McLaughlin Funeral Home Archives - Lafayette Square Archives

2007 Park Avenue: Home, Hospital, Mortuary, B&B

An earlier essay in this series dealt with the colorful history at the northwest corner of Mississippi and Park Avenue. https://lafayettesquarearchives.com/1951-an-anchor-on-the-corner-in-lafayette-square/. Next door is a large and deep three story brick home on a double lot. To its immediate west is another distinctive home, so close as to nearly adjoin. There is a backstory to both, although this essay focuses on 2007 Park Avenue.

Another successful Germanic immigrant

A native of Austria, William Skrainka moved to St. Louis as a young man and became both a stone merchant and quarry owner. As early as 1870, his business appeared in Goulds Business Directory at the NW corner of Dillon and Park Avenue.

By 1875, Skrainka was in the building materials business with partner Claus Veiths, at 501 N. Levee Street. That year, William began construction on a house at 2007 Park Avenue in Lafayette Square. The family moved in during April of 1876.

An 1878 business directory found the Skrainka firm under the topic “stone contractors” at the northwest corner of Locust and 6th Street. The listing has William living with his wife Mary and son Fred at 2007 Park Avenue.

He and his wife controlled the properties at 2007 and 2011 Park Avenue from 1876 through 1912.

The Skrainkas at home

In 1883, in addition to a Skrainka location at Locust and 6th, a Gould directory places his business at South 18th Street and Gratiot. This quarry, an easy reach from Lafayette Square, features in the 1875 Compton Dry Pictorial Map. The family also owned a large diabase (an igneous form of basalt useful for building foundations and roadbeds) quarry near Fredericktown, Missouri.

From Compton and Dry; 1876. As 2007 Park was built that year, it does not appear, but 2oo1 and 2011 Park are both present on the map.

By 1888, Wm. Skrainka and Company included sons Morris, Frederick and Louis. The family enterprise at that time engaged in “grading, curbing, guttering, macadamizing and crosswalks.” Its business address was 404 Market St, Rm 308, and the residence for William, Mary and Fred remained at 2007 Park Avenue.

By 1892, the Gould Blue Book, which located the family at 2007 Park the year before, had nothing on any of them. G.J. and Lina Helmerichs owned 2007 Park Avenue and it was home to them and a Miss C. Kleinschmidt. This remained the situation through 1894.

Skrainkas on the move

The new resident was owner of G.J. Helmerichs Leaf Tobacco Company at 56 Chestnut and 67 Market Streets. His trade was nearly exclusive with the heavily German folk of South St. Louis, as shown by frequent advertising in German American papers like this 1859 Westliche Post:

In 1893, William, Mary and Fred lived at 3100 Pine Street. A year later, William died in St. Louis of Bright’s disease at the age of 79.

Two years later, Mrs. William Skrainka and Frederick resided at the Hotel Beers. This was a swanky establishment on the corner of Grand Avenue and Olive Street. It burned down in 1931, and is today the site of the Kranzburg Arts Center

2007 Park was then occupied by just Mrs. Helmerich and Miss Kleinschmidt, and they remained through 1897.

The Skrainkas kept moving. In 1897, Fred, Louis and Morris Skrainka were all listed at 319 N. 4th Street, and two years after that, Fred resided at the West End Hotel, staying there through 1912.

In the 1904 Gould Business Directory, Skrainka Construction Company listed Louis as President, Frederick as Vice President and Morris as Secretary. Their mother Mary Skrainka lived at the West End Hotel.

On Dec 19, 1906, Mary Skrainka died in Berlin, to where she had travelled in search of medical therapy.

Not Mr. Vanderbilt; Dr.Vanderbeck.

A well known maternity physician, Cornelius C. Vanderbeck moved to St. Louis from Philadelphia, where he edited and published The Philadelphia Druggist and Chemist periodical. In 1890, he authored The Ladies New Medical Guide – An Instructor, Counselor and Friend. Vanderbeck ran a sanitarium on Franklin Avenue in St Louis by 1898, and was a frequent lecturer on health topics in the city.

In 1908, Dr. Vanderbeck established a private infirmary and maternity hospital at 2007 Park Avenue.

Let ’em know you care – send them a post card from the hospital. This, from 1909.

2011 Park Avenue, next door to 2007, was originally built in the late 1860’s for Johannes Ludewig, a wholesale furrier. It was home a decade later to George Muller, longtime owner of a saloon on North Third Street. His upscale watering hole was a favored meeting place for politicians and retired “colonels” over a generation.

