Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site
It’s a frigid day in December when I climb into Esley Hamilton’s red Ford Focus for a driving tour of St. Louis County. Hamilton wears a salmon-colored sweater over a matching shirt, with black corduroy pants. He’s known for his tweedy appearance, round spectacles, and slightly nasal tenor. It’s a voice that many bureaucrats have come to know after years of hearing the preservation historian fight to save some of the region’s most significant landmarks.
Since he began working in historic preservation, Hamilton’s cataloged more than 4,000 county buildings and added 30 properties and eight historic districts to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2003, the Post-Dispatch hailed him as “the ultimate bureaucratic wheel-greaser.”
In January, however, due to budget shortfalls, Hamilton’s employer, the St. Louis County Parks & Recreation department, eliminated 32 full-time positions—a dozen of which were vacant at the time—and 20 part-time positions. Though Hamilton’s job was unaffected, he plans to retire this year, and the department already has indicated that his position will most likely be eliminated.
What does that mean for St. Louis County?
I quickly learn not to ask Hamilton. “My greatest strength is showing up,” he says. “Essentially, I just come to every meeting and keep telling [groups working to save a building] that this is important and don’t give up.”
When the Interstate 64 expansion threatened three houses on Bennett Avenue, a Richmond Heights subdivision settled by African-Americans in the 1950s, Hamilton convinced the Missouri Department of Transportation to modify its plans. It was Hamilton and his interns who spent a day measuring the Spanish Lake Blacksmith Shop to prepare it for a move to Faust Park (which he also championed), so it wouldn’t be torn down for a Dollar General. When the Utz-Tesson House in Hazelwood was threatened with demolition, Hamilton took out an ad in Preservation magazine for a buyer. For 25 years, he fought to move the Tappmeyer House from Olive Boulevard to Millennium Park, where the Creve Coeur Club uses it today.
We drive through central-corridor subdivisions like the Moorlands, Hampton Park, and Maryland Terrace. Hamilton points out houses designed by Isadore Shank, a St. Louis–based midcentury architect, and Angelo Corrubia, who designed St. Ambrose Church. We circle through Clayton subdivisions designed by landscape architect Henry Wright, who laid out the progressive Radburn community in Fair Lawn, N.J., in 1928.
Finally, we pull up to a green two-story house in Affton—a building of national importance that nearly perished years ago.
"This can’t be happening,” Hamilton thought.
It was January 12, 1979, and he was visiting Delbert Wenzlick at White Haven, Wenzlick’s longtime home in Affton—which also happened to be the former familial home of President Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent. Grant himself also briefly lived there before the Civil War.
Wenzlick had invited Hamilton and then–St. Louis County historic preservationist Virginia Stith to his home the day after being released from the hospital, having suffered cardiac arrest. As he led them into the basement to show them his scrapbooks, Wenzlick began gasping for breath. He was having another heart attack.
While Wenzlick’s wife hurried upstairs to call for help, Stith and Hamilton tried to find an entrance for the emergency-response team. At the time, the basement didn’t have an exterior entrance, so they rushed through the furnace room. Finding a small door blocked by snow, they used shovels and brute force to open it. Minutes ticked away. The January cold seeped in. Wenzlick struggled to breathe.
“This can’t be happening,” Hamilton thought again.
Help arrived, but it was too late.
Soon, developers were suggesting White Haven would be an ideal spot for condominiums.
At the time, Hamilton was just starting out in historic preservation. A Maryland native, he’d received his bachelor’s degree in English literature at Syracuse University and spent time studying in Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as Florence, Italy. It was while working on his master’s degree in urban planning at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that Hamilton had arranged an internship in East St. Louis.
When draft deferment for graduate students had ended in 1968, Hamilton immediately received an induction notice. Hoping a job in East St. Louis would allow him to defer fighting in Vietnam, he called Model Cities, a community redevelopment program. “My draft board was in Silver Spring, Md., and they were all freaked out because of the riot that had taken place just a few blocks from their office that spring, when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed,” he recalls.
Joining Model Cities worked, and Hamilton—who’d only planned to work in East St. Louis for two years, until his draft eligibility ended—stayed for seven. Eventually, he left to study architectural history at Washington University, where he also began working for St. Louis County’s Parks & Recreation department.
In the early ’80s, Hamilton wrote the National Historic Landmarks nomination for White Haven. His research became the starting point for the National Park Service’s historical restoration of the property. In 1985, concerned citizens formed Save Grant’s White Haven, a group that raised awareness about the home through lectures and concerts.
