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”Tag: Dick Lemen
1940: Swekosky’s Second Act
This is the continuation of an essay entitled “1923: Swekosky’s Early Years” https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1923-trouble-in-paradise-swekoskys-early-years/ In brief review, an amorous young dentist from Preston Place in Lafayette Square got himself in deep water with the ladies. We last left him in 1923; bankrupt, alone, and difficult to track.
Forward seventeen years to September 1940. There appears a profile of Swekosky, who somehow renamed himself, from William E. to William G. He is happily remarried, living on Jules Street in McKinley Heights. The article from the Post-Dispatch is titled, “History Of Old Homes Is Hobby Of St. Louisan.” It credits him with twenty years in the study of old homes. This stemmed from his earlier employment in the title department of a Clayton bank.
Rescued from a life he seemed made for
Swekosky’s father dissuaded him from a career as title examiner, and put him through dental school at St. Louis University. On the side, William began reading books on stock investing, and “majored in Insull stocks”.
Samuel Insull was like the Kenneth Lay (Enron Corp) of his day. He was president of Commonwealth Edison in 1907, having built a utilities empire across 39 states. The company’s stock sold well on his vigorous and hyperbolic promotion. He even made the cover of Time Magazine, which wrote admiring essays in 1926 and 1929. When the market crashed in 1929, he surrendered his companies to creditors and fled the country. Extradited, Insull faced trial three times for fraud and embezzlement. He became a symbol of the corporate corruption that led to the Great Depression. An outcry for reform led to creation of both Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration.
During the 1920s, Swekosky learned to time purchases and sales of Insull stocks in various enterprises. Built on air, a company like Peoples Gas Light and Coke, hovering around bankruptcy, would be bought by Insull for $20.00/share, and less than a decade later, be valued at $400.00/share, largely on the strength of Insull’s Midas touch. Swekosky thus acquired the freedom he needed to “spend my spare time on my houses.”
Entering a new vocation
Swekosky was a contemporary of John Albury Bryan in Landmarks Association, with both referred to as “walking histories of St. Louis”. The distinction between them was that Bryan’s professional interest was in architecture, whereas Swekosky preferred digging into the people and stories associated with significant buildings.
The Post-Dispatch received a large number of letters from Swekosky, handwritten in green ink, informing them of the pending demolition of some St. Louis landmark. He kept a filing system only he could navigate, and took hundreds of photographs documenting the properties. Taking a reporter for a drive, he would effortlessly spiel about individual homes and businesses, giving a full account of occupancy over the years.
Swekosky spent nearly every weekend at the Missouri Historical Society and City Recorder’s Office. There he pored over documents and directories, footnoting the backs of his pictures with further findings.
A specialist on the South Side
He housed his collection in an office on South 12th Street. From an unassuming home on Jules Street in McKinley Heights, it was easy for Swekosky to focus his energies on cataloging the surrounding South Side and Lafayette Square.
An Everyday Magazine article, “Old Mansions Are His Hobby,” featured Swekosky in 1942. The article gives examples of his rambling train of thought in discussing an old house photo:
“Here’s Dr. Franz J. Arzt’s home, built on the northeast corner of 12th and Lami in 1877. Marble front, interior trim of mahogany and walnut, tiled entrance hall with six giant mirrors, three-story tower, mansard room with wrought iron trim, large imported art glass window in the east wall”.
Warming to the task, Swekosky shifted gears into the stuff he loved – the occupants and their backgrounds:
“Dr. Arzt kept parrots and grew orange and lemon trees in a glass house and had the first goldfish in St. Louis. Mrs. Caroline O’Fallon was another goldfish fancier. She lived on Pine near Leffingwell and spent her leisure time on the roof during warm weather. She had a large copper-lined fish pool on the roof.” His typed notes from the house add even more: “Dr. Arzt built a cave under and around the glass house with real stalactytes and stalagmites. Lami Street was a popular coasting place in winter, as it was very steep. The sight of Dr. Arzt’s oranges and lemons growing in the winter was a pleasant sight.”
Another example
It’s interesting to dig into his comments and a great way to learn new things about old St. Louis places. There’s a beautiful home at 1126 Sidney Street today, that Swekosky discusses in 1942:
“First house in St. Louis to be decorated with stone lions. Home of brewery baron Max Feurbacher, whose opera garden was patterned from one in Heidelberg. Occupied by the family for 47 years, that’s unusual.”
The dour doctor makes his house calls
Note: I’ve never seen a photo of William G. Swekosky smiling, which seems unusual, or might not inspire much confidence in his dental skills. Perhaps it was from covering up the fact that he was really the reincarnation of notorious William E. Swekosky…
There are dozens of newspaper articles from the 1930s up to 1964, that repeat what Swekosky offered, nearly verbatim. His files were encyclopedic, peopled with folks as interesting as their houses. Here’s an article from 1955, concerning the razing of a housing tract developed by Lafayette Square co-founder Sir Charles Gibson. This tidy summary contains a lot of interesting side channels. History is full of rabbit holes, and Swekosky seemed born to explore them, developing a map as he went.
