A convenient feature of living in Lafayette Square is that you can easily access different interstate highways. From the Square, one can head to who-knows-where within a couple of minutes. To hit I-44 west, about 200 feet from the on-ramp to I-55 south, turn immediately at the corner of 18th Street and Lafayette Avenue. You most likely know the spot:
The building at 1800 Lafayette Avenue that currently houses Care Solutions was a turn-of-the-century drug store. It boasts an original iron storefront, and a cool history. This was an active spot, as 18th Street was through to traffic. Ed’s Auto Service once closed off Dolman from intersecting with Lafayette. Ed’s met the wrecking ball in preparation for State Highway 755, aka the North South Distributor. This failed project also explains why the on-ramps for 44 and 55 lie so near each other.
A pharmacy for nearly a century
The first record I could find for the 1800 Lafayette structure was a 1904 mention in The Pharmaceutical Era magazine. It noted that Lafayette Pharmacy Company had incorporated with a capital of $5000.00 at this address. Pharmacist Harry Stiegemeyer (1871 – 1931) purchased it from Philip Koch.
A magazine from January 1898 mentions how young Harry,“the popular clerk at Crawley’s Pharmacy” had gone “up the river on a ten day’s vacation.” Crawley’s was at 2201 Carr Street, north of downtown. Owing to the distance, Harry may not have had any existing trade when he started up his own store. Regardless, he made a go of it, and prospered in his new Lafayette Square location. Harry was successful enough to manage a second venture, the Boyle Street Pharmacy at 4198 Manchester Road, from 1926 to 1930.
Stiegemeyer owned and operated his Lafayette store for 21 years. He then sold the business as a going concern to Mr’s Butler and Boettner, who renamed it the B&B Pharmacy. A fairly well-connected Mason, Harry went on to a management position at Laclede Trust Company. He died in 1931, and is buried in Zion Cemetery.
The pharmacy traded hands again fairly soon, as G.H. Boettner filed for bankruptcy the following year, claiming debts of $24,674, and assets of $560.
Neighborhood turns rough
A 1933 article from the Post-Dispatch related how the next manager, James A. Link, was robbed by two masked bandits. Another man entered the store just as the robbers turned to leave, and was shot and killed. For Link, it was a deja-vu of misfortune. He had been robbed at an earlier location on Morganford Road in 1927. That store went bankrupt in 1930, and Link relocated to the Lafayette Avenue site.
Link had witnessed enough of the risk he was taking in the retail trade. The store with all its goods went on auction through Selkirk later that year. Pharmacist Edward Sturgis bought it and carried on from there. The interior must have been impressive with its 65 foot wall case and soda fountain.
The building’s run of bad luck continued in 1934, as a fire broke out on the unoccupied third floor. The rumor was that it started in a pile of rubbish. A man and his wife living on the second floor escaped without assistance. Estimated damage to the structure was $1,900, or about $28,000 in today’s dollars.
Forging ahead to 1953, the building, true to its roots, was now Irwin Kreisman’s Drug Store. A gang of petty thieves centered its operations in the Bohemian Hill area, just southeast of 18th Street. Known as the Salvation Army gang, or the reform gang, they had once persuaded a judge to grant them leniency. This, by claiming they had seen the light and joined the Salvation Army. They even procured uniforms. The gang then used their garb as a way to earn the confidence of others, who they fleeced or outright robbed.
The Iken years
The neighborhood was indeed becoming a rough place, and Kreisman soon sold his pharmacy business to Joseph Iken. In 1955, a pair of robbers brandishing pistols held up Iken. They made him open the safe, then lie on the floor. The duo made off with $1.400. Armed robbers also afflicted the store and Iken in 1960. This time it was at the point of a sawed-off shotgun. He was held up yet again in 1961.
