Forward, Into The Past
Beginning with William Carr Lane, 48 elected mayors have served the city of St. Louis. The first 45 were men, and the most recent three have been women. Four of the mayors once called Lafayette Square home. They are:
Continue reading “1842-1925: Lafayette Square Mayors”Desiring a more urban experience, we left the suburbs for Lafayette Square in 2013. The area appealed to us as a distinctive and historic slice of St. Louis. A lovely park, small commercial area and extensive architectural preservation made us want to be part of the neighborhood. It holds both city and national historic district status, and a strong commitment from its residents toward preserving its Victorian look and feel.
People visiting Lafayette Square for the first time wander the neighborhood in a sort of reverie, wondering about the times, architects, materials and restoration involved in the century-old brick beauties there.
In conjunction with the City of St. Louis Plan Commission, architectural standards for both new construction and exterior remodeling took effect decades ago. Adherence to them has ensured that a uniquely preserved part of Gilded Age St. Louis has remained intact.
A large lot on the southern edge of the historic district sat idle for years. Its redevelopment began around 2019. Neighborhood meetings were arranged to promote the developer’s vision for a new apartment complex. It would have 120 or so units, and blend into the neighborhood, creating attractive infill and opportunity for residential growth.
As the plans developed, historic codes were challenged and overruled, in the interest of moving the project forward. 2200 Lasalle opened in 2023.
What resulted is more an expression of blasé sameness than any compelling or complimentary architectural statement. Its ‘five over one’ design, with a wood frame superstructure atop a concrete podium, is designed to be more economical to construct than a traditional steel and concrete building.
Not that the economy of construction keeps rents affordable. It faces Chouteau Avenue, a fairly nondescript truck route south of downtown. A rooftop pool, underground garage, pet park and fitness center are features intended to attract young professionals. In May of 2025, Apartments.com cited a city-wide average of $1,300 per month rent for a two bedroom unit. A similar space on the second floor of Lafayette Square’s new apartments currently rents for over $2,200 per month. As of July 14, 2025, 2200 LaSalle was approximately 85% rented.
The five over one style, also known as Fast-Casual Architecture, took hold around 2010. It has since multiplied around St. Louis like Bradford pear trees. Examples now line Forest Park Avenue, and serve as apartments, hotels, retirement communities and even offices like St. Louis’s otherwise stylistically aware Cortex.
In a recent essay, Cory Lefkowitz opined on the juxtaposition of Fast-Casual Architecture on areas of former distinction:
it’s downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of living in interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places, given the thousands of precedents for inspiration… Instead, we’ve copied and pasted to our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh.
The look has become a contemporary architectural cliche, unbroken walls for streetscape, and a numbing redundancy that makes one city’s residential stock indistinguishable from that of another. Even Kirkwood in St. Louis County has embraced the look. It increases city residency, but diminishes the same charm that attracted residents in the first place.
It’s great to have housing, and we need more of it. But we hire large architectural firms to design and build blocks of dull rectilinear boxes, placing them in areas of projected hot demand. It lessens the wonder and attractiveness of nearby areas of genuine interest while adding only rentable space.
I’ve written a lot about the old German House building at the corner of Jefferson and Lafayette Avenues. Despite a strong architectural and historical significance and prime location, it sits unloved, on sale for a song. Because it’s not easy, and because it’s expensive to do, it resists rehab interest, while McUrbanism prospers. The heritage of the neighborhood would only be enhanced by bringing it back. It would be further credit to a fantastic neighborhood in its fifty year restoration. Perhaps we’re missing something in our priorities.
Why Everywhere Looks The Same; Cory Lefkowitz; https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-248940f12c4
The Age Of Average; Alex Murrell; https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average?ref=thebrowser.com&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
St. Louis two bedroom apartment cost average from Apartments.com at https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/saint-louis-mo/
2200 Lasalle at Lafayette Square; marketing piece at https://www.2200lasalle.com
The German House in Lafayette Square is available for sale through CBRE at https://www.cbre.com/properties/properties-for-lease/flexindustrial/details/US-SMPL-85559/2345-lafayette-avenue-st-louis-mo-63104
The most recent historic codes for Lafayette Square (December, 2018) are available at https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/city-laws/upload/legislative//Ordinances/BOAPdf/70926.pdf
For more on the story of German House, you can check my archive to the right for September, 2020. Here’s the first in the series from this blog: https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1928-1942-german-house-the-earliest-years/
Joseph Alfaro was a truck driver during the postwar years in St. Louis. He and his family sublet two rooms of an apartment from another family on Park Avenue. After three years of this arrangement, the landlord decided the house wasn’t safe with four adults and twelve children in four rooms. The Alfaros were asked to leave.
