Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
3640 Marine Avenue
The vast majority of the modern City of St. Louis was countryside before and immediately after the Civil War, as I wrote a month ago. The houses out in the countryside—but within St. Louis’ incorporated boundaries—took on a distinctive quality that would surprise current day residents of the city. As Compton and Dry’s 1876 Pictorial St. Louis and historical photographs reveal, large country houses once graced many of the farm fields and pastures that are now built-up neighborhoods such as Tower Grove. The Carpenter Gothic houses, of which there are just a handful west of Jefferson Avenue, are one relic of this rural phase of St. Louis.
But of particular interest is the legacy of the Italianate villas, some of them built by famous St. Louis industrialists and landowners. The style’s name reveals its origins: It gathers its influence from the Italian peninsula, via an English lens. While this architecture borrows heavily from the Italianate Renaissance, particularly from the designs of Andrea Palladio, its categorization is not so simple; other styles, such as the Neoclassical and the later Beaux-Arts, tapped the same well of inspiration with different results.
Read also: The Venetial Influence on St. Louis
The Italianate borrows from an idealized Italy that perhaps never existed, except in the minds of the English-speakers of Great Britain and the United States. Northern European noblemen had been going on the Grand Tour for centuries before the founding of the United States, completing their education by seeing the great ruins of Ancient Rome and—ironically, since many of them were Protestant—the great works of Renaissance and Roman Catholic artists in Florence and Venice. Americans soon began to go on the Grand Tour as well, and Mark Twain famously immortalized his own visit in Innocents Abroad.
Italy in the early 19th century was a little rough around the edges. For example, the famous Villa d’Este outside of Rome in the mountaintop town of Tivoli has been immortