Looking north up 23rd Street in St. Louis Place. Photograph by Chris Naffziger
St. Louis Place does not hold the title of “Most Destroyed Neighborhood Due to Urban Renewal.” That would probably go to the Mill Creek Valley, annihilated after World War II for, well, a bunch of empty grass fields for the most part. But St. Louis Place still wins the award as the neighborhood that receives the brunt of the most cockamamie, ridiculous long-shot ideas that leaders have tried to foist on this city. And as the decades have gone by, and each redevelopment plan sputtered out and died, the neighborhood has been left to rot, waiting for salvation.
This author is not under the naïve impression that St. Louis Place does not suffer from severe depopulation. Much of the neighborhood west of the eponymous park but east of Jefferson Avenue sits empty of buildings, save for one or two per block. In fact, driving up 23rd Street, nary a building is in sight unless one turns his head to the left or right. This author is not claiming that the recent vote in the Board of Aldermen to condemn the western half of St. Louis Place will destroy an intact neighborhood. It will not. But the real issue is why our leaders continue to make grand plans without guaranteeing their success first. The vacant lots and empty streets of St. Louis Place offer us a cautionary tale.
The first aborted scheme that city leaders proposed to savage the St. Louis Place neighborhood was the planned North South Distributor (MO 755), which would have crashed through the city from the intersection of I-44 an I-55 at Lafayette Square all the way through the Near North Side and end at I-70 near the McKinley Bridge. This missing interstate was finally canceled in the 1980s, and the planned 22nd Street Parkway through St. Louis Place has never been built. Down south, the Truman Parkway has attempted to provide the connections the canceled interstate would have opened. But the damage is done; north of where 755 would have passed over Highway 40, one can still see the demolished gap in the buildings of western downtown.
Later, in the 1970s, the St. Louis Place Renewal Plan, by Francis Podrom, proposed the demolition of large tracts of the neighborhood. In particular, alleys and backyards were targeted for removal, with parks to be installed in the resulting open spaces. Some of the most iconic buildings still standing in the neighborhood were labeled “obsolete” and condemned to demolition. Luckily, almost none of this plan was implemented, but the prejudice against the very nature of St. Louis Place—a district with high-density, walkable streets and different income levels—has prevailed.
In the 1980s, the western half of St. Louis Place was targeted for the building of a warehouse district. Of all of the plans, this one made progress, lending much to the current state of the blocks around 23rd Street. Large-scale clearance and demolition scraped much of the last 150 years of history from the blocks surrounding the beautiful St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church, itself a victim of the clear cutting. After the demolition ended, not a single warehouse was ever constructed. The lots remain empty, scattered with only a couple of holdouts. They’ll go soon probably, as the Board of Aldermen has voted to use eminent domain to seize their houses, too.
Somewhere in the intervening years, a golf course was proposed for the vacant blocks leading up to Paul McKee’s plan for Northside. McKee, it should be remembered, has still not produced any substantial redevelopment in the areas that he has been promising. Which raises the question, if he and other city leaders had not been holding this land hostage for the last decade—or even the last half century—what would have happened to these desolate blocks? Despite conventional wisdom, there has been real private redevelopment and investment in St. Louis Place, around both the old Falstaff Brewery and St. Liborius. Have we prevented those developers from doing more successful projects? This author does not know, but as long as St. Louis Place is held hostage to “big plans,” this historic neighborhood will continue to languish in obscurity.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via e-mail at naffziger@gmail.com.
