1970: The No Tell Hotel Of Lafayette Square

The corner of Lafayette and Missouri Avenues shares the multi-address feature of the Sheble-Bixby house at Mississippi and Lafayette. It contains 2166 Lafayette Avenue, and 1700 and 1706 Missouri Avenue. While a single mansion, it was once the residential estate of local physician Dr Joseph Spiegelhalter and his six children. It was later the Missouri Hotel.

Yet another Lafayette Square German

 He was one of the restlessly busy Germans common to South St. Louis, engaged in the Liederkranz singing society and Mercantile Trust Company. Speigelhalter somehow found time to act as president for both the Missouri Crematory Association and St Louis Swimming School. He died at home in 1909, following a long illness. Dr Spiegelhalter had practiced medicine from Lafayette Avenue for half a century.

The building itself

The imposing house he left behind is an example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. This style was at peak popularity when the mansion went up in the late 1880s. Other examples from the same period are found nearby at 2126 Lafayette, and 1605 and 1525 Missouri Avenue. The influence dates back to 11th and 12th century Roman architecture found in southern Europe. It’s a clear departure from the earlier French Second Empire style of 1870s homes in Lafayette Square.

The photo above is from William Swekosky in the early 1940s. The estate sold in 1918 and by  the 1930s, 2166 Lafayette had become a boarding house. The corner entrance below the turret was a delicatessen. A barber shop lay around that corner – a barber pole stands out on the sidewalk. Note the competing signs for Coca-Cola and Cleo Cola. There’s a story here. 

Cleo Cola

Sylvester Jones leaned on his nickname when he formed the Vess Soda Company in 1916. His flagship brand was Whistle orange soda, launched in 1925. When the Depression set in, the company ran into financial straits and sold to Donald Schneeberger. The new owner was a marketing whiz, and supposedly named a new drink after his favorite cigars, Antonio Y Cleopatra. Cleo Cola was born.

 The soda business was competitive, and the extra boost of caffeine proved a winner in wartime. Cola went everywhere with the armed forces and was as eagerly consumed in factories and farms. The market got contentious enough that Coca-Cola sued Cleo Cola for patent infringement in 1944. Winning the lawsuit, it forced Cleo into an early retirement. Vess carried on as the “billion bubble beverage.”

Checking into the Missouri Hotel

2166 Lafayette Avenue sat impassively as this stuff transpired.  It had its own issues to deal with. By the 1930s it became the Missouri Hotel, a long term boarding house. By the 1950s it had fallen into a fairly disreputable regard. There are newspaper accounts of robbers and counterfeiters getting caught with the goods there. Lack of citations raise doubts about the Missouri as a full-fledged bordello, but it almost certainly served as a house of assignation.

The Missouri Hotel was a place where short term carnal interludes were accommodated. The sheer weight of stories from neighborhood veterans of the 1970s about the streetwalkers and cruising johns is compelling. That short stretch of Missouri Avenue was becoming, de facto, a leafier version of Washington Boulevard’s Stroll. One story features neighborhood leader Dennis Mertz, photographing license plates,. He used his legal skills to identify the car owners; then sent post cards notifying the guilty of their recognition within the neighborhood. 

The curious beat reporter’s story

In 1986, Post-Dispatch columnist Elaine Viets, with her ear always tuned to the heartbeat of the South Side, weighed in with an article about the end of the “House”. She was intrigued by the opportunity to tour the Missouri Hotel. It had recently converted to condominiums and was available to visit as part of the Lafayette Square Holiday Parlor Tour. 

Viets interviewed the new owner of the building, Bob Kraiberg, who told of a neon sign out front, used as a “vacancy/no vacancy” indicator. He tried to retain the sign, but occasionally someone would drift in and inquire about the hourly rate. He finally removed the sign to discourage this kind of association. Asked if he would rather have yuppies or prostitutes, Kraiberg coolly replied that yuppies wouldn’t ring the bell after midnight. 

The new ownership did trade in the building’s unsavory legacy. It listed the newly created seven apartments as the opportunity to “live in a legend.” It converted to condo in 2006, and so it remains today. 

Beauty is only skin deep

Reputation is one thing, of course, and appearance is another. If you again reference the photo of 2166 Lafayette above, you might initially fail to recognize it today. It underwent a major face lift in the early 1950s.

Permastone is an affront to historical architecture. A glopped on process first patented in 1929, it became a fad for updating or unifying the look of brick structures. Baltimore, weirdly analogous in many ways to St. Louis, was particularly beset with a wave of facade cover-ups. Film Director John Waters called Permastone “the polyester of brick” and made a documentary of its history. His co-producer mused about adding Permastone to her father’s gravestone to lend that kitschy Baltimore look. It’s now prohibited from application on St. Louis landmarks, but there are a couple of notable Permastone examples among the limestone and brick facades in the Square. We live with our mistakes, same as our successes. 

Deliberately mistaken identity?

There are still those who cling to the unsubstantiated folklore of a full fledged red light house at 2166 Lafayette Avenue. Anecdotally, there were 30 ‘cribs,’ each with a sink. All were removed from the building when it was rehabbed.

 They may have been ginning up a buyer’s interest in the bungalow, but one never knows. Marjorie Main might have been a winking reference to an actress of the same name. That Ms. Main starred in 10 Ma and Pa Kettle movies in the 1940s and 50s. The Kettles had 15 kids, which would have nicely filled the Missouri Hotel. Then again, Marjorie Main went on to be fairly type cast as a classic boarding house owner. This, from the Globe Democrat in 1946:

Boarding house, burlesque, bordello…it was a furtively racy world back then. We might never be sure of the truth of 2166 Lafayette Avenue, but it does make for great speculating. 

Resources

Paul K. Williams runs an excellent blog called The House History Man. It mostly deals with the interesting architecture of the Washington DC/Baltimore area. His treatment of Permastone and Formstone is well worth the read. http://househistoryman.blogspot.com/2012/02/history-of-formstone-permastone-love-it.html

Obituary for Joseph Spiegelhalter from St Louis Globe-Democrat; June 8,1909, Page 3.

A good primer on Richardsonian Romanesque architecture appears at https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/richardsonian-romanesque-architecture-interiors

Another hotel in Lafayette Square existed further back in time. The story of the Lafayette Park Hotel, which dated back to 1876, appears in my earlier essay, here: http://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1896-end-of-the-lafayette-park-hotel/

For the completist only, a recap of the Coca-Cola vs Cleo Syrup Company lawsuit is on Casetext at https://casetext.com/case/cleo-syrup-corporation-v-coca-cola-co

Elaine Viets article was taken from the St Louis Post-Dispatch of December 11, 1986.

An article worth the review is from the Post-Dispatch of May 1, 1977, entitled “Sin Rears Its Ugly Head As New Problem In Lafayette Square.” It blames county residents for the uptick in prostitution, and contains some sensational accounts from the St. Louis Metro Police Vice Squad. The LSRC met and took exception to the article, calling prostitution “more a nuisance than a problem,”  and Elizabeth Cook wrote a letter to the editor on May 23, citing low overall crime and the attractiveness of the Square to potential home buyers. 

A nice recap of Ma and Pa Kettle is at Wikipedia as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_and_Pa_Kettle. Their last feature was “Ma and Pa Kettle in the Ozarks.” That would be one to go out on. 

St Louis historians as a group rely on the Swekosky collection for photographs and house histories. It is an invaluable resource, resident at the Missouri Historical Society. mohist.org