Alfaro quit his job as a truck driver to look full time for another place to live. Now they had neither a paying job nor a home of their own. They sold their furniture to ensure that their children had food, and hit the road. A homeless man is sad to see, but a homeless family of ten is a tragedy in the making. Joseph and his wife had eight children, ages fourteen years to four months, to consider.
Seeing no alternative, and too proud to beg, the family took to camping in Lafayette Park in mid-August, 1947. After their first night in the park, a Third District police officer found them lodging at the nearby Salvation Army, where they slept for a week.
With their allotted time gone, the Alfaros returned to Lafayette Park. The park superintendent offered to take up a collection to help feed them, but Joseph declined, saying he didn’t want money, just a place for his family.
You have to give kids credit. Over a five day park residency they made the best of the situation.
With old comforters their only camping equipment, they played around the park bandstand, in the shadow of Thomas Hart Benton, famous Missouri statesman. “They are all eaten up with mosquitoes, but they do enjoy themselves during the day, wading in the park pond,” said Mrs. Alfaro.
Both the St. Louis Star and Times and Post-Dispatch reported on the Alfaro’s situation. The coverage drew the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Ball, who took the family into their five room home in Maplewood.
Carl J. Reinecke, president of Reinecke Lumber Company also noticed the Alfaro’s plight. He visited the Hall’s home and offered the Alfaro family full access to the empty third floor of a company storeroom on Cass Avenue. The Alfaros were free to shelter in that space rent free until they could find a more permanent lodging.
Reinecke also gave the thirty-seven year old Joseph Alfaro work at his lumber company.
We’re living in difficult times; difficult mostly due to the way our own society works. We say we’re better than this, or this is not who we are, but empathy has become an emotion in shorter supply. I submit this to remind us all of the profound virtue in simply caring about those with less. Those most worthy of our admiration generally do the most while having the least to gain.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch; August 26 and August 27, 1947
St. Louis Star and Times; August 17 and August 29, 1947
Elaine Viets wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for over twenty five years. She specialized in quirky vignettes from South St. Louis. Since then, she has become a prolific writer of crime fiction, featuring strong women with odd backgrounds. (Suggested: her Dead End Job series) In the research for these, Elaine often assumed the same low-level low-income positions that her protagonists held in the book) She now lives and writes in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I emailed her for approval to repost an article she wrote about early rehabbers of the Square. In her reply she wished Lafayette Square well, and wrote that she’s always considered it one of the prettiest places in St. Louis.
On October 15, 1989, The Post-Dispatch published Elaine’s story, Categorizing Rehabbers in its PD Magazine. In honor of all those who swung a sledge-hammer or uncovered a hidden stairway in Lafayette Square, here is a repeat.
ALL REHABBERS seem alike – worried-looking, gray-skinned people. The worry comes from wondering what’s going to go wrong with your house next. That special shade of rehabber gray comes from plaster dust. That stuff is everywhere. You can’t get rid of it.
Rehabbers sound the same, too. We can go on about plastic plumbing and slate shingles until your eyes cross. But we really are different, just like snow flakes. Or, some kind of flakes. Lee the Rehabber, a real city expert, listed some of the kinds you’ll encounter.
”This person does everything to keep the house the same,” Lee said, ”right down to the original colors, furniture and curtains.”This gives you the weird feeling you’re in an old photograph.”In fact, a picture of the house taken a hundred years ago looks the same as a photo taken today.”Many Lafayette Square houses are in this category. These rehabbers reject everything from the 20th century, even its comforts. ”The kitchens and baths won’t be modernized. The only new things will be a refrigerator and a well-hidden micro-wave.’’ Deep in the basement, like a family secret, you’ll find a furnace and a water heater.
”These people try to keep the outside the same, except they use today’s colors.”You’ll see some startling effects. Sturdy old brick houses may be trimmed a delicate mauve and gray, like plow horses wearing plumes.The Updaters may appreciate the old touches, but they want a hot shower in the morning.”The kitchen and bathroom will be modern. If the floors are beyond restoring, they might carpet them. They’ll save the original woodwork. If the original floor plan is lousy, they’ll change it. ”This house won’t look like its 100-year-old picture,” he said. ”It will look better.”