On July 5,1967, a 60-year old former convict pulled a ski mask over his face, drew a gun, and proceeded to rob the store. Joe Iken gave a signal to his clerk, who ran next door to Simon Kozloff’s shop (Barry’s Variety Store; 1804 Lafayette Avenue) to sound an alarm. Kozloff stood on the street yelling for help, and the crook, alert to the commotion, fled out a back door. Kozloff and Billy Moore, a 16-year old local boy, gave chase north on 18th Street to an alley. The man turned and fired wildly at his pursuers. Two other men came from a tavern and helped corner the robber in the alley. He then shot and killed himself.
Joseph Iken was a decorated veteran of World War II and president of the Missouri Jewish War Veterans. He continued to stick it out at the pharmacy, despite the odds.
Lafayette Square’s other apocethary
The only other drug store in Lafayette Square in 1967 was the Park Avenue Pharmacy at 1937 Park Avenue (Now Frontenac Cleaners). It was then in the process of closing shop. This enterprise was owned by a well-liked local pharmacist, Herbert Brueckmann. The Post-Dispatch headlined its demise as “The End Of An Era.” Olivia Skinner wrote at length about the former elegance and subsequent decline of the neighborhood. She noted that in the preceding two decades, the Lafayette Park area diminished by more than a quarter of its residents. U.S. census stats showed that by 1960 the four tracts surrounding the park lost 13,669 of its 1950 figure of 35,327. Many of the former mansions, turned to boarding houses, were now empty shells.
At the time of its closure, the building at Park and Mississippi Avenues retained a physician that practiced for 35 years on the second floor, and an insurance agent on the third. All three grew up in the neighborhood, and held an unofficial wake for their businesses, as Skinner listened in. Herbert Brueckmann worked at Park Avenue Pharmacy since he was nine years old. He began by working two days a week. Pay was 25 cents and a scoop of ice cream per day. Brueckmann added that he was happy to do it, as “there was always someone waiting outside to take your job.”
“Last year a man from the government offered me a $5,000 loan to fix up the place – new paint, new linoleum, all kinds of things. I told him it wouldn’t do any good at all unless he could put more people on the streets.”
The doctor interjected that he’d seen ten drug stores close in a twenty year span. He said, “if Herb can’t make it, nobody can.” Herbert reminisced that the store used to deliver until 11 p.m. “People would drop by after supper for soda and just to buy things. We had a bustling soda fountain business too. We made our own ice cream; before air conditioning. In the summer of 1945, we sold 2,700 gallons.”
They don’t make ’em like this anymore
The insurance man recalled that hurt kids used to stop into the pharmacy instead of going home. Herbert would wash a wound, bandage it, and give the child a piece of candy. “He gave change and made phone calls for people who couldn’t read the directory. For people who couldn’t write, he’d address birthday cards, and even write letters. People would hand him a nickel, a card or piece of paper and a pen and say, ‘You write it’. And he did.”
All three agreed that the real change came with World War II. People from ‘the country’ took defense jobs, and then sent for all their relatives. They noted that civil rights legislation opened neighborhoods to demographic changes, causing residents to relocate to “Arnold and Lemay.”
They also blamed the automobile. A trend to drive farther continued through the rest of the century. People now drove to a newer and larger supermarket that sold “groceries and drugs and toilet paper – whatever you needed.” “I have to buy a dozen cans of hair spray at $1.50 apiece, but the supermarket price is $0.89. Then the ice cream trucks drive by and take that business too.”
Herbert never missed a day’s work, although he gave all credit to the assistance of “my wonderful wife. Without her help I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did. There were times I should have stayed at home.” Raising five children, the two always felt they needed the income.
A neighborhood in decline
The writer contrasted these wistful memories with Herbert’s recollection of a drive he took, to canvass the area. The homes he saw were hollowing out from the river to Jefferson Avenue and from Chouteau to Geyer. The empty houses convinced him there was no point in remaining. Her description of Lafayette Park itself is forlorn:
“the sunny green park surrounded by solid mansard mansions reminds the visitor of a bravely smiling dowager fallen on evil days and badly in need of dental work. Many houses are vacant, with broken windows and boarded doors. Others have been pulled down. Passersby risk turned ankles on missing section of brick sidewalks. Back yards are piled high with broken washing machines, rusty bed springs, rags and old automobiles. Lines of laundry flap in the wind.”