“I think that our strategy of getting the public involved was the right one,” Hamilton says. “It’s always good to be able to reason with the decision makers and show them that this is the right thing to do, but that doesn’t compare with having a lot of screaming people behind you.”
Eventually, Wenzlick’s widow, Ann, donated half of the property. Then–St. Louis County Executive Gene McNary used a state loan and county bond issue to pay the remaining $510,000. The VP Fair Foundation later paid back the loan, and together with the county, it handed the property over to the National Park Service in 1990.
Even today, more than three decades after the fight to preserve White Haven began, Hamilton cites it as his most important save.
Information is Hamilton’s artillery in battles to rescue historic homes and persuade others that the past is worth preserving. “I always wish that I had a smidge of the information that he has,” says Michelle Swatek, executive director of The American Institute of Architects’ St. Louis chapter. “If I had that much information, I would probably be smug with it; Esley never acts as if he knows more than anybody else.”
Hamilton earned the nickname The Answer Man not only because he always knows the answer (or knows who would know), but also because “to Esley, there are no dumb questions,” says Michael Hardgrove, president emeritus of KETC Channel 9. “If you ask what you think is a pretty simple question, he will give you a pretty complex answer.”
Eleanor Mullin, president of the Historical Society of University City, recalls the time a friend claimed there was a Frank Lloyd Wright house in University City. Mullin bet otherwise. “I called Esley,” she says. “He didn’t even have to look that up. He’s like, ‘Oh no, that house was built for so-and-so in the year such-and-such, and the architect was this-and-that.’ I won a pizza at Pi.”
Hamilton’s interests are broad. “There’s just no field that he’s not well-versed in,” says longtime friend Mary Jo Cannon, who’s married to architect Jamie Cannon. “It’s your topic, but he knows as much as you do about it.” On our drive, we talk about the choir at the Unitarian church where he sings tenor, the 13 operas he saw in 2011, and his passion for English country cottages.
Hamilton isn’t just a historian or a preservationist; he’s also a critic. He lambastes Washington University’s new Green Hall. “That archway is so badly designed, it’s just excruciating to me every time I see it,” he says. And he criticizes the Missouri Botanical Garden for neglecting the Museum Building for 30-plus years; last year, the garden announced plans to open a museum in the historic Georgian-style structure.
Hamilton’s arguments often champion the neglected and denounce elitism. “The [Wash. U.] School of Architecture is made up of so many purists that they won’t even consider a period-revival style as being legitimate architecture,” says Hamilton, who teaches at the university. The “red-granite monstrosities” at the college are in the collegiate Gothic Revival style, “so there’s really no reasoned criticism of these buildings that might cause them to be improved,” he says. “People either think they’re fine or they think they’re just beyond contempt.”
“He makes other people upset,” says Nancy Hardgrove, who’s invited Hamilton to lecture at the St. Louis–Jefferson chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She says the audience often asks, “Why aren’t we doing something about this?”
Hamilton was also the keynote speaker at The American Institute of Architects’ first St. Louis chapter meeting of the year. Though his lecture was about Collegiate Gothic architecture, he began by thanking everyone for supporting the county’s parks when St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley threatened to close some of them in November due to budget shortfalls. Though the parks will remain open, Hamilton emphasized that St. Louis County needs to start treating the parks like an integral part of government. When he added that he plans on staying with the parks because he doesn’t “have time to fill out the retirement forms,” the audience broke into applause.
Hamilton gives more than 60 lectures a year. He used to offer tours as well, but he retired from them last fall. “I was working seven days a week about four months of the year,” he says. “I couldn’t do it anymore.” (Later, he admits he’ll be giving a tour in the spring—an item in a charity auction.)
Hamilton also teaches two classes a year at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts: one in landscape architecture, the other in historic preservation. “Esley always has more plates spinning than I’ve ever seen,” says Christopher Chappell, a graduate student in Washington University’s architecture program who took Hamilton’s historic-preservation course and interned for him last summer.
Hamilton also edits the Society of Architectural Historians’ newsletter, and he’s written more than 120 books and articles and organized 11 exhibits about local history and architects.
He started out writing National Register of Historic Places nominations, but changed his approach after all 19 historic buildings at the Robert Koch Hospital for Contagious Disease were demolished in 1989 despite being on the list. Since then, Hamilton’s “tried to work more on public education and trying to get local municipalities to establish local historic-building commissions. That’s why I give so many talks and why we have publications.”
