Image of Larry Giles
Keeper of the Treasures
By Lynnda Greene
Photography by Dilip Vishwanat
Whenever another fine old building falls victim to urban renewal’s relentless wrecking ball, Larry Giles is there for the last rites, using scaffolding, hoists, crowbars and bare hands to recover precious pieces of the building’s mute dignity. Working largely alone for 30 years, this unassuming self-appointed keeper of our built past has been squirreling away a treasure trove of the St. Louis history we’ve been too misguided to cherish. Today his collection, a jaw-dropping 250,000 artifacts, includes 110,000 pieces of the ornamental brick, terra cotta and other building materials used by the architects and craftsmen who made St. Louis one of the most architecturally significant cities in the nation.
Now owned by the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation (www.buildingmuseum.org), a not-for-profit Giles established in 2002, the artifacts—along with Giles’ library of 25,000 rare and out-of-print architecture books and original source materials—are being moved to a newly purchased 12-acre site near Sauget, Ill., to await the construction of a new home where we can all enjoy them. Thanks to enthusiastic local supporters, plans for what will become the National Architectural Arts Center, to be built on a dedicated East Side site opposite the Gateway Arch, are well under way. Here, Giles talks about the crucial role architecture and construction have always played in our city’s history—and why they matter now more than ever.
Why does our city remain architecturally significant? Despite all the destruction, we retain so much original fabric exemplifying the best of almost every type of building - residential, religious commercial, industrial. St. Louis is one of a handful of cities essential to an understanding of American architectural history.
Were you always interested in history and architecture? Not in textbooks, but growing up in the Central West End and hearing my grandparents’ stories about old St. Louis excited me about history in my own city. I’d ride miles on my bike, exploring city neighborhoods, wondering who built them and lived there. But I didn’t become seriously interested in architecture and preservation until the 1970s, when I returned from a tour in the Marine Corps and found whole neighborhoods disappearing.
How did you get into architectural recovery? By the ’70s, the rate of destruction was alarming—more than 1,000 buildings every year. We don’t even know what we lost because so much was never recorded. It seemed there was no adult supervision. In 1972, several friends and I incorporated Soulard Resources to begin a program of rehab for some of the worst buildings in the Soulard Historic District. Part of my work involved salvaging old house parts from demolished buildings to reuse in our restoration work. No one cared; contractors almost gave them away.
Then you started the Soulard Restoration Group. Why? To encourage others to adopt some 250 vacant buildings. By 1976, federal tax incentives for historic preservation had begun to attract developers to Soulard. After selling our little rehab company, I rescued an old warehouse in the neighborhood to use as a repository for a rapidly growing collection of artifacts. When I organized the St. Louis Architectural Art Co. in 1973, the scope of my salvaging work expanded citywide.
At what point did this become more a mission than a business? Almost from the beginning I found myself selecting and storing away important artifacts of museum quality that I thought deserved public recognition—even though they easily could have been sold. Thirty-three years and several thousand buildings later, I have what I believe to be the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind.
How did the idea of a museum for architecture come about? A museum of American architecture in St. Louis was originally proposed in 1936 by architectural historian Charles E. Peterson. He was employed by the National Park Service to document the historic St. Louis riverfront slated for demolition as part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The idea always seemed important to me, not only because St. Louis buildings represent some of the best American architecture, but also because our manufacturers contributed so many technological advances to the building arts and trades.
How did St. Louis become such a brick and terra cotta colossus? We had vast and rich deposits of high-grade clay, stone and other raw materials; a steady supply of cheap, skilled immigrant labor; and the exceptional skills of the early manufacturers, many from England’s ceramic district in Staffordshire. As a result of their innovative technology, chiefly the development of the dry-press brick, St. Louis became the largest manufacturer of face brick and the third largest producer of terra cotta in the world.
Many of our architecturally significant buildings are gone; others stand vacant or in ruins ... Many of our neighborhoods are at great risk for demolition. The increasing value of St. Louis red brick and long-leaf yellow-pine lumber has reduced the costs of demolition and thus allowed the city’s demolition budget to go a lot further. St. Louis is now the largest supplier of used red brick to exurban developers around the country.
