Lafayette Square Archives - Lafayette Square Archives

1989: Categorizing House Rehabbers

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.

The Restorer

”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.

Tom Keay rehabbing in all directions at 1532 Mississippi Ave; 1977

The Updater

”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.”

The High Tech Rehabber

”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.’’

The windowless shells and weedy lots of MacKay Place in 1972.

The Max Factor Rehabber

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.

The Remodeler

”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.’’

Lafayette Gothic. Sue and Terry Linhardt; 1973

The Odd Couple

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.

Resources

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

1988: The Hijacked Hibiscus

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.

2023: Like A Ton Of Bricks (Part 3)

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.

Bricks on the go

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.

A nasty cottage industry

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 small miracle of preservation

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!

Credits

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/

1872: Like A Ton Of Bricks (Part 2)

To begin with..

*Detail of Letterhead Logo for Hydraulic Press Brick Company of St. Louis (1883)*

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.

Now, about Edward Sterling

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.

Hydraulic gathers steam

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.

Getting the local bearings

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

300 million per year. Note: H.W. Eliot – Secretary and eventually President of HBP Co. was poet T.S. Eliot’s father.

Epilogue

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/

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”.

Manchester clay to St. Louis bricks

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.

*Sketch of fire brick works, pre-1904, from “The Clay Working Plants Of St Louis.” As early as 1839, St Louis brickyards were turning out in excess of 20 million bricks annually.*

“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.

In this detail from an 1874 Currier and Ives print, note the distinctive terracotta shade of the 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.

Still a vibrant expression of the past

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/

Resources

(1) Urbanist Dispatch

(2) Rome of the West (Blog)

(3) Dotage St. Louis (Blog)

KWMU 90.7 FM Radio St. Louis

1861: Judge Leo Rassieur

The advent of civil war was a perilous time to be a state in the middle U.S. There were slave states with deep economic interests in that “peculiar institution,” and free states where slavery wasn’t legal. However, four slave states did not secede from the US in 1861: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. These states walked a tricky line, and it required political and sometimes military maneuvering to prevent their secession.

1887: Horse Manure and The City

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.

1892: Speaking Tubes And Old Homes

A reference to ‘speaking tubes’ appeared during a look at old real estate listings around Lafayette Square. Being from split level suburbia, I’d never heard of them.

The Surfaces Of Lafayette Square

A Deeper Appreciation For Superficial Things

There’s something enchanting about the interplay of surfaces. This narrative was supposed to be about the mysterious painted rocks I occasionally encounter while walking the dog around Lafayette Square ( 7 to 8:30 a.m. on a sidewalk near you). It evolved into a general appreciation of the surface interactions we see around the Square. it’s also an outlet for the photos piling up from these morning rounds. It gets around to the rocks, so please read on.

1857-1898: The German Newspapermen

Here’s the tale of three interlinked German-American newspapermen. They’re featured at the statue of The Naked Truth at Grand and Russell, and all three lived in Lafayette Square.