Herbert added, “ Twenty people at a time used to get off the streetcar at the corner here. Many would come into the store. Now most people are off the streets by dark. They’re afraid to be out, and I wouldn’t dare send a delivery boy.”
The insurance agent said. “Herb would help you out. I used to come in here and get a soda, shoot the breeze with Herb, and pick up money that my clients would leave for me.”
As the character of the neighborhood changed, Herbert became more careful of the business he accepted. Realizing that some of his customers were addicts, he grew cautious about sales of paregoric and airplane glue. There were more calls from poisoning cases, and he would give advice on how to induce vomiting. He would advise a caller to get the person to City Hospital.
And with the decline, there were more fights on the corner. Shoplifting became a problem. Youngsters tried to jimmy the telephone coin box outside the store.
The doctor said, “the police used to play checkers with the old men in the park. Now they’re never still. They have their hands full with juvenile delinquents and winos.” There were three break-in attempts in 1965. The store still bore the scars at the transom in the back, the ceiling, and the front door. Breuckmann did, however, consider himself lucky that he had avoided the hold-up events that others suffered.
His wife then showed up, beaming, and rejoiced that her husband was going to take a new role as pharmacist for St Luke’s Hospital. “He’s worked 75 or 80 hours a week here,” she said. “Now Herb can come home and be a husband and father to us, just us, and not to this whole neighborhood.”
Joe Iken wraps up the Square drug trade
This left Joe Iken at 1800 Lafayette Avenue waging the last stand of the neighborhood pharmacy in Lafayette Square. He allied himself with Rexall, and was still very much in business when the above ad appeared in the Lafayette Square Marquis in 1983. Joe advertised that he collected utility payments, saving folks the cost of postage. He was a notary and could test t.v. tubes.
Iken witnessed a certain amount of rebirth in the neighborhood, and held out for a long time. As the community trended more upscale, 1800 Lafayette had, by 1997, become the Bark Avenue Grooming Shop. It was the first home of St. Louis City’s Stray Rescue.
Echoes of the past still persist around the Square – the telltale ghost sign above reflects a time when drug stores were the commercial hubs of a neighborhood. Turn onto the I-44 ramp, take a quick look up and give a nod to Harry Stiegemeyer. He may have been the dean of Lafayette Square pharmacists. Today’s corner drug stores have given way to chain box concepts like CVS and Walgreens. They carry a soup-to-nuts range of products, but try to get someone there to write a card for you!
Resources
Various St Louis Post Dispatch and St. Louis Star And Times stories; especially Lafayette Square At End Of Era by Olivia Skinner in the July 9th 1967 Post Dispatch. How appropriate, as 1969 marked the birth of the next era with the formation of the Lafayette Square Restoration Committee, now in its 50th year.
The Pharmaceutical Era Volume 31 p 97; D.O. Haynes and Co. New York; 1904
Various Goulds directories, courtesy of Mercantile Library
The National Register via DNR.MO.GOV
National Association of Retail Druggists (NARD) Journal Volume 37: 1923
Meyer Brothers Druggist; St Louis; Vol XIX; 1898
An essay that takes place within 100 feet of Joseph Rexall tells the story of the giant red sculpture bisecting the I-44 and I-55 ramps:https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/2008-whats-a-treemonisha/
Photo of Joe Iken by Judy Taylor for the Lafayette Square Marquis; Fall, 1981.
This was so interesting! I should see if the pharmacist in our building is willing to help the nurses with wound care (I work at a college health center). My dad worked at a soda fountain as a teenager and lived withing walking distance (went to McKinley High). I wonder if it was in one of these places!
this was terrific!
I liked most the part where the neighborhood kids would go to the pharmacy with their bruises and bloodied knees instead of going home. Ha!