun way back in 1868 as Gieseke-D’Oench-Hayes. Gieseke is German for goose, so the name, used since 1906, was easy to translate and much easier to remember. Kids received a golden egg with a shoe purchase. It held a small prize and functioned as a piggy bank.
In 1911, Roberts, Johnson and Rand merged with Peters Shoe Company to form International Shoe Company. The Peters Diamond Brand shoe store is in the foreground. This brand dated back to 1898, and was used well into the 1940s.
Note how they co-opted the Weatherbird reference from the popular Post-Dispatch front page cartoon. That the Red Goose and Peters outlets were separated only by a couple of buildings must’ve made for interesting competition. Peters won, as International Shoe eventually absorbed Red Goose You can find more Lafayette Square shoe history HERE.
Trying to beat the July heat in St. Louis
The window ledge air conditioner was invented in 1931. Those who probably needed it most found themselves excluded by the sheer price of them: a large unit cost between $10,000 and $50,000 then. They wouldn’t become widely affordable until the 1950s. Until then, you’ll note that every business on the North side of Park Avenue sported awnings. They were essential for keeping the summer sun from making business inhospitable. You’ll also see no such need on the shady south side. These were practical considerations.
The last days of knee pants
See the kids on the cooler south side of the street? Note the boy on the right. Knickers, or knee pants were still worn by boys in the middle of the country then. Loose fitting short pants gathered at the knee were big in the English speaking world until after World War I. The style began in the US, and was adopted by the British in the 1860s. A custom was that a boy at puberty upgraded his wardrobe from knee pants or knickers to regular trousers.
The word came from “knickerbocker,” created by Washington Irving in his History of New York in 1831. It became a term for New Yorkers of Dutch descent, and was applied in 1842 to the earliest organized base ball team in the nation, The New York Knickerbockers. There was eventually a Knickerbocker beer, a gossip columnist named Cholly Knickerbocker, and the fashionable Knickerbocker Club in New York City. In 1946, the New York Knicks NBA basketball team was formed.
Knickers became an athletic style among mountain climbers, skiers, fencers, cyclers and golfers. You still can find the occasional golfer, like Ricky Fowler, here in the 2014 US Open, driving the ball in his knickers. The baseball uniform has migrated from knickers to the long socks you still see today, covering the distance from ankle to knee.
However, in British slang, knickers are synonymous with women’s underwear, so don’t be confused.
West toward the corner
Nearing the corner of Park and Mississippi Avenues, there was a bakery where Polite Society serves up a delightful osso bucco today. Bakery items need to be fresh, so in the days before chemical preservatives, there was a bakery in almost every residential neighborhood.
1937 Park Avenue sits at the corner of Mississippi Avenue. It was long the site of a pharmacy, and will be the subject of an essay to follow.
In the far distance across Mississippi Avenue is 2001 Park Avenue, a long time dining establishment. It was a candy store in the early 1930s. (See earlier essay on the building HERE.) The next two houses, 2007 and 2009 Park Avenue, like the building on the corner, date back to at least 1876. In the early years of the 20th century, they served as maternity clinic and hospital, as well as the residence of celebrated obstetrician CC Vanderbeck. By 1931, 2011 and 2007 Park became McLaughlin’s residence and funeral home, respectively. Here’s another look at 2011, 2007, (the late) 2003, and 2001 Park Avenue in 1925:
The street lighting of 1931 was attractive, even if it was inefficient. What we would call historic lighting today was then consistent with the times. Good looking granitoid columns led to a pleasingly Victorian gas lamp look. With regular incandescent light bulbs, they shone a yellowish glow a short distance. The city recently reintroduced this classic look at the Compton Hill Water Tower Park. Even in an LED world, these look terrific:
Roofline ornamentation
Despite holding down the shady side of the street, pretty much the entire scene in view of the south side of Park Avenue is now gone. By contrast, the sunny north side remains largely intact. This double building, still at 1915 and 1917 Park Avenue, lost its double topper. Today these ornamental rooflines are again being added; a nice nod to history in the Lafayette Square neighborhood.
The view of Park Avenue on the left (below) is 90 years old. To the right is the same view today. Yes, Park Avenue was considerably widened, and double-headed historic lighting added, in the early 1980s.
Epilogue
A joy in finding an old photo of a current place is how it provides a sense of connection over time. It’s both odd and familiar, like the ghost of some long-gone distant relative. Lafayette Square is a historic neighborhood, and people reflexively point to either the 1880’s, when the Square was in its heyday, or the late 1960’s, when the brave bohemians began restoring the neighborhood. It’s more difficult to fill in the gaps that give any clear view of the area over the years in between. That’s why a snapshot in time captures so much. We could take a snapshot right now, as a favor to whomever chooses to reside here 90 years from now. It always pays to look around and notice what you can.
Credits
The photo this essay was based on is courtesy of the St. Louis Library Digital Collection, which has many others worthy of study. They were rescued by river enthusiast and historian Dick Lemen. He collected and compiled many of the original negatives from the Streets and Sewers project: https://cdm17210.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/lemen/search. In the 1980s he donated photos based on the negatives to the Mercantile Library. As a result, many of them are available for view at the UMSL Digital Library: https://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu/umsl/islandora/object/umsl%3A12422?display=grid
Thoughts on Charles Clement Holt – NPR St Louis The Takeaway Aug 2 2017 Kelly Moffitt https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2017-08-02/salvaged-photographs-from-the-st-louis-street-department-circa-1900-1930-catalogued-in-new-book
An exhaustive index of Knickerbocker references is provided at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knickerbocker. Makes it seem not so obscure, just lost in time.
Much of the background for discussion of “Strange Interlude” is from theatermania.com of Oct 22 2017” https://www.theatermania.com/off-off-broadway/reviews/strange-interlude_82844.html and Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Interlude
Red Goose Shoe backstory from the American Treasure Tour Museum at http://americantreasuretour.com/blog/red-goose-shoes-friday-july-31-2015
A sense of how the Great Depression progressed over time can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Great_Depression
Again, wonderful detail and brilliant narrative. intended to just glance at it and come back to it but stayed with it to the end. Then of course I had to read about 2001 Park.
Many thanks, Bro. Jones
I have a friend who moved to Park Avenue and would like to get her a book for Christmas about the history or photos of Park Avenue/Lafayette Park area. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Outside of making sure your friend subscribes to my email essay posts, I might recommend Al Montesi’s book. Lots of photos and enough text to hold it together. Here’s a link to the Abes Books listing. I highly recommend Abes if you’re searching for a better on-line bookstore. (Click Here)