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”The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported an interesting case, back in September 1988. This was straight from the mean streets of Lafayette Square. Bill Bryan of the P-D staff wrote a pair of brief articles, and this is a summary.
Jerry Patterson lived on the 2000 block of Lafayette Avenue. He phoned the police to report the apparent theft of a hibiscus tree from his back yard.
Officers responded to the call. They scoured the crime scene and determined that the plant in question may have been anemic. Dropping its dead leaves, it left a breadcrumb trail that might lead to the thief. They followed the shedded leaves to a residence in the 1700 block of Nicholson Place.
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/
St. Louis is situated on some terrific ground with which to build a durable city. Limestone bluffs once lined the riverfront, and were quarried for facades and foundations. As mentioned in the preceding essay, a long deep seam of high grade clay ran under present day Manchester Road. There was coal galore, conveniently mined from the same area as the clay. Mold and fire the clay and you have a brick. Handy materials for an incredibly fast growing, if fire-prone city. Inexpensive and plentiful Italian and Irish immigrant labor kept production costs low. A terrible fire led to a city ordinance in 1849 mandating brick as the city’s construction material. Many such buildings have lasted over 150 years.
Edward Sterling (1834-1911) founded a bonafide brick-making empire, based in St. Louis. Early in his life, his uncle Elisha was managing a steam furnace company in Cleveland. Looking to diversify the business in the 1850’s, Elisha and his associate Ethan Rogers looked into the manufacture of bricks.
Until that time, brick production consisted of forming clay into molds by hand and then kiln-firing in batches. Now, late into the industrial revolution, underlying assumptions about labor and efficiency were challenged in almost every aspect of the economy.
Rogers invented and patented “a new and improved machine for molding and pressing brick by hydraulic pressure”¹. The first hydraulic brick machine was put into service in Cleveland in 1856. Three years later, that machine was sold to a manufacturer in Nashville, and eventually melted down for ordnance during the Civil War.
As a young man going his own way, Elisha’s nephew Edward unsuccessfully tried his hand at running a lumber company. He then returned to Cleveland and secured a financial interest in the patent rights for Rogers’s hydraulic dry brick press. Edward acquired a new press and in 1860 moved that 33-ton, cast iron machine to Memphis. In 1860, this press produced 8 million bricks in 11 months.
When the Civil War interrupted his production in Memphis, Sterling established a plant in St. Louis, He leased a brickyard near the southeast corner of Chouteau and Mississippi streets (in what is now Lafayette Square) and began manufacturing in late April 1865. With the luck of being in the right place at the right time, the following month brought the end of the Civil War, and began a long process of physical reconstruction.
The Sterlings family business soon attracted other investors, and Hydraulic Press Brick Company incorporated in 1868.
Edward Sterling became Hydraulic’s first president. The company took over the buildings, equipment and machinery in use at the plant on Chouteau and Mississippi. It also acquired an interest in the rights to three patents: the Rogers hydraulic press; a novel design for a brick kiln; and another design for an improved “perpetual kiln.” Hydraulic’s annual production in 1868 amounted to around 5 million bricks, and 7 million the following year. Sterling claimed this output was far less than the demand.
The quality of this brick – heavy, dense, and strong – proved itself in tests conducted by the government. The crush strength of a Hydraulic brick proved more than twice that of conventional handmade brick of the time. James Eads also performed tests and praised the solidity of Hydraulic brick. The product thus began selling itself. With both press and kiln patented, profits flowed to Sterling’s enterprise. Hydraulic product was used in the construction of Eads Bridge, the Bissell Point water treatment plant and Anheuser-Busch brewery. As word spread, it found use is both Chrysler and Manhattan Life buildings in New York.
By the end of 1872, the company had increased its throughput to nearly 18 million bricks a year. With 14 kilns and 2 brick presses, the plant could produce nearly 9,000 bricks per hour.
It’s possible to locate both Sterling’s home and business on the 1875 Compton and Dry map of St. Louis. At that time he lived at the intersection of 14th and Chouteau Ave. His Hydraulic Press Brick Works had migrated down the road to Chouteau and Grand.
As the company yards followed excavation of the clay deposits, several moves west ensued. The works eventually resettled at Kingshighway, where it remained at the turn of the 20th century. Hydraulic Press Brick by then was churning out over 100 million bricks per year, It was, by then, the largest brick company on Earth.²
Edward retired from the business in 1905. Eight years earlier, he prepared a home to retire to, in Redlands, California. “La Casada” was a 22 room mansion of 8,000 square feet. Italian/Mission Revival in style, it featured extensive formal Italian gardens and seven landscaped terraces running down a hillside. Scenic America magazine in 1912 proclaimed this home to be “The most beautiful residence in all southern California”…
…with nary a brick in sight.
