1935: Just Past Noon at the Junction

A City Struggling To Recover

People can’t go around in a funk forever; they adapt and persevere. And so it was in St. Louis. Mayor Bernard Dickmann took office in 1933 and became a spark plug for the city. In 1934, he coordinated the serving of Christmas dinner to nearly 50,000 St Louisans, and repeated it for four consecutive years. He managed to get a $7.5 million bond issue past the city alderman. Its express purpose was to finance the clearing of 486 buildings from the riverfront. This was slated to become an undefined monument to Thomas Jefferson. In the event, it took until 1939 to demolish the first building. Construction of the memorial didn’t begin for another twenty years. Downtown, the Municipal (then Kiel, now Stifel) Auditorium, the new US Courthouse, and Soldiers Memorial were all built primarily to provide work.

Picking A Spot To Portray A Time By

It was a time when downtown was the place to be, with its daytime lock on the bankers, merchants and clerical workers of the city. Before the interstates carved up the area and allowed a quick commute, and bypass of urban areas, the city streets teemed with pedestrians, streetcars, buses and autos. 

A particularly popular spot was where Highways 50, 60, and 66 all came together, at the corner of 12th and Chestnut Streets. There is a great photo of a summer day in 1935, at 12:08pm. Have a look.

Summertime, as the two men standing with their backs to us at the Tasty Corner are in white short sleeved shirts. White shirts in the summer were so ubitquitous that it led to the name ‘bleachers’ being given to the outfield seats at baseball games.  

So much that is St Louis to absorb here. Let’s start at that corner. The Tasty Corner was a popular working lunch spot that opened early that same summer.  

Perhaps in an effort to improve the national disposition, Congress repealed Prohibition in 1933. It may be a result of the ensuing enthusiasm that Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935. A gin rickey is 2 ounces of gin, half a lime’s worth of juice, and soda. 15 cents seems pretty reasonable, though 5 cents would buy you a beer. 

Being a Beer Town

For beer, you only have to look to the photo for a recommendation. The Columbia Brewery was located in St Louis Place. Alpen Brau was its flagship beer, competing in the newly vibrant post-prohibition beer market. 

The tie in wasn’t so much the Alps themselves, as the Tyrolean Gardens of the 1904 Worlds Fair, a delightful recreation of a cold place in a hot town.  

Columbia established its brewery at 20th and Madison Streets in 1891. With prohibition it became part of the IBC consortium, making root beer and near beer.

Sell You a Car?

Note the handy clock in the photo; it’s an old advertising trick. A premium could be charged for this billboard as peoples’ eyes would look up for the time, and come away with a subliminal thought about the youthful and stylish 1935 Ford V-8 two-door Cabriolet. 

She was a beauty in her day. A lot of passersby were needed to at least consider this purchase, as it wasn’t exactly utilitarian, and these were hard times.

On this day, a sand blizzard blotted out the sun from northwestern Oklahoma to Amarillo, Texas. A prolonged dry windy period displaced 300 million tons of prairie topsoil and uprooted thousands of migrants in a search for refuge out West.  

Heart of the Shopping District

There are also two large department stores represented in the photo. Looking north on 12th Street (long before there was a Mayor Tucker to cause a name change to the street), you first spot the Trade In furniture store of Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, popularly known as Vandervoort’s. 

Vandervoort’s competed with Stix, Baer and Fuller for the high end consumer, but that wasn’t as high as it might have been in better times. Almost all the stores had to be creative with promotions to convince folks not to use an old item through another lean year. So trade-in’s and the resulting sales of both new and used items became commonplace. This location of Vandy’s was a place dedicated to furniture, regardless of vintage. 

The promo above is a come-on to have your character analyzed by the Mechanical Brain on the 7th floor, but also to closely fact check the ad for deliberate but subtle errors, in return for a store credit. Like with the clock above the Ford billboard, close inspection might plant the thought of a living room set in ones mind, which could probably be explained later on the 7th floor of Vandervoort’s.

Vandervoort’s dated back to 1850, with its flagship in the Syndicate Trust Building at 10th and Olive from 1907 until being shuttered in 1969. 

A block further north is the Union-May-Stern department store.  

 

Again, “odd davenettes” and phonographs from $1.00 testify to the tough times for retailing in the Great Depression.

The Well Dressed City Worker

Not that folks in the city weren’t interested in fashion. In fact, we look downright slouchy today, compared to what city office workers dressed like in 1935. They followed the example set in hit movies, like 1934’s The Thin Man. Here are examples from 1935:

Square shoulders, mid to long length skirts and low heels. It was a serious and buttoned up time, when contrasted with the free wheeling late 1920’s.  

Nine months before Sinatra’s appearance on the Bowes radio show, in Tupelo, Mississippi, a baby was stillborn, but his twin lived and went on to become Elvis Presley.

Some Other Noteworthy Scoops

Will Rogers and Wiley Post died in a plane crash in 1935, while Amelia Earhart became famous by flying solo from Hawaii to New York the same year. In Cincinnati, the first night baseball game was played between the Reds and Phillies. The average wage for anyone fortunate enough to find steady employment, was $1,600 per year. The average new house cost a little more than twice that. 

Things change. St Louis went through a period when it demolished almost its entire central corridor. The people who lived there were relocated west and north of downtown. The corridor then sat empty and mostly undeveloped for decades. It was a massive error in retrospect, and it’s proven nearly impossible for St. Louis to quit the association of land clearance with civic improvement. 

Here is the same view as the picture, taken recently from Tucker at Chestnut Street and looking north:

The smoke is gone, but so much of the interaction on a busy street is missing, when held up against the same view in that summer of 1935.