“One of the most important things he’s taught me is the value of outreach,” says historic preservationist Michael Allen. After Allen wrote a letter to the Riverfront Times bemoaning the destruction of the Beaumont Medical Building in midtown in 1997 and complaining about the design of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (“if you can believe that,” Allen chuckles), Hamilton tracked him down and said he was delighted to know someone else shared his opinion. He gave Allen a free one-year subscription to the Society of Architectural Historians’ newsletter. That, according to Allen, “encouraged me to take a hard look at a career in preservation.” Now, Allen heads his own historic-preservation enterprise, the Preservation Research Office.
Hamilton’s office is full of relics: a microfiche reader, a heater that appears to be a historic artifact, some haphazardly hung awards. In 2011, he won the Meade Summers Award for Lifetime Achievement in Historic Preservation from the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, as well as the Webster Groves Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award (he was the first nonresident to do so). On his office door is a tribute from the Post-Dispatch Weatherbird; last year, the newspaper ran a readers’ poll asking what the Weatherbird should say about Esley Hamilton. The line chosen: “Irreplaceable.”
Hamilton’s office is mostly filled with binders labeled with the names of neighborhoods and subdivisions. He thinks these records are his real legacy and isn’t sure what to do with them. “If they’re going to eliminate the position, they’ll just throw them away,” Hamilton says. “The State Historical Society has agreed to take them, but once we give them to that society, then it would be almost impossible to do what I do,” he says, because of limited access to the records.
He doesn’t seem ready to retire. “I have such a long list of unfinished projects, it’s pathetic,” he says.
Recently, he’s attended meetings about Rock Hill Presbyterian Church. U-Gas bought the property where the church and the 1839 Fairfax House stand, at the intersection of Rock Hill and Manchester roads. The convenience-store chain has agreed to retain the house, but the church faces demolition. Slaves built Rock Hill Presbyterian Church in 1845 and worshiped there with white property owners. “They were also buried together in the cemetery,” says Chris Musial, a member of the Save the Rock Hill Church committee. The cemetery was moved in the late 1800s to make way for Manchester Road, but “that integration continued through the Civil War and segregation. To me, that’s the very symbol of Rock Hill. We want to be an integrated, diverse community.”
Musial met Hamilton at a Rock Hill Board of Aldermen meeting. “He seemed a lot busier than I would have thought,” Musial says with a laugh. Hamilton advised the committee to draw up a business plan and get it approved by the Board of Aldermen before approaching donors for moving costs. He also suggested relocating the church to Rock Hill Park.
At press time, the outlook was unclear. It would cost around $400,000 to move the church, according to some estimates, but a plan was approved by the board allowing a search for a donor. And while Rock Hill has a historic-preservation ordinance, the city hasn’t designated the church a landmark.
Hamilton sighs. It’s only the latest in a string of battles. Last year alone, he expressed concerns about the county selling part of Sylvan Springs Park to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, Washington University tearing down part of McMillan Hall to make way for its Olin Business School, and the deterioration of Oak Grove Memorial Mausoleum near Normandy.
Brownhurst mansion, however, was his most vexing project. Daniel Sidney Brown built the limestone-and-shingle mansion in 1892. The Society of Mary bought the house for novice nuns in 1918. In 1960, when St. John Vianney High School opened on the grounds, the house was vacated and fell into desuetude. “It had been on our most endangered list for more than 10 years,” Hamilton explains. “[The Kirkwood Landmarks Commission] let the owners walk all over them when they should have been taking them to court years ago over their neglect of the building.” He calls it “demolition by neglect.”
Last May, the Society of Mary requested a demolition permit, which started a firestorm of controversy. Eventually, the religious order agreed not to tear down the house if a buyer would pay to have the house moved by October and restored elsewhere. It also agreed to donate $30,000 to moving costs and sell the house for $1. Though a buyer came forward in September and offered to restore the home, there were no plans to move it—and the house was torn down.
“I was very upset about that,” Hamilton says. “I was quoted in the Webster-Kirkwood Times as saying that was one of the most unethical things I had ever seen, and [the Society of Mary] teaches ethics.”
When a historic building is torn down, “we lose a tangible connection with the lives of countless people,” says Allen. “The city’s architecture is really the sum of its parts—the fewer parts there are, the less the sum. We can’t save every building, of course, but we can certainly slow the rate of loss.”
