South St. Louis, Then & Now

Posted on 03/22/2010 by Toby Weiss

Bates Street & Morgan Ford
South St. Louis, MO

FILE PHOTO This venerable “gasoline service station” opened in 1931, back when 2 gas pumps in front of a tiny garage was all that was needed to handle vehicular volume in this section of Bevo Mill. We are fortunate to have such historical remnants of the city’s past still standing and operating today.

OK, this is actually a lame Photoshop gag.
I took this photo just the other day. With the vintage pickup truck parked in front, the place was an endearing warp in the space/time continuum. This brief, anachronistic moment is Reason #1,238 why I love the City of St. Louis.

Walking Tour of CWE MCM, May 17th

Posted on 05/11/2009 by Toby Weiss

From Landmarks Association:

Sunday, May 17, 2009: Film and Walking Tour

This was the Future: Mid-Century Modern Architecture on Lindell Blvd.
10:00 a.m.
Begin inside the Chase Park Plaza Cinema, 212 N. Kingshighway

Have a mid-century modern morning in May! A screening of the new short documentary San Luis: This Was the Future tells the story of the threatened San Luis Apartments. After the 10 minute film, Toby Weiss of beltstl.com and Michael Allen (ecology of absence) will lead a walking tour of the many mid-century treasurers along Lindell Boulevard, where modern design flourished between World War II and the 1970s. The walk will run from the Chase Park Plaza Hotel to Vandeventer and back, so be prepared for serious walking.

See a free movie, take a free tour, get a little exercise, get a lot of knowledge… there are worse ways to spend a Sunday morning! Please do join us Sunday if you can. Michael is the brains of the outfit, I’ll be the “little song, little dance, a little seltzer down the pants.” It promises to be a good time.

This Was The Future

Posted on 04/18/2009 by Toby Weiss

Towards the effort to save the San Luis, a documentary was made in 48 hours over the first weekend in March 2009. I was honored to be asked to be a part of this adventure, and a big round of applause to everyone involved. You’re all brilliant.

There are plans for a proper screening in May during Preservation Week (details forthcoming), but you can watch it now. It’s less than 8 minutes long, so watch it a couple of times, and pass it around. It’s an easy way to raise the profile of a building longing to be spiffed up and returned to its glamorous life.

St. Louis in National Geographic, November 1965

Posted on 04/10/2009 by Toby Weiss

St. Louis was extensively covered in the November 1965 issue of National Geographic. The Arch was almost complete, the new Busch Stadium was under construction, and wiping out old ugliness for new (federally funded) progress had many optimistic for the resurgence of the city that was just around the corner.

Much thanks to Jonathan Swegle and Jeff Vines for putting this issue in my hands.

Click on each individual spread and it will pop into a new window so you can read it. Within the following pages, many projects are mentioned. Please help me keep track of the following:
Which buildings are now gone?
Which remain?
Which projects panned out as expected?
Which ones didn’t?
Is there anything to be learned from this snapshot of the past?

Remembering Famous-Barr
Missouri Botanical Garden

Cherokee Street Evolution

Posted on 04/06/2009 by Toby Weiss

Cherokee Street, between Gravois and Jefferson Avenues
South St. Louis, MO

The Cherokee Street Open House felt a bit like a debutante ball, but rather than debuting young ladies into society it was more like grand dames getting their groove back after a messy divorce. So actually, it was more like a Cougar Coronation… Anyhoo, the old broad is back, much like “Hello Dolly, ” wherein they bridge the gap, fellas and find her an empty lap, fellas ‘cos Cherokee Street will never go away again.

The Cherokee business district was a major retail hub that sprung up around the electric street car lines. Come the cancellation of the street cars in the late 1950s, Cherokee worked on accommodating buses and cars, but as population fled the city, this district was left high and dry. Here’s a good history of the rise and leveling off of the district.

Come the 1980s-90s, things got a bit bleak and seedy. The vast majority of old guard retail died off, retired or moved to the county. New business moved in to old spaces, but not at the same pace as vacancies, so the district took on the look of a period piece movie set after filming had ended. But this faded grandeur offered up its own charms.

The retail architecture chatted about its past as you walked by, and even if you weren’t listening closely, you still got the gist of what it used to be.