A good number of Swekosky’s authoritative and often exhaustive house notes are available through the excellent search tool on the Missouri Historical Society website. Give it a spin at
https://mohistory.org/collections?text=Swekosky&images=0
The collection grows unwieldy
His seemingly constant stream of information often appeared on the backs of Swekosky’s photos of local buildings. Here is front and back of the Dietrich Waldecker house, now home to McLaughlin Funeral Home on the corner of Lafayette and Missouri Avenues in Lafayette Square. He often used the distinctive green ink in his photo musings.
This is not to suggest that Swekosky was never wrong. He issued opinions easily, and over time, it is sometimes difficult to sort out what is real and what might be conjecture. Infuriated over the destruction of once exclusive Vandeventer Place for development of the Cochran VA Hospital, he took to the paper in protest, maybe going a little too far in his speculating. This, from the St Louis Star and Times in 1948:
St. Louisans know how that one turned out.
During a City Hall housecleaning around 1950, the City of St. Louis decided to offload hundreds of photos, mostly shot for the Streets Department by Charles Clement Holt. These rare and comprehensive images from the first three decades of the 1900s sold at auction. They comprised three 13 foot high stacks of negatives, most of them on glass.
Enter Dick Lemen
Swekosky swept up this poorly curated collection. In the early 1960s, he lent it to friend and amateur photographer Dick Lemen of Moline, Illinois. Lemen cleaned, printed and enlarged the images, producing over 1300 superb photos. Some were sold to magazines and newspapers. He bought the collection outright from Swekosky. An interesting fellow in his own right, Lemen worked as a river deckhand, warehouseman, historian and technical advisor during the filming of “The Adventures Of Mark Twain.“
In the 1980’s, Dick Lemen donated the collection to the St. Louis Mercantile Library. It forms the backbone of the remaining photographic record of St. Louis in the early 20th Century.
Taking a look in the rear view mirror
In 1962, a Globe-Democrat feature,“ Old Houses Are Like Old Wine,” profiled Swekosky and his long amateur career. By then, William G. referred to himself as “the pallbearer of old houses.” At a breathless pace, he could still bury the reporter in detail. “Why was the skeleton in the back yard? Oh, an undertaker used to live there years ago. The bones were probably those of a drunk or deadbeat who’d ordered a funeral and never paid for it.”And, “A millionaire lived so ragged that the poor people felt sorry for him and let him share their food. When he finally starved to death, his heirs found $1,500,000 in a safe deposit box.” “Another family with a fine house on Waverly Place centered its menus around soup bones. They saved enough money to marry off their daughter to a European nobleman who bled the family fortune.”
Swekosky, a man of some means who lived in a small South Side bungalow, was asked to consider the hundreds of structures he admired and pick one for himself. He hesitated; “looking like a bewildered sultan trying to make a choice from an extra-large harem. “Well, what I’d really like to do is buy a lot of those beautiful houses and live five years in each one.”
Unfortunately, he suffered a heart attack while getting out of his car on Jules Street two years later. Swekosky was taken to City Hospital and died there on New Years Eve, 1963. This site lies about 500 feet from where he was born. His funeral was at St. John Nepomuk and burial at Calvary Cemetery. He was 69 years old.
Collection, like collector, stays lucky
Judging by the pair of obituaries, and subsequent Swekosky revivals, William G. successfully outlived any recollection of William E., as seen in the earlier essay. No mention was made of his prior adventures in dating and marriage. It’s an open question whether his reinvention was deliberate, or just an unconscious process of growing older and maturing. Whatever, he really did become a guiding light for St. Louis preservationists and historians. Not bad for a dentist from Bohemian Hill (now an off ramp for I-55.)
Swekosky’s sister donated his voluminous collection of photographs and manuscript histories to the Sisters of Notre Dame College in Lemay. The Sisters worked for years to archive and match his writings to corresponding photos. They also published their findings in a weekly column that ran in the Globe- Democrat. In 2001, the Sisters donated Swekosky’s collection to the Missouri History Museum.
Writing for the Post-Dispatch in 1976, Florence Shinkle called Swekosky “a dentist by profession, a photographer by choice, and a romantic by nature. He worked in a cramped office, slept in a brick bungalow, but lived grandly, exuberantly in the past”. A still later tribute in 2001 credited him thusly: “When the demolition of a valuable piece of property was imminent, he notified the newspapers, providing them with pictures and documentation. His factual alarms were often peppered with delicious bits of gossip.”
Epilogue
A long life is ensured for buildings within a registered historic district. Lafayette Square was fortunate that young bohemians in the 1970s fought long technical battles for that designation. As a result, others moved there, free to marvel at how it managed to be saved. The shift in thought and policy toward preservation comes from realizing that not all progress in St. Louis has been for the better. This awakening traces back to folks like Bryan, Lemen, and Swekosky.
Finally, for a nice sampling of Swekosky photos of old St. Louis, please have a look at:
https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=swekosky&view_all=1
Thanks To Research Sources, Including:
A brief biography of Samuel Insull appears at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Insull
and more information on his holdings is here:
https://scripophily.net/inutininc2.html for stock certificate and description of company
Urban STL blog for detail on razing of the old St. Louis Palladium for the Cochran VA Medical Center.
A great local urban blog: stlouiscitytalk.com
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Globe-Democrat, and Star-Times
St. Louis Historical Society Library And Research Center