Over the years, Hamilton has lost some battles. The most significant was the Streamline Moderne Coral Court Motel, built on Route 66 (Watson Road) in 1941. Over the years, the motel had earned a reputation for what went on behind closed doors. (The units’ attached garages allowed patrons to hide their cars.) Carl Austin Hall, who kidnapped Bobby Greenlease in 1953, spent the night there with a woman of ill repute and $600,000 in ransom money before he was caught and sent to prison. Half of the ransom was never recovered; though it was rumored to be in the motel, the money wasn’t found when the building was torn down years later to make way for a residential complex.
Before the hotel was demolished, Hamilton had taken the same approach as he had with White Haven, trying to encourage community involvement to save the Coral Court. The village of Marlborough’s Board of Trustees, however, didn’t create a historic-preservation ordinance or designate the site a landmark. How did Hamilton feel when the building was torn down in the spring of 1995? “People were resigned to it,” he says.
“Preservationists are…” Allen pauses. “I won’t say naysayers, but they tend to assume the worst: that we’re going to lose battles and that we’re going to lose buildings. But Esley never seems to tire. He never seems to be ill-humored about it. He seems to always be a cheerful warrior.”
“We don’t win them all,” adds Jane Gleason, chairwoman of St. Louis County’s Historic Buildings Commission. “But I think we’ve won more because of him and his research over the years.”
As we drive, Hamilton stops at three sites that he didn’t personally save.
In the ’60s, before Hamilton moved to St. Louis, Ferguson-Florissant School District purchased the property where Taille de Noyer sat and made plans to expand McCluer High School. Instead, the newly formed Florissant Valley Historical Society raised funds to move the historic antebellum home and restore it. Today, it remains a museum and the society’s headquarters. “It’s really an important landmark in the history of preservation,” says Hamilton.
This was the first (and for a while, the only) county-municipality historical society. Hamilton has strived to get more of St. Louis County’s 90-plus municipalities to “have preservation built into the overall planning of the city, instead of considering it a separate category,” he says. During his tenure, 13 municipalities have added historic-preservation ordinances.
“Esley is concerned about every piece of St. Louis County and can document that concern,” says architect Jamie Cannon. “Who’s going to be concerned when he leaves? The politicians aren’t.”
So what, exactly, is St. Louis County losing with Hamilton’s departure?
Cannon pauses. “I think they’re losing their conscience.”
Parks & Checks
Why St. Louis County Parks & Recreation is shrinking and what it’s doing to stay afloat
Before the St. Louis County Parks & Recreation Department’s budget was finalized earlier this year, its staff brainstormed ideas to earn more revenue. It considered opening up some of the parks to RVs, adding paintball battlefields, moving out of the St. Louis County government offices, or setting up a foundation like Forest Park Forever. In the end, though, St. Louis County cut the department’s budget by $3.6 million by eliminating 32 full-time positions—a dozen of which were funded but vacant—and 20 part-time positions.
The budget crisis was years in the making, though.
In April 2004, St. Louis County residents voted down Proposition P, which would have increased the county’s sales tax by one-eighth of a cent to provide the parks department with a dedicated funding source, so it wouldn’t have to rely on the county’s General Fund. That vote, coupled with the recession, means “we’ve probably been shrinking gradually for the last 10 years,” says Lindsey Swanick, director of St. Louis County Parks & Recreation. In the past five years alone, the department lost 45 positions—a 17 percent reduction (it now employs 203 full-timers and 229 part-timers). Yet it continues to operate 70 parks and five community centers.
Facing the possibility of more cuts, the department is looking for additional ways to save money. “We’re going to try to cluster our facilities,” says Swanick. “In other words, close a lot of smaller maintenance buildings, which will save on computer costs, phone lines, and utilities—but it takes time to do that. We’re always looking to try to increase our revenue and programming, but you can’t make up this kind of shortfall in recreational fees.”
Swanick also says rolling the park-maintenance fund into the real-estate tax through a 2-cent increase could provide the department with an additional $6 million to $8 million annually and cost the average homeowner $8 to $9 per year.
For now, though, the department is tightening its belt. “We’re going to look very ragged,” Swanick says. “You’re going to see trash in the parks, you may see bathrooms not cleaned as frequently. Pool season is going to be shortened. We’ve never done this before,
so it’s sort of hard for us to predict.”
