Tudor Revival Historic District? 10:56 AM

I've had my nose in A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia McAlester and Lee McAlester for the past couple days. It's come as a great relief to understand the architectural style of the typical New Orleans shotgun home with East Lake detailing: they're Folk Victorians!

Anyhow, I was reading the section on Tudor Revival and saw St. Louis's offerings prominently featured. I could tell the house was a Northampton (possibly Southampton or Lindenwood Park) beauty--a dominating front gable that dramatically plunged down to the entryway. It also had the requisite "gingerbread" frosting along the foundation and framing the windows, doors, and corners. Most in St. Louis are familiar with this type of house, which occurs quite often in neighborhoods that were built up between 1915 and 1935.

No neighborhood seems to embrace the style quite as ubiquitously as Northampton, though. Luckily, despite my inability to secure my own pictures, Doug Duckworth has me covered! He recently took a photo tour of Northampton in the area around the amazing La Tropicana and the wonderful World Cafe.


I failed to mention how these homes often exaggerate their chimneys, but this picture has served me well in conveying this.


Aha! Another Tudor Revival feature: the false half-timbering. Those decorative timbers are not structural, but were meant to evoke their older English counterparts.


The Gothic arch doorway is a nice detail, though not typical to Tudor Revival.


Notice the tiny window in the lesser gable and, of course, the swooping and front-and-center gable that screams Tudor. As if to spite me, this one has a Gothic-arched door as well, though it's not quite as pronounced.

I won't pillage all of Doug's collection; you must visit the rest here.

But just thinking to how there are entire blocks of these "Hansel and Gretel" houses made me believe it's about time to add this charming neighborhood to the National Register. My suggestion for a name: Southwest St. Louis Tudor Revival Historic District. Or Northampton Tudor Historic District. I suppose the name Northampton only adds to the tribute to our neighbors across the pond.

This style was so popular in the early and middle 20th century that we were lucky enough to see whole neighborhoods of them. While perhaps neighborhoods like Northampton lack the gritty urbanism and architectural diversity of the neighborhoods to the east, it is hard to argue that these rows of frosted gables, tiny casement windows, rustic shutters, half-timbering--and yes, the stained glass!--are somehow unattractive.

Take a stroll down Lindenwood, or Pernod, or Fairview, or any number of Northampton streets and tell me you're not impressed by the playful intimacy of these little cottages.

M.L.K. Jr.: His Dream, Our Dream 3:46 PM

From Fountain Park, on the North Side.

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama's words in his March 18, 2008 speech on race forced the nation to confront its racial rhetoric and paradigms as latent holdovers from a discriminatory and hateful past. Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death, on this day in 1968, we must absorb the shame-inducing honesty of the Senator's words:

... As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.


Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.


Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.


A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us...

The urban underbelly that so many American citizens are able to shield from their consciousness as "beneficiaries" of exclusionary zoning, superior schools, networks of power, private automobiles, social and physical mobility, trust funds, the "right" way to speak English, a biased legal system, the correct ZIP code, or even just an Anglo name--this is the hour to immerse yourself in the tear-stained truth of the matters of race and poverty in the country. May you never again call any neighborhood with worse-for-the-wear buildings and African-American residents a "ghetto"--thinking somehow that you're superior. Or worse, maybe you think you're lucky to have escaped such conditions. Then why is crumbling infrastructure, contaminated soil, and social isolation okay for those stuck in these ghettos? Abandon all pretense.


Attend church in a neighborhood you were told you'd be shot if you entered it. See what happens.


Walk down St. Louis Avenue from Crown Candy to City Limits, or anywhere in between. See how you feel.


Pull your car over when the police lights flash. When they tell you you shouldn't be up here, do NOT head south.


Stop at a Chop Suey place along Kingshighway, or Natural Bridge, or MLK Jr. Blvd. Or dine in at a fast food restaurant on one of the main drags. Would you eat this every day?


