Courtesy of the City of St. Louis
St. Louis history is blessed with a plethora of maps that have documented its development from a small settlement to a bustling metropolis. Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, published in 1876, gives us an invaluable look into a city about ready to take its place on the world stage in the decade after the Civil War. Sanborn and Whipple fire insurance maps give us scientifically accurate windows into every building within the boundaries of the City of St. Louis from the 1870s to the present day, allowing us to know the minutiae of the built environment right down to the thickness of walls down to the exact inch.
But not all maps have provided a positive benefit to St. Louis. In fact, there are several maps published by the city planner Harland Bartholomew in 1947 that have wrought horrible damage to St. Louis, their influence still coloring the debate and causing real harm to people. “Obsolete and Blighted Districts” and the “Substandard Housing” maps are two of the most influential that Bartholomew published. In fact, 1947 is one of the critical years in the history of St. Louis, when the dust had settled after the victory of World War II, and the city could no longer rely on tens of thousands of war effort workers stoically packing into spartan living conditions in the city. St. Louis had to figure out what it was going to do with itself in the postwar world.
Its decisions were disastrous, largely due to the philosophies demonstrated in those two maps. Look at them closely. In public lectures where historians have stated that their proposals, the annihilation of all the building stock shaded black, or “obsolete,” were not implemented, and that the neighborhoods shaded in red, or “blighted,” were not divested of valuable taxpayer investments. A simple walk or drive around St. Louis east of Grand reveals that even if there was no “official” adoption of Batholomew’s plans, the de facto outcome has occurred regardless.
Mill Creek has been destroyed. Most of the Near North Side, much of it still owned by Paul McKee, sits largely devoid of its historic buildings—or any buildings at all. South of the railroad tracks, the neighborhood of LaSalle Park was mostly destroyed, except for some token streets left off Park Avenue. The Kosciusko neighborhood, which I wrote about last month, was wiped off the map. Many of these buildings were approaching 100 years old, and if they had not been demolished, many of us would probably be alive when they would celebrate their 200th anniversary. But the Modernists, who influenced Bartholomew, had a dim opinion of Victorian Period architecture, as summed up nicely by James Schmiechen in 1988:
The bourgeois Victorians, obsessed with historic style, be it Gothic, classical, Renaissance, or some mongrel style, were dismissed by design critics as playing retrospective make-believe when they should have been looking ahead to the Bauhaus. Historicism was seen to reflect the failure of its proponents to come to terms with the machine age.
What a sad and depressing outlook on life, and one that I try to politely remind preservationists fighting to save Modernist buildings now facing demolition in the 21st century—didn’t Modernists themselves argue that old is bad, and it needs to be erased for the future?
Now in full disclosure, I have spoken to many longtime St. Louisans who were alive when these neighborhoods were still standing, and they have reported back to me that these aging districts were in a serious state of disrepair. Many did, in fact, lack indoor plumbing. I cannot casually discount the eyewitness testimony of primary sources. But I would counter with this: Look closely again at those maps. Included in the blackened “obsolete” swath are the thriving and highly desirable Lafayette Square and Soulard, as well as the up-and-coming North Side neighborhood of Old North. Somehow those “obsolete dwellings” overcame their lack of indoor plumbing to become some of the most expensive real estate in the City of St. Louis, and by per square footage, some of the most expensive in the region. Indeed, Soulard’s transition to indoor plumbing seems to have gone very well.
If we expand our discussion out to the areas shaded in red, or only “blighted,” the conversation turns to the absurd. Compton Heights, with a few mansions still in the ownership of their original families, as well as Shaw and much of Tower Grove, where prices are now going skyward, were deemed as undesirable by the standards of the mid-20th century urban planner. And that is even before we get to North St. Louis, where one suspects that “blighted” was merely a synonym for “African American” or at risk of becoming African American. It is naïve to not believe racism was not a role. If better quality housing had indeed replaced all these miles of annihilated urban fabric, I would have less to criticize, but there are now blocks of the city that have laid fallow for close to 70 years since their clearance. What we have left is a dead zone surrounding downtown.
Which has been the unfortunate, and, in my opinion, fatal, result of the wholesale demolition of the neighborhoods around downtown St. Louis—that dead zone. Coupled with the construction of the elevated lanes of Interstate 64/Highway 40, and the swath of still vacant land to the north, downtown St. Louis suffers from a peculiar ailment that stifles its urban character. Take a stroll away from Lower Manhattan; K Street in Washington, D.C.; downtown Baltimore; Center City, Philadelphia; or any number of American cities. Slowly, elegantly, the office buildings and stores make way to carefully restored (and often very expensive) 19th-century townhouses—real neighborhoods—connected to their central cities and employment centers.
In St. Louis, we encounter a wasteland: highways, abandoned lots, derelict buildings, blight. There is not a single neighborhood that a pedestrian can walk to from downtown St. Louis without passing through one of those enemies of a healthy urban environment. This problem has been decades in the making, and I can only imagine it will take decades to repair, if ever. We are still reeling from the mistakes of 1947.
