Forward, Into The Past
For starters, you won’t find the house and I can’t find a photo. How then to write about the Pulsifers? Probing a more obscure part of Lafayette Square history, it’s instructive in what it touches. Let me draw you a word picture.
In the summer of 2016 a road crew working on Lafayette Avenue in front of Lafayette Park exposed a pair of iron streetcar rails. On request, they set them aside, and they lay near Lafayette and Missouri for several weeks. Unable to reach any consensus for display, the neighborhood may have lost track of them, but it set me to wondering…
At the time of the 1904 Worlds Fair, St. Louis had one of the most extensive surface transportation networks in the country. Small wonder that a trolley became a stage for the 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis.
Continue reading “1889: A Streetcar History of Lafayette Square”
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:
Continue reading “1930: The Dogleg Corner of Lafayette Square”
A marker sits on the ground near the Kennett Street entrance to Lafayette Park. It looks like a headstone – concrete chipped by decades of reckless mowing; brass long ago gone green with age. “Creative Play Area” is inscribed on the plaque, and it’s a puzzle, as it overlooks a blank stretch of grass and a large shallow concrete dish. Yep, you’d have to be creative indeed to see it as a special play area. But it didn’t always look this way. The simple marker memorializes a playground once installed here, as well as the man behind it
Continue reading “1956: The First Lafayette Park Playground”
Stephen D. Barlow was a pioneer; the first to develop land directly opposite Lafayette Park to the east. He was born in Vermont in 1816 and first came to St. Louis in 1839.
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.
Continue reading “1931: Strange Interlude on Park Avenue”
The Lafayette Park Conservancy is a group dedicated to the preservation and improvement of the heart of Lafayette Square. In 2007, it set about restoring its 22 foot tall monument to Thomas Hart Benton. 2008 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of its creator, Harriet Hosmer, and the 140th year of the statue in the park. Therefore, a program was devised to coincide those anniversaries with the unveiling of a thoroughly refreshed Benton in the park.
St. Louis was simultaneously blessed for growth and cursed for livability by its proximity to the rich bituminous coal deposits of Southern Illinois. It made for cheap power, which allowed energy intensive industries like brick works and steel makers to thrive here. Most residents followed suit (or is it soot?) and burned coal to heat their homes. The smoke from soft coal hung heavy in the air of St. Louis every winter, dimming the daylight and causing respiratory issues. City efforts at smoke abatement through legislation reached back to the late 1860s, but the power of the coal business and low cost for home use kept it a perceived necessary evil.
Continue reading “1934: John A Bryan on Clearing The Air”St. Louisans love stories about baseball, beer and Germans. Here’s all three, in part 2 of the Schnaider saga.
Part 1 lafayettesquarearchives.com/1881-schnaiders-beer-empire-part-1/ featured Joseph Schnaider and the origins of Schnaider’s Garden in Lafayette Square. In 1887, residents of Benton Place raised the 30-foot limestone wall you see on the 2100 block of Hickory Street. It was a fortification, insulating the prosperous and reclusive above from the hustle and flow of Schnaider’s below. Note the cinderblock-filled doorway in the wall that servants from Benton Place homes used to access the shops along Hickory and Chouteau.
Continue reading “1887: Schnaider’s Beer Empire Part 2”
Joseph Schnaider (1832-1881) was a man with beer in his DNA. Born in the Baden area of what is now Germany, young Joseph was already working as a brewers apprentice at the age of 15. He became foreman of a large brewery in Strasburg three years later. Attracted by the published charms of America, and seized by a travel bug, he toured France and then headed across the Atlantic. He somehow wound up in the friendly Germanic confines of St. Louis.