Or simply watch. Watch Fairground Park crumble. Watch McKee own more of St. Louis Place. Watch the Mullanphy Emigrant House struggle to stabilize a piece of history. Watch St. Louis's historic African American community, the Ville, slowly erase its shotgun homes from the cultural landscape. Watch children pack into and pour out of some of the worst schools this nation can present to you. Observe our unique brand of poverty and decay, some of the most notable desolation in the U.S.


But until you do, do not be self-righteous. Do not think you're better. Do not think you're lucky. Do not think it's out of your control. Because the soul of this nation carries these unsightly scars. Do not cake your wound, our wounds in foundation.


Martin Luther King, Jr. had the dream. You, we, I, in his absence, have to act.

"Visit To A City Out Of Time" 12:46 AM

The following is a poem by the transcendent Audre Lorde, a legally blind black lesbian married to a white woman in the 1960s. She is called the "ultimate other," reflecting her intersecting identities and sources of oppression. Her challenging and often bitter poetry survives her; she died of cancer in 1992. She often spoke of the need to voice one's demons, one's anger and not to appeal to nicety. Her caustic words were meant to provoke, to incite change, to inform the status quo that there was a rift on the horizon.

Here is her poem (see title above) about St. Louis, written at some point in the early 1970s. Notice her scathing indictment--how St. Louis is a victim, like Lorde herself, but one who has surrendered and is perhaps carried as if driftwood down a "cutting" and uncaring river. What's your take?

If St. Louis
took its rhythms
from the river
that cuts through it
the pulse of the Mississippi
has torn this city
apart.

St. Louis is
somebody's home
and not answering
was
nobody
shoveling snow
because spring would come
one day.

In time
people who live
by rivers
dream
they are immortal.

No such thing as "aldermanic advocacy" 11:26 AM

Alderwoman Jennifer Florida, D-15th Ward, who represents part of the area of the South Grand business district, said people and business owners in the area would have to strongly support the proposal before she would work for it.

What is "it"? The East-West Gateway's Great Streets Initiative, and specifically, the proposed streetscape improvements to Grand South Grand.

Shouldn't our leaders be advocates for better and safer design, for a pleasant streetscape that complements one of St. Louis's most bustling, exciting districts? Or could it be that the alderwoman is afraid that some residents will vote her out for slowing down their too-fast morning commutes on the superhighway that is the current South Grand?

An embattled neighborhood: Yeatman, Yateman, Jeff-Vander-Lou? 9:27 PM

Norbury Wayman's History of St. Louis Neighborhoods calls it Yeatman, though this interesting AP article from December 1979 entitled "City Faces: Bringing Spirit to St. Louis" calls it Yateman. Today, it's Jeff-Vander-Lou.

Yeatman's boundaries were defined as Grand on the west, Delmar on the south, Jefferson on the east, and St. Louis Avenue on the north.

Begins the article:

Twice in his life, Macler Shepard had been bulldozed out of his home in downtown St. Louis -- because city planners and the federal government saw nothing worth saving in his declining neigborhood.

But when the bulldozers threatened him a third time, he decided to fight back.

That was 1966, and the federal policy known as "urban renewal" was demolishing some troubled neighborhoods and replacing them with high rise low-income housing.

To suggest, as Shepard did, that people just might want to preserve and renovate the structurally sound rows of three-story brick housing in St. Louis's Yateman neighborhood -- one of the worst areas in the city -- was plain heresy.

Now, 13 years later, Shepard's efforts have helped rescue Yateman from the wrecking ball and have sparked at least a partial revival of this predominantly black neighborhood near downtown St. Louis.

His neighborhood work was honored in November when he won a Rockefeller Public Service Award. The annual award is sponsored by John D. Rockefeller 3rd and is administered by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Since Shepard began 13 years ago, 639 units of housing have been built or renovated, with another 215 to be completed in 1980. A shoe factory is part of $22 million in recent private investments in the area.

Eighty percent of the residents are black, but about two-thirds make at least $9,000 a year. In 1966, two-thirds of Yateman's residents were under the poverty level.

