Image of Edward G. Lewis
University City celebrates the century it owes to an ex-con.
By David Linzee
Only seven years after he founded University City and became its first mayor, Edward G. Lewis was hounded out of town by creditors and investigators. He went to California, where his fundraising and city-building endeavors landed him in prison for fraud. So why is U. City celebrating its centennial by erecting a memorial to this dubious character?
“I wouldn’t call him dubious,” says Sue Rehkopf of the University City Historical Society, which is coordinating the memorial. “He was a dreamer, not a con man. He got things going. Nothing was ever too large for him. He was not great with details, but he didn’t set out to cheat anyone.”
Louis Gerteis, history professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, sums up Lewis this way: “He was a combination of visionary and huckster, riding the waves of Populist-era trends, like women’s rights and planned communities.”
Handsome and charismatic, Lewis was one of many young men from New England who came to St. Louis seeking their fortunes around the turn of the 20th century. He found his fortune by publishing women’s magazines. U. City’s octagonal City Hall, now sparkling after a multimillion-dollar renovation, started life as the Woman’s Magazine Building, his corporate headquarters. Mailed to farms and small towns all over the country, his publications allowed him to tap into the energy, optimism and naïveté of that younger America. He got his readers to sell magazine subscriptions by offering them free tuition at his university. He encouraged them to make deposits by mail to his bank and invested their money in the development of U. City. This was all a bit too slick for local and federal officials, who investigated Lewis for mail fraud and closed down his bank.
A fierce battle in the courts and the press ensued. Lewis’ defenders portrayed him as a champion of the people, oppressed by the establishment. His accusers said that he used false promises to steal from poor farm women. By 1914, his interconnected enterprises had collapsed. Yet, almost a century later, University City endures and bears his imprint.
“We would not have become what we are without him,” Rehkopf says.
“Lewis remains controversial,” notes Esley Hamilton, a preservation historian with St. Louis County, “but all agree that in urban planning, he was ahead of his time.”
Lewis made a number of shrewd choices in planning his model city. He sensed that St. Louis’ premier suburbs would be to the west and bought open ground near the new campus of Washington University. He also offered a range of housing in his first development, University Heights No. 1, with sprawling mansions at the top of the hill and more modest dwellings on the slope. Later planning and zoning authorities followed his lead, creating a city with mixed land use and an ethnically and economically diverse population. Lewis’ successors also added to the Civic Plaza, the group of grand buildings near the Lion Gates on Delmar. Eric Sandweiss, author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape, believes that the plaza became a symbol for the spirit of U. Citians. Hamilton says it instilled pride in the community, so that even “in the ’50s and ’60s, when U. City was under pressure, people wanted to stay.”
In those years, the troubles that beset most aging inner suburbs hit U. City. Streetcars gave way to automobiles and developing suburbs lured the well-to-do farther west as the poor moved in from the east—a shift encouraged and exploited by racist real-estate practices such as redlining and blockbusting. U. City’s population dropped from 60,000 in the ’60s to 35,000 in the ’90s. Its once-proud public schools went into decline. The business district, named the Loop after a streetcar turnaround, suffered from the loss of its streetcar. “The Loop died in the ’70s,” says former City Council member Lewis Lieberman.
But U. City’s people and their leaders “recognized problems early and tried to do something about them,” says Mike Giger, president of the Parkview Gardens Association, a neighborhood-improvement group. They fought blockbusting, started the first house tour in the area and established the University City Residential Service to promote their housing stock. “U. City has been the forerunner for a lot of activities that are now being tried nationwide,” Giger says.
Those efforts are paying off. Though the population remains well below its ’60s peak, the assistant city manager, Thomas Moton, says that the city has the same number of households as it did then. The lower figure represents a national trend toward fewer people per household, rather than empty houses. Lieberman predicts that the next census will show considerable growth, thanks to new construction. The Loop has come back strong; it was recently called “the literal and figurative center of St. Louis culture” by St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic Joe Williams. And U. City may even get its streetcars back, in a project spearheaded by Joe Edwards of Blueberry Hill and the Pageant.
Sandweiss says that a memorial to Lewis may not be necessary because the city itself is his monument. Research needs to be done to establish whether the charges against him were justified, Sandweiss adds. “But a walk down Delmar on a sunny spring day makes that almost a moot point. Flawed people can do great things.”
