Forward, Into The Past
A colossal (technically speaking, twice life-size) bronze statue of Thomas Hart Benton resides in St. Louis’s Lafayette Park. It was cast by Ferdinand Miller in 1864 at the Royal Metal Foundry of Munich in Bavaria.
This grand giant, the first public monument placed in Missouri, was produced by a rightly famed sculptress, Harriet Hosmer. She is profiled in an earlier essay here.
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.
Frank Absher of the St. Louis Media History Foundation recently sent me a color postcard from the German House of September 1929. It served as an invitation to the dedication of the huge building that still sits at 2345 Lafayette Avenue. This was its very beginning. KMOX, on the air for four years by then, was on hand to live cast the event.
Continue reading “1929: Launching The German House”
This essay is about the Treemonisha sculpture, but to get there, let’s journey back 50 years to visit Lafayette Square in March 1971. A quick look around, and we’d understand why properties sold for the cost of their back taxes. The housing stock was dilapidated and no banks would finance the buying of a vacant shell. No realtors listed the properties.
It is true that archivists are a form of non-destructive bookworm. I prefer to think of myself more as an old pioneer panning for gold in the cold stream of time. In that spirit, I submit something I ran across recently; from an 1888 version of the booklet “Police Guide And Directory Of St Louis”. Here, on page 43, a helpful table of petty crime a stranger might wish to avoid in the Lafayette Park neighborhood.
Continue reading “1888: Ignorance Of The Law Was No Excuse”It’s entertaining and ever evolving to put an ear to the discussion about properties in Lafayette Square. Over the past two years, I’ve seen several posts and memos about a classic three story building at 2051 Park Avenue. It’s currently a set of four upscale condominiums, but has a busy back history – residential, educational, and religious.
In January of 1886, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported “crowds of coasters at the northwestern gate of Lafayette Park.” Sledding (aka ‘coasting’) in the 19th Century attracted “long lines of finely-dressed ladies and gentlemen.” They “shot down the steep incline from the flag pole, went whizzing through the big stone gates, across Park Avenue, and down the long hill (Missouri Avenue) to Chouteau Avenue. The neighborhood resounded with the laughter and raillery of the merry crowds.” Good times for a Saturday evening by all accounts.
Continue reading “1888: Sledding In the 19th Century”Happy Halloween! This is a particularly weird one in any number of ways, but to keep from trying to list all the forms of dysfunction we’re probably feeling, let’s check in with the celestial and supernatural worlds.
Continue reading “2020: Halloween Once In A Blue Moon”