The article references that Yeatman (or Yateman) had slid in population from 72,000 in 1966 to the then-current figure of 50,000. Today's J-V-L, a larger neighborhood than the original Yeatman, can claim only 6,459!

Shepard is responsible for forming the 1966 neighborhood organization, Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc., which later gave way to the current nomenclature. I guess I had never realized the name's origin:

"The name stands for the three thoroughfares by which people come from the suburbs to downtown St. Louis, earn their money during the day, and disappear at 4:30. The name was a way of saying that this is part of the problem," [Shepard] said in a telephone interview.

The J-V-L (Jefferson-Vandeventer-St. Louis Ave.) of today is faced with some of St. Louis's most pressing issues. It is one of the neighborhoods that Paul McKee, Jr. has systematically assaulted with demolition by neglect. Its spiritual landmark, the St. Alphonsus "Rock" Church on North Grand, nearly burnt to the ground last year. The former home of the Cardinals, at Sportman's Park, also on North Grand, will no longer be home to the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis once work on Grand Center's Woolworth building is completed. Day by day, due to Blairmont blight and urban decay, the neighborhood continues to lose its irreplaceable building stock along with most residents who can afford to leave.

I wonder what Shepard would think of the track record of preservation in his neighborhood as of late.

There is one potential bright spot of the neighborhood: a sub-neighborhood called Lindell Park, which features beautiful homes. Lindell Park is centered around the area just east of Grand and Dodier. These three were home listings on Coldwell Banker Gundaker's website that are but three examples of the extant architectural gems of the north side, even J-V-L.

2923 Dodier, 63107 (Yours For $74,900)


3219 Hebert, 63107 ($125,500)


3501 University, 63107 ($62,500)

Let's hope that the encroaching Blairmont presence won't compromise the lovely and mostly intact Lindell Park.

P.S. The doors on some of these homes are fodder for another post...

[EDIT (2/3/08): Thanks for the linkage, Random Talk on Urban Affairs! One of your astute commenters noted a major gaffe of mine. Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls is not moving from their facility on North Grand. In fact, I'm told, they're expanding! I had them confused with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, which will be moving into the Woolworth Building. If you're not satisfied with my summation of evidence minus this error, then look to the disappearance of the corner of St. Louis and Glasgow, a once great intersection. But I guess that's McKee related. Ah well. I give up. McKee is bad enough. No need for a long list of ailments when you've got a secretive speculator in your midst!]

St. Louis's Industrial Antiques 9:16 AM

With the housing market downturn and the recent collapse of the Ballpark Village deal, I started to think about other projects within the city, and especially those that have already claimed a piece of our built environment in order to start construction.

Specifically, the St. Louis Army and Ammunitions Plant (SLAAP) site at Goodfellow and I-70 came to mind, as did the old Gasometer in Forest Park Southeast. Both were demolished last year for new developments.



On the SLAAP site, “Goodfellow Crossing,” by Koman Properties, complete with a Home Depot store, is slated. With interstate visibility and a mostly missing urban context south of I-70, there is nearly a one hundred percent chance of this development joining the CSD (Conventional Suburban Development) club. Is a big box better than the industrial landmark that used to be on the site? I’m no engineer, nor environmental specialist, and so cannot assess the safety of living on such a contaminated site, even post-remediation. Even so, the awesomeness of the defunct and demolished SLAAP should have warranted unique redevelopment proposals. I hate to play the naysaying game, but this big suburban box will likely need reformatting in a decade or two. Who knows, though? Perhaps increased rehabilitation activity on the north side will warrant a large Home Depot store?

[Edit (4/2/08): Michael Allen of Ecology of Absence just confirmed that Home Depot has has backed out of this development. Refer to the end of this post and reflect even more ruefully.]

In Forest Park Southeast, the turn-of-the-century gasometer was torn down for a proposed residential development from Jerry King. Luckily, Built St. Louis snapped some photos of the doomed relic of the Laclede Gas Company. While there is a rendering of the development proposed for the adjacent vacant lot along Taylor and Chouteau, not much has been said of the Newstead side where the gasometer once loomed. I hope the housing market collapse has not precipitated a needless demolition of a onetime south side “landmark.”



