Forward, Into The Past
The 1888 book Commercial And Architectural St. Louis was both city travelogue and advertisement for its many commercial enterprises. It contains some intriguing drawings of Lafayette Park from the late 1880s. Consider that these images pre-date the Great Cyclone of 1896. That cataclysm wrecked much of the neighborhood and everything in the park but the statues and Park House.
Continue reading “1888: Views Of Lafayette Park”
Next time you walk around Lafayette Square, have a look at some of the brickscape. You’ll see many St. Louis companies represented in its paving bricks.
Then consider the houses’ exterior walls – today’s facing brick is an aesthetic compromise designed to lend a historic look, rather than supportive strength. Our early buildings were brickfests by comparison. The cross-section pictured below (from 2020) was of a decrepit building corner at the foot of 18th at Chouteau. Brick is solid stuff, and its sheer volume in use is a testament to the affordability of something locally mass-produced.
Beyond St. Louis, when you touch an early 20th-century red brick building in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or Dallas you may again be close to the clay once beneath St. Louis. Bricks produced here shipped by rail everywhere. The strength and distinctive terracotta hue of St Louis brick made it a ubiquitous material for prestigious civic construction.
The export of St. Louis brick is sometimes involuntary. St. Louis City in 2017 had nearly 25,000 vacant or abandoned properties.¹ As the city loses population and other cities grow and thrive, a black market craves high quality low-cost brick. This is often wrested from abandoned buildings in the city. Turn of the century housing falls victim to wholesale “brick rustling” in North St. Louis.
Setting fire to an isolated structure is one ploy to ease the task of brick thievery. When the fire department battles the blaze, cold water hits hot walls, popping brick mortar and making the whole structure prone to collapse. Later, a cable strung between windows and tied to a truck pulls down the wall. Soon, the bricks may be heading down the interstate to Texas or Louisiana.
The loss of back walls from abandoned homes is prevalent on the north side. Enough so that the remains of such a structure are known locally as a “doll house”.
Lafayette Square has lost its fair share of significant brick structures. From left to right below, the Sheble/Bixby house, Nicholson estate and Barlow Mansion come to mind. While enjoying the old-time craftsmanship and solidity of our remaining original homes, an appreciation of brick is certainly integral to it.
The historic homes of the Square form a backdrop that gets into one’s bloodstream. If it’s not romantic, why do the wedding parties line up each year for their pictures in the park? Today it’s difficult to see the years of sustained effort expended in bringing the grand houses, and Lafayette Square itself, back from the brink of ruin. The city nearly wrote off this neighborhood in the late 1940s. A St. Louis Plan Commisson plat map labeled the area “Slum D”. The commission slated much of the area for destruction. This to make way for proposed state highway 755, the North-South Distributor. As close as it got after a contentious quarter century was the creation of Truman Parkway.
The area is magical, and its survival hung in the balance for decades. If it seems like a preservation miracle, I encourage you to take a pilgrimage there any time of year. And enjoy your look at all that brickwork!
I recommend this article for a deeper look at the importance of brick to St. Louis, and a good discussion of brick theft. It also makes reference to an excellent documentary, Brick – By Chance And Fortune. The Story of Brick in St. Louis, filmed by St. Louis’s own Bill Streeter. You can stream this 2011 feature from Amazon.
1.) Riverfront Times – January, 2018
99 Percent Invisible podcast – a truly worthwhile source of the unexpected in design and architecture. exchange.prx.org
Part one of this three part essay is here: http://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1849-like-a-ton-of-bricks-part-1/
Part two is here: http://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1872-like-a-ton-of-bricks-part-2/
A small smorgasbord of St. Louis paving and firebricks appears at the top of this website, or click here: https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/the-bricks-of-lafayette-square/
What follows is a subset of a well-researched history of St. Louis city street names. Every name tells a story, and the byways of Lafayette Square are no exception. Please note my appreciation at the bottom, as a lot of good work went into this compilation.
(E-W) and (N-S) refer to direction each street runs.
If you check out the featured image, you’ll note that the most prominent building remaining from the old City Hospital complex is now known as the Georgian Condominiums (white arrow.) Behind that was the old Malcolm Bliss Hospital, shown with the red arrow.
Simple requests sometimes lead to weird tales from the past in the Lafayette Square neighborhood. Here is a recent case in point.
While trying to research both 1300 and 1302 South 18th Street, I found an 1899 newspaper article about the homeowner at 1300.
Continue reading “1899: Petty Crime With Petty Change”In 1983, Gar Allen and Larry Bennett bought what remained of a home at 1815 Lafayette Avenue. The three story shell dated from 1876 and was originally built by Christian Staehlin of the Phoenix Brewery. That brewery was razed in the mid-1960’s while I-44 was under construction. The house itself had a large sub-basement, formerly a tunnel from the brewery, that Allen and Bennett would have turned into a wine cellar, but for the dampness.
Continue reading “1815: The Handwriting On The Wall”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.
If John Albury Bryan was the father of the restoration of Lafayette Square, it might be fair to ask who the mother was. The answer is most likely Ruth Kamphoefner, and rightly so. However, there were movers before Ruth moved to the Square in 1972. Consider the fascinating lady that lived about 100 feet from Bryan on Benton Place. She died eight weeks before him, and the passing of these two must have resonated in the neighborhood. Let’s take a time trip back and look in on Henrietta “Retta” Strantz Reed.
Continue reading “1960: Retta Reed – ‘Mayor’ Of Benton Place”
A 1938 Post-Dispatch obituary noted the death of Christian J. Zeitinger – inventor, promotor and hydraulic engineer. He was 73 years old and died from “the infirmities of age.” It recalled his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court, the result of financial scheming in the development of a gravity flour mill invention.
In 1946, Retta Reed, who lived for years at 35 Benton Place in Lafayette Square, bought and razed the abandoned house across from hers. Curious about 40 Benton Place, I began an expedition backward through the newspapers.