In 1912, Vanderbeck sold 2007 Park Avenue and then rented it back. He used the proceeds to expand operations to 2011 Park Avenue. Vanderbeck bought that three story home from jeweler F.W. Drosten for $8,000. Now Vanderbeck’s offices, clinic and residence were in 2007 Park, and a a fifteen bed “private infirmary” operated next door. This arrangement lasted until 1920. The two buildings connected by a second floor breezeway. Evidence of the passage still remains in both houses.

It can be inferred that much of Vanderbeck’s work was charitable on behalf of unwed mothers. Frequent want ads in the papers advertised both for nurses and adoptive parents.

From maternity to eternity

Allen and Bessie McLaughlin bought 2011 Park Avenue in February of 1920. Their family ran a funeral home at 2007 Park Avenue until 1922. When C.C. Vanderbeck died in 1932, with funeral arrangements handled by McLaughlin Funeral Home. Next door, 2011 Park Avenue later converted to a hotel operated by B.C. McLaughlin.

Obit from 1922. Funeral at 2007 Park Avenue.

When the McLaughlin Funeral Home moved to 2301 Lafayette Avenue, 2007 Park Avenue became, like many large residential properties there, a rooming house. At one time it hosted a beauty parlor on the first floor. A faint image of the words ‘Beauty Shop’ are still visible occasionally in one of the original front windows.

A climb back to respectability

2007 Park languished as a rooming house from the 1940s through the 1960s. It’s good that the exterior was built for the long term, as that may have proven its saving grace. It sat before the main gates of beautiful Lafayette Park, but the neighborhood itself had fallen far from its Victorian glory.

St. Louis Globe-Democrat; March 1962, from an article entitled, “Neighborhoods of Distinction.” In the background are 2011, 2007 and 2003 Park Avenue.

Doug and Carol McDaniel moved into 2007 Park Avenue in 1973, and stayed for two decades. They cleared and landscaped the lot next door, overhauled the house, reconfigured walls and removed bathroom fixtures and a couple of kitchens.

May, 1975, with 2003 Park Avenue torn down and lot ready for improvement. Gates to Lafayette Park in background.

A small house at 2003 Park Ave was demolished and merged into the adjoining lot to create 2005 Park Avenue. Although extensively improved, it remains a legally buildable lot.

Undated photo showing 2003 Park Avenue, between 2007 and 2001 Park.

Rooming house to B&B and back to home

When Mike and Kathy Petetit purchased the house in 1997, they set about converting it to the Park Avenue Mansion B&B. It was a popular spot for weddings, receptions, honeymoons and neighborhood card tournaments for the following two decades. They sold the property in 2018 and retired to a single story home with pool in the Arizona desert.

When Mike and Patricia Jones bought 2007 Park Avenue that year, they did what people do with the big old rambling historical buildings in the Square. They tore apart and redesigned the kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. No matter how much one puts in, more is always indicated. A growing need for tuck pointing, rebuild of the fish pond and a new roof combined with Covid to keep the property from visitors and guests. This conspired to send the Joneses westward, into a new single story home in 2022.

2007 Park Avenue remains a key building among the mansions fronting Lafayette Park. The park dates to 1836, and the homes surrounding it mostly went up in the 1870s and 1880s. French Second Empire details like the mansard roof, tall arched windows, double sets of doors and extensive use of iron remain prevalent here, as in the immediate area.

Like the Lafayette Square neighborhood that surrounds it, 2007 Park Avenue is rich in history and protected as both a city and national historic district. Through generations of dedication to it, the home has kept with the times while maintaining its heritage.

Note: When we sold our home on the Square, our realtor created a video walk-through. If you’ve ever been curious about the innards of a house with this much exterior, you’re welcome to take a virtual tour, here: https://saint-louis-real-estate-photography-llc.aryeo.com/sites/YBMAJGW/unbranded

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

c1929. *Swekosky’s dental office at the southwest corner of Gravois and Jefferson, where Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken stands today (what would Swekosky make of that!)*

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…

*Swekosky with parrot; neither smiling.*

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.

*Dietrich Waldecker House 2301 Lafayette Avenue*

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

1917: The Life and Times of Mayor Henry Kiel

Casting a look back a hundred years in St Louis history, it requires little effort to find a subject with deep roots in Lafayette Square, whose tale is well worth retelling. Here’s the story of the 32nd mayor of St Louis, Henry W. Kiel.