Since I cannot find a copy of a group project I worked on as an undergrad regarding the salvage of this venerable skeletal structure, I will post my door-to-door quickfire interviews of nearby residents below. These were what residents had to say about the gasometer, circa December 2006.

Denise, waiting at the bus stop on Tower Grove and Gibson, on the gasometer.
"It's an eyesore. Tear it down and built apartments. Something. Anything."

43xx Chouteau
Teenage Girl: I think it should stay
Teenage Boy: What is it?
Me: Well, it's a natural gas tank. But they don't use it anymore.
TB: How long has it been there?
Me: Since 1903.
TB: Keep it up as a monument.

43xx Chouteau:
Martez: It doesn't bother me.
Me: Well you know they're tearing it down, right?
Martez: What are they building there then?
Me: Some apartments
Martez: Gotta get with the change!

43xx Chouteau
Jerry: If it doesn't have no purpose, knock it down

43xx Chouteau
Melvin: Why not tear it down?

43xx Chouteau
Mary explained to me that she had a friend whose house was seized by eminent domain right across the street. She says he did not get reimbursed at market value. She mistakenly thinks the gasometer, too, has been acquired using eminent domain, and she wants to see it stay to spite ED.
Mary is a large woman. Her hanging midriff is exposed as she explains she took so long to answer the door because she has arthritis.
Mary: I think it should stay up. People should have more rights.

43xx Chouteau
Mark: It's of no real consequence whether it stays or goes. In fact, I don't know if you know this since you're in the neighborhood and all, but, the neighborhood residents like to add a couple bullet holes in it come Fourth of July. So maybe it'd be better to see it come down."

43xx Chouteau:
Amy, who seems distracted and wanting to shoo me away: I'd like to see it turned into an art project. I have a couple ideas for it myself.

43xx Chouteau
Dorian: I'd like to see it stay. It lets you know you on the South Side! It's like the Arch, you just know you here when you see it. It's a good symbol. I like seeing it when I wake up in the morning and come outside."

43xx Chouteau
Algnieszka (I suspect this is a last name): I'm used to it.
Me: There are plans to demolish it.
A: Ah, yes. I have lived here for several years. I remember when it used to go up and down. What are they going to put there ... another parking garage?
Me: Actually, they're going to put some apartments and rowhouses there.
A: Well, that will be about the time to move.
Me: Oh? Why?
A: Because the neighborhood will not be the same.
(I suspect she thinks this is low income housing that I am speaking of and is suggesting the neighborhood will get worse.)
Me: Well, they're going to be fairly upscale, I believe, though there will be affordable units.
A: Yes, but I like the neighborhood's feel right now. I think this will change it. Yes, there are gun shots. Not as many as before. But I like it now.

44xx Chouteau
Woman who would not give me her name: It doesn't make me no difference.
Her building is in the shadow of the structure, which has kept a sheet of ice intact and safe from the heat of the sun.

44xx Chouteau
Cozette: It doesn't make any difference to me.

44xx Chouteau
Unnamed person: We really could care less
I peer inside. A whole family is sitting at a dinner table, filled with kids kicking their legs impatiently under the table. The door slams. Again, the gasometer's shadow preserves an icy porch.

44xx Chouteau
Truess: What is that thing? I have no idea.
Me: It is a gas tank. It used to supply natural gas to the city. It was built in 1903.
Truess: I say, keep stuff like that. It's a monument. Is that the word I'm looking for? No wait, it's a landmark. That's it.

44xx Chouteau
Doris: Keep the thing as long as it does not blow up. I mean, let inspectors in so they can make sure. But keep it if it not doing any harm.