During the near-desolate 1990s, I spent a lot of time at Hammond’s Books, Record Exchange, Salvation Army, and both the Globe Drug and Globe Variety stores. In 2009, gloriously, only Record Exchange and Globe Variety are gone (the former relocated, the latter retired), while the others remain, to be joined by heaping handfuls of new and unique businesses.

(A magical history tour of Globe Drug will be coming up shortly.)

It’s pure delight to have new proprietors walk over the terrazzo thresholds of past shopkeepers and prop their wares into the same display windows. It’s both an appreciation and continuation of a grand tradition.

Talking in sweeping generalizations, key South City business hubs were vacated by whites and left floundering until two groups unaffected by the weight of its history came along: immigrants and young people.

Think Bosnians bringing Bevo Mill back to life, or Asians injecting flavor into the South Grand business district. In both cases, it’s a group of foreign people settling into an old American city, noticing the near-empty spots of high density business and residential similar to their homeland, noticing how cheap the real estate is and noticing that it’s theirs for the taking.

With optimistic foreign energy percolating, the young and adventurous come along to bask in the freedom from mall culture, and a new “frontier town” blossoms. And so it went with Cherokee Street and the large Mexican population blooming in St. Louis City. They took advantage of the ready-made space, and now the young and adventurous native entrepeneurs are filling in the gaps with shops and unique concepts that perfectly compliment the veterans in the area. Here’s a brief smorgasboard of the variety of the area.

So, on one deliciously sunny spring day, Cherokee Street proprietors opened up their doors for a massive meet-and-greet party, a genius way to distill and bottle the new essence of the district, letting visitors drink until drunk on the goodwill of possibility.

Pianos tinkled and aquatic fairies twinkled, and all was right in South St. Louis. Cherokee Street has set the bar high for civic pride, education (the historic plaques on the buildings are frickin’ brilliant) and uplift by osmosis. Their brand of Open House is a model I hope other burroughs of the city will adopt to embrace and elevate what makes St. Louis City so vibrant.

As the sun set on the day, a loop paraphrasing Dr. Suess kept on in my brain: “and to think that I saw it on Cherokee Street.” Click here to see more photos ot the Cherokee Open House.

Central West End "Progress"

Posted on 01/24/2009 by Toby Weiss

A “Special Progress Section” was included in the May 7, 1961 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These 3 examples shown boasted about the progress on Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End, like the Optimist building.

They also touted the new building for the Engineer’s Club, which is by the same architecture firm as the Optimist building, Schwarz & Van Hoefen.

And then there was the new chancery office for the Catholic Archdiocese, which was under construction at the time of publication. By clicking on the above photo to read the caption, one finds this quote:

The Catholic Church has been a bulwark in the fight against decay, providing assistance for the Central West End Association and other neighborhood groups.

Ironically, the same Catholic Church that championed progress on this block of Lindell now wants to tear down one of those progressive buildings they helped usher in.
Learn more about the push to save the San Luis here.

It was a sweet justification to find this “Special Progress Section,” because it supports what I’ve been trying to say about the Central West End and Lindell Boulevard, in particular: all chapters of its story are important and vital. And it is highly irresponsible and short- sighted to begin destroying buildings that were considered the desirable solution to older buildings they felt needed to be destroyed. The cycle has got to stop! We can no longer (literally) afford to squander our history and resources. There must be real understanding of past and present, and a practical plan and vision for the future based on the realities and aspirations of the entire community.

You can see how these 3 buildings look today by clicking here.

Like a Phantom Limb: The Ambassador Theater

Posted on 10/15/2008 by Toby Weiss

Inside the late Ambassador Theater
7th & Locust, Downtown St. Louis, MO
Upon learning the news of a plans for a parking garage to go up on the plaza that brought down a building, I’ve been reminiscing hard about the Ambassador.

The theater itself closed long before I could see shows that created life-long conversation about concerts within. To this day, I still hear folks older than me tell tales of shows they saw there, and those memories keep the building alive.

In the final days of the 17-story Ambassador building, there was only one business left inside. It was a scroungy, hole-in-wall Chinese restaurant that I ate at about once a week, because I worked at the Famous-Barr building nearby. Rather than the food court on the 4th floor of the leaky-roofed St. Louis Centre, I preferred eating there because it had weathered soul, and allowed me to “use” and be inside the Ambassador building. I clearly remember the day in summer of 1989 when the owners told me the restaurant would be shutting down; they’d been evicted because the building had been bought and was coming down. That shock was followed by a slow and painful lingering death over the next 7 years.