Thanks to research sources, including
(1) Mimi Stiritz – National Bldg Arts Center 2017. Much of this post is influenced by her work at http://web.nationalbuildingarts.org/collections/clay-products/ornamental-brick/hydraulic-brick-company-the-early-years/
(2) Mound City On the Mississippi. City of St Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency
Bob Corbett of Webster University did an extensive amount of research into mapping the proximity of coal and clay mines in the Dogtown area of St. Louis. It proves the point in this essay’s first paragraph. http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/dogtown/history/mines.html
Thanks also to Michael Allen and Chris Kallmyer “The Land and The Brick” http://www.chriskallmyer.com/works/commonfield-clay/commonfield-clay-interviews/land
Part one of this essay series on St. Louis brick appears here: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1849-like-a-ton-of-bricks-part-1/
“Architecture starts when you carefully place two bricks together. There it begins.”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
You build with what you have at hand. St Louis was geographically gifted for growth by sitting atop two dandy sources of construction materials – limestone and clay. As function also leads to fashion, you only have to stroll around Lafayette Square to witness the flights of imagination launched by architects working with bricks from fired clay.
The walls of a frame house left to nature will last about five years before beginning to fall apart. The walls of a brick structure can stand for a hundred. Old home preservationists get the benefit of a head start in St. Louis City. We often talk about an otherwise decrepit house as having “good bones”.
The area of Manchester Road that parallels the River Des Peres between Kingshighway and McCausland was a rich source of brick clay. Two miles wide and four miles long, a one to two foot seam of high quality clay ran east to west. This district was mined using shafts and slopes. Frequent blasting loosened the clay for easier removal. Brick factories developed as close as possible to the source of supply.. Called Cheltenham today, the area attracted Irish and Italian immigrants to work the deposits. In turn, clay mining and brick making helped establish both Dogtown and the Hill. These neighborhoods flanked the mines to the north and south. The mines operated from the 1850’s into the 1940’s.
“In 1849, the steamboat White Cloud caught fire and drifted into the riverfront wharves. A third of the city went up in the subsequent blaze. A hurriedly-passed local ordinance forbade the construction of wooden buildings, and St. Louis became even more predominantly brick.
Firebrick from St. Louis kilns proved suitable not only for buildings and streets, but also for sewer lines under the fast-growing metropolis. St. Louis truly was (and remains) a brick city.
Ready availability, low cost of production and transportation, and a friendly zoning ordinance combined to promote a distinct city architecture. Within this singular theme of brick exist striking variations.
You won’t find such an array of styles within a single building material as you do with St. Louis City and brick. Pittsburgh and Baltimore might come close, but walk Benton Park, Downtown, Lacledes Landing, Soulard and Lafayette Square, then find another city like this. We take it for granted since it surrounds us like air and water – part of our urban environment.
On January 10th, 2018 Lara Hamdan, KWMU radio and Don Marsh presented an episode of the excellent St Louis On The Air series that discussed Evens-Howard Place, an area approximately where the Brentwood Prominade is today. It was a vibrant middle-class African American neighborhood collectively engaged in fire brick production.
In part two, a deeper dive into a specific and influential company with Lafayette Square roots; The Hydraulic Press Brick Company. Right here next week: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1872-like-a-ton-of-bricks-part-2/
(2) Rome of the West (Blog)
(3) Dotage St. Louis (Blog)
KWMU 90.7 FM Radio St. Louis
Just north of the new apartment complex at 2200 LaSalle Street is a row of developing townhouses, built with an appreciation of the Lafayette Square historic district. Infill opportunities are scarce in this area, let alone having an entire city block free up. Here’s the story of that area, once known as Sherwood Forest.
My dog and I walked a trail through the woods in Kirkwood Park last week. Approaching a bridge over the creek, I noted a couple of lizards turn tail and disappear below the decking. On our way back, I snuck up and got some photos of the little fellas. I knew they were skinks, but had no real idea what that means, so had to crack the internet for detail.
Wild Violets
Sometimes scary tales involve something one wouldn’t associate with a threat. Something pleasant to the eye, that wouldn’t hurt a fly. Little wild violets, for example.
We once had a home with a large yard in South County. Pat came in beaming one spring morning, delighted by the little blue flowers that had appeared in our lawn.
Continue reading “2013: Vile Wild Violets”I recently took a look at an enlarged view of Lafayette Park, and came away pretty amazed at what the map recognized.
Continue reading “2020: A Walk In Lafayette Park”
Horses are beautiful creatures; large, strong and well-suited to working with people. They found an immediate home in the heart of American cities.
St. Louis had challenges on many levels in dealing with its own waste. Without a dissipating wind the coal smoke hung like a low shroud over the city. Sewage often refused to drain properly, garbage was dumped in open pits, and animals died without proper burial.
Continue reading “1887: Horse Manure and The City”