”These people usually buy rundown buildings that have little to save,” Lee said. ”They gut the inside, removing the walls, floors and woodwork.”The outside stays much the same. Inside everything is new. The people who used to live there wouldn’t recognize the place.”Considering who used to live there, that’s good. ”The result is a new home that looks old only on the outside.’’
That’s an old rehabber term for a cosmetic job. ”These types come to the neighborhood in the first influx. They buy the better homes in good repair, they don’t gut them, and they finish them in a hurry.” The rehab looks beautiful: fancy wallpaper, nice woodwork, old chandeliers. But it’s a haunted house. It has the ghosts of the past. ”The old plumbing is about to rust through. The old wiring is waiting to blow a fuse when you plug in your hair dryer. The plaster ceiling, held up with a fresh coat of wallpaper, is about to drop in your Sunday dinner.”Max Factors are often sold to unsuspecting couples. They don’t understand that an old house with ”everything original” is not a find.
”Whatever the house looked like before, it will be worse when they’re through,” Lee said. Remuddlers put aluminum siding over mellow brick. Drop 8-foot ceilings and cover up the ornate plaster. Remove the original woodwork. Panel with cheap pressed sawdust. ”The results are always the same. When they’re finished they’ve removed all the original beauty.’’
Most people will rehab a house. Once. If they’re still married when it’s over, they’ll never even pick up a hammer again. But there are a few odd couples who are only happy living in plaster dust and painter’s drop cloths. When they get one house finished, they sell it and move into another mess. They’re so crazy, they can’t wait to do it again, right away. What do you call them? That’s easy – the nuts and bolts rehabbers.
Thanks to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for original text.
It took a certain kind of evangelism to attract others to the Square in the 1970s. Another gifted local observer, Linda Underwood, categorized the locals of that time. It complements this piece well: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1979-the-pony-was-the-people/
Note the photo above of 1532 Mississippi Avenue. The same home is now for sale, and you can see for yourself what over 45 years of rehabbing can do. https://www.redfin.com/MO/Saint-Louis/1532-Mississippi-Ave-63104/home/93697404
Lafayette Square bears historic designations from both the City of St Louis and the National Register of Historic Places. They bestow an enforced permanence to the look of the Square. Recognition of the authentic and increasingly rare Victorian Age style in our buildings ensures their survival. There are various forms and combinations of styles in our architecture, but following are four major types. Let’s say you have relatives or guests in from the suburbs. You want to give them the straight scoop on what the heck is a mansard. Here is a brief field guide.
Do you remember seeing advertising for a pet monkey in the old comic books?
When I was a kid, I wanted a monkey, even if they were only sea monkeys. I didn’t know the sea monkeys were really brine shrimp, or that pet monkeys and alligators are only cute for a short time. They can become animals like you might see at a zoo. Like adolescent people, they sometimes grow to be surly, unpredictable and even violent.
Continue reading “1913: Immortal Monkey Of The Square”
A little known aspect of Lafayette Park history involves its role in expanding our national pastime. In the 1850’s, the mansion of Edward Bredell Sr. stood directly across from the park on Lafayette Avenue. Edward Sr. made his fortune in mining and dry goods wholesaling. He later established the Missouri Glass Company as an enterprise for his son to manage. Edward Jr. attended Brown University, where he likely was introduced to New York rules baseball. Games involving balls and bats in various forms have been described as early as the 1820s, but the New York game was well defined and quickly gained popularity in that area
Continue reading “1860: Lafayette Square on First “In the Gilded Age of the 1890s city parks often hewed to the same starchy formality as was expected of a polite society. Lafayette Park was a strolling park, with pedestrians expected to keep to the graveled pathways. Those who chose to stray onto lawns and flower beds could find themselves confined to the police substation (today’s park house) for an hour, to ponder their errant ways.
This stuffy policy informs a poem which appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat 130 years ago, in February of 1894. Reprinted for your enjoyment here:
Continue reading “1894: Keep Off The Grass”A description of Waverly Place by an enthusiastic real estate broker, on behalf of Charles Gibson. It appeared in the Daily Missouri Republican of June 23, 1859:
The prevailing economy in 1914 caused many tight purse strings around Lafayette Square. For the winter holiday season, someone decided to take the frugal approach. He or she procured a Christmas goose from the apparent bounty of Lafayette Park.
Continue reading “1914: The Tough Old Birds Of Lafayette Park”