In the late spring of 1990, they opened up the ground floor of the building for a public auction of the theater’s contents. During the time one could tour what they might want to bid on, I spent lunch hours photographing as much of it as I could. The two black & white photos above are from one session, and click here to see the color shots I shared with Rob Powers.

Those hours spent inside the remains of the Ambassador still pop into my memory with alarming frequency. I remember the sights: as I photographed the ticket booth (above), a man asked, “Are you buying that?” I remember the smells: a stack of musty sheet music found backstage and the lingering scent of stale perfume in the ladies’ rest room. But it’s the overwhelming feeling of sadness that sticks the hardest. I still feel it every time I walk by that unused bank plaza.

That I’m not the only one who feels renewed outrage at the latest developments on that property highlights how important our landmark buildings are. They can tear down the building itself, but just can’t kill its meaning or the resonance of its demise. The Ambassador is downtown’s phantom limb.

(One of these lamps – above – wound up in the movie theater at the revamped Northwest Plaza.)

The Ambassador remains a cautionary tale about dunderheaded downtown planning politics, and how “they” haven’t learned anything in the 13+ years since its demise. For instance:

* If the building could have been mothballed for just a few more years, it would now be a precious gem in the crown of downtown’s rehab renaissance.

* Now, let’s put up a parking garage on the land, and revisit the bad juju of another parking garage just 2 blocks away from the burial grounds of the Century Building (another phantom limb).

It’s not just the misguided and clueless idea of another new parking garage surrounded by a minimum of 5 other parking garages within less than a 4-block radius that burns. It’s that we have City Fathers’ missing the importance of the tax dollar influx from our rehabbed historic forest for the precarious limbs of a banking tree. This corporation already once wasted an opportunity for the entire downtown region with a flimsy excuse, and are potentially being allowed to add insult to the lingering injury. That they are seriously discussing giving them $700K in tax incentives for this folly creates a chilly parallel to the $700 billion U.S. bailout of national banks being rescued for bad behavior.

I sincerely wish our city could learn from past mistakes and work toward elevating our resources and potential rather than financing another dog and pony show.

Remembering Famous-Barr

Posted on 08/21/2008 by Toby Weiss

Inside the September issue of Vanity Fair (whose cover asks “Carla Bruni: The New Jackie O?” to the sound of a million eyes rolling) is a special advertising section called St. Louis Luxury Living. Within this section is an ad for Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers, featuring the photo shown above.

Gorgeous photo (wish there was a photo credit) of a gorgeous building that started life as the first Famous-Barr in St. Louis County, from 1948 to 1991. It’s heartening to see a good building continually appreciated by being continually occupied and loved by its occupants.

I worked in the downtown Famous-Barr advertising department from 1988 to 2001. The building and its history always enchanted me, from grade-school adventures to see the Christmas windows to my tenure inside as an employee. Famous-Barr sold to Macy’s and then Macy’s shut down the advertising department (along with the headquarters a few floors up), with the last advertising troopers turning off the lights as they left at the beginning of July 2008.

It saddens me to think of that advertising department – which was there since the 1920s – gone for good. But at least the building is still there.

This week, the Suburban Journals ran a piece recounting the day the Southtown Famous-Barr opened in 1951. Jim Merkel’s “This Week in South Side History” is a regular feature, and he deserves a large round of applause for his consistent coverage of the South Side built environment.

The only thing missing from the article is photos of the Southtown Famous. So I dug out some photos I took on Christmas Day 1994, during the demolition of the building (shown above and below). That massive lot sat vacant for so long that I lost sense memory of the building, but the photos brought it all back. It really gave the Kingshighway/Chippewa intersection a “here’s where it’s all happening” feeling one only experiences in densely packed and deeply loved urban neighborhoods.

One interesting thing in the Journal article is the sickening sense of deja vu.

“I believe this beautiful structure signifies the confidence held by business leaders throughout the nation in the people of St. Louis. Here we have an outstanding example of the company’s recognition of the economic possibilities to be developed in St. Louis.”
– Mayor Joseph Darst

These quotes are from 1951, a year after a peak population of 856,796 in St. Louis City. Yet it still reeks of the exact same low-self esteem statements made by our current Mayor & Co. to this very day. Meaning, even when this city was top of the heap it felt bottom of the barrel?

