Whitney Curtis
In October 2004 preservationists watched in agony as a wrecking ball struck the historic Century Building downtown. That ball hit the building again and again, for months and months. In February 2005, after the last remnants collapsed, the building was gone forever.
Well, not quite.
While preservationists were fighting to save the Century Building, salvage specialist and historian Larry Giles was devising a plan to make sure the building would not disappear entirely. Eventually, working nearly every day through the 2004–05 winter, Mr. Giles recovered from the building an elaborate marble arch entrance, cast-iron spandrels and examples of every type of structural member that held the building together. It was a familiar and regrettable task for Mr. Giles, who has spent the past
37 years devoted to the recovery of architectural components, blueprints and linen drawings, books and architects' papers.
Thankfully for St. Louis, Mr. Giles has never let the burden of his duty deter him from action. If anything, he has increased his capacity for it over the years. He says his salvage work grew out of rehabbing houses in Soulard in the early 1970s. While Mr. Giles previously sold some of his rescues through the St. Louis Architectural Art Company (dissolved this year), most of his salvage load is for a collection of epic proportions. Mr. Giles is not a dealer, but a preservationist, whose collecting has been done for public benefit, rather than private profit.
His collection has grown to include an estimated 300,000 pieces. In it are a few entire building facades; ornamental terra cotta; ornamental and paving brick; cast-iron pieces; limestone, granite and other stone pieces; hardware, enamel boards for neon signs, and any other part of the built environment you can name.
Meanwhile, he has also assembled a reference library of more than 50,000 volumes and an uncounted number of linen drawings, job files, papers, photographs and ephemera related to architecture and the building arts. Mr. Giles has rescued papers and drawings for the United Railways Company, which built and operated the St. Louis streetcar system, the St. Louis Lightning Protection Company and the Guth Lighting Company.
In 2002 he founded the nonprofit St. Louis Building Arts Foundation to ensure that his collection will have proper stewardship for years to come. The foundation's central goal is the eventual creation of an architectural museum on the East
St. Louis riverfront to display Mr. Giles' artifacts and library.
In 2005 the foundation purchased the former Sterling Steel Casting foundry in Sauget, Ill., where much of the collection has been consolidated. The 15-acre, 13-building foundry was constructed between 1923 and 1959 — and Mr. Giles is rescuing it by rehabbing buildings eyed for the wrecking ball by other prospective buyers. Few saw much architectural value in a collection of well-used industrial buildings in Sauget, but their significance was evident to Larry Giles. So he saved them.