Brian Phillips, Executive Director of the Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corporation
BP: I wouldn't mind seeing it demolished. It's been sitting vacant for years. Laclede gas company doesn't use that type of technology any more
[Is it entirely due to the gasometer's literal transparency, its bare skeletal structure, that people do not see the history and promise of such a structure?]
I explain to him that a group of gasometers was reused in Vienna, Austria.
BP: That would be highly unusual in the St. Louis market. ... Basically, any quality development on that site would be a boost to the neighborhood. If it brings more residents and businesses to the area, that would be great.

Beverly, 44xx Gibson: It needs to go. Something else could be put there in its place for children...a recreation center or something. People throw their environmental waste in there too. It's just bad.
Me: What?!
Beverly: You know, they beer cars and stuff like that.
Me: Oh.
I speak about memorializing the structure. I ask for her input. She seems skeptical about remembering the tank until I tell her it's from 1903.
Beverly: Well, that could name the new apartments after the gas thing, the...you know...thing.
I am about to walk away.
Beverly: or they could decorate the light poles with the metal!

Unnamed woman 44xx Gibson: it's ugly

Greg, 44xx Gibson: I don't know...it's a landmark...yeah...it's an interesting piece of the neighborhood

Brenda, 44xx Gibson: I really have never thought about it. It's going to look real strange without it. It's been there for what...20 years, 30 years?
Me: It was built in 1903
Brenda: Oh Lord!

Patricia, 44xx Gibson: I haven't seen it yet.
She has just moved in to her new apartment. Boxes dominate the floor space. She's about to leave anyway, so I escort her to the side of her new apartment where she sees the gasometer, she says, for the first time.
Patricia: it has gas!?
I ask her if she'd care if it were demolished for new apartments.
Patricia: You know...all that stuff that they'd be doing will make money, you know.

Celeste, 44xx Gibson: it's not being used, right?
Me: No.
Celeste: I really think they should tear it down.

Tyree, 44xx Gibson: "Oh...it can go...quickly"

Charles, 44xx Gibson: They should keep it up. That's antique. Know what I'm saying?

For more information on and photos of the SLAAP plant or the gasometer (including the other St. Louis gasometers in north St. Louis and Shrewsbury), follow the links.

What will become of the rest of St. Louis's abandoned industry--the Carter Carburetor plant on North Grand and the Carondelet Coke Plant on the extreme south side of the city, to name just two? And will these developments ever get built--and will they be better than what they replaced?

No way! 7:05 PM

Suburban developer McKee purchases St. Louis City Hall, Arch
by LAN D'GRABBE (Associated Press Writer)

ST. LOUIS, Mo. - Two iconic St. Louis buildings are part of a major purchase of land made by Paul McKee, Jr., a suburban St. Charles County developer. St. Louis City Hall on Tucker Boulevard and the famous national landmark the Gateway Arch were purchased by the developer, along with several other high profile public buildings including the Civil Courts Building, the Soldier's Memorial, and most of the St. Louis Loft District along Washington Avenue.

An associate of Mucker, LLC. (named for the Market Street and Tucker Boulevard intersection where City Hall is located), who bought the properties for a combined total of over one billion dollars, could not be reached for comment.

Mayor Francis Slay, a Democrat, lauded the purchases Tuesday.

"This is a great burden lifted off of the city," he remarked. "No longer will the city be unfairly pegged with maintaining anything--whether it be residential, commercial, public, or civic buildings."

Residents expressed concern over McKee's new holdings, arguing that his track record of land purchases in north St. Louis should have precluded him from undertaking such large responsibilities as the city's main governmental building and its chief tourist attraction, the Gateway Arch. Several buildings owned by McKee's associated LLCs have rapidly deteriorated, some stripped of their bricks and other decorative materials prior to emergency demolitions.

Mayor Slay said of such skepticism: "Well, this is the Show Me State. I don't know what McKee's plans are for these buildings, but I trust him. I'll sign on as soon as he shows me."

Asked if he is worried that St. Louis landmarks will be stripped of their architectural details and eventually bulldozed, Slay stated, "No. City Hall was built in 1898--it's old--and is a prime location for a publicly subsidized parking garage or suburban subdivision. And the Arch has lost its luster--it's about time we slapped some vinyl over it."