From where and why does this city have such chronic low self-esteem issues? It works like negative manifesting and is, frankly, unattractive and undeserved. Is there a clandestine and long-standing political plan to keep this city in a meek and groveling state of mind? Is it a certain generational mindset passed on down? Is it an unforeseen backfiring of St. Louis humility and gentility?

If anyone has any plausible theories on St. Louis Self Esteem origins, I’d love to hear them.

Ralph Clark Pharmacy, Overland MO

Posted on 09/04/2007 by Toby Weiss

Above is a construction photo, circa 1945, of the building that still stands at Lackland & Brown Roads in Overland, Missouri. We see this photo now because a relative of the man responsible for this building saw this post, and shared some of her personal family treasures.

Other than new replacement windows on the second floor, the building remains remarkably unchanged and just as vital as the day it first opened for business.

Cerelle Bolon of Phoeniz, AZ sent me all the b&w photos shown here. Her late uncle Ralph Clark (shown below) was the owner/builder/pharmacist of his namesake building. Cerelle writes:

“I am his sister’s daughter, and we visited there every summer. It was great to see it still preserved and looking good! I mentioned this to my mother, Mildred Clark Bright, who will be 100 on October 28th, and she said that Uncle Ralph was so proud of that building and his profession. And rightly he should have been.

My mother and her six siblings were raised during the depression, and their father, who had started as a blacksmith, later took a job in a foundry in St. Louis. He rode two buses cross town from Wellston to work.

All of their children became well educated. Three of the brothers became pharmacists, and one brother, Glynn Clark, graduated from Washington University (as did I in 1959), became a Marine lt. Colonel and an educator. He eventually became president of Meramec Community College in Kirkwood. My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years.

“This is just to let you know how happy I am to share my pride in my family’s well-deserved accomplishments, and I am happy knowing that Uncle Ralph would have LOVED to know that you are still proud of his building.”

I adore the internet for 2 reasons.
#1: fine people like Cerelle can contribute their pieces of the larger puzzle because
#2: the built environment means something to all of us, and cyberspace gives the hoi polloi a place to share the joy.

It’s not just the privilege of architects, city planners, professors and developers, but is a part of all of us. We do not need to know text book architectural terms to know what is beautiful, useful and essential to us. We live and work in these buildings within our communities, and (to paraphrase Wilde) though all of us are in the gutter, some of us are looking at the brick work, fenestration and pride of place.
Thank you, Miss Cerelle!

Little Bevo

Posted on 08/04/2007 by Toby Weiss

Morgan Ford St. near Delor, South St. Louis, MO
This Strassenfest weekend is the perfect time to discuss Little Bevo, of which I know very little.

This needs to be said right up front: I find this building horribly unattractive and it creeps me out. But I’m often unable to control a fascination with things I hate (like Styx), and this building is a perfect example. I instinctively loathe all manner of traditional German architecture and food. Being a product of a predominantly German bloodline indicates I have some self-loathing heritage issues, but this doesn’t bother me near as much as, say, Mel Gibson does.

With the unflattering disclaimer made, a detached observation of Little Bevo is now possible.

This 1924 building is directly across from the notorious Bevo Mill, and since it was built 8 years later, it is a Mill pastiche which tends to give the immediate area a theme park feel. From the look of it, seems a safe guess that it was once a tavern and/or restaurant, and if anyone knows the history of this building, please do speak up because Little Bevo is defiantly silent.

In the 17 years of living in the South Side, I’ve never seen it anything other than boarded up. City inspectors haven’t touched it since 2001. Every single building around it has been brought to life by the Bosnian community, so it’s a sure bet that many of them have looked into buying and renovating this place, since Little Bevo sits firmly in the middle of Little Bosnia.

While life swells around it, Little Bevo just sulks. Aside from the layers of poop from years of being an elaborate pigeon coop, everything is intact. With three apartments above the retail ground floor, it’s a multipurpose building in a prime location. You just know there is a businessman who gets irked every time he has to walk by this hulk of wasted potential.

So, the building is a constant mystery, calling all kinds of attention to itself because of its silence. Is this a premeditated business maneuver of the owners? Perhaps a stand-off in a grudge match? No one wants it because it’s haunted? The character of this building encourages such exaggerated speculation.

B.E.L.T.

Built Environment in Layman's Terms

Category Archives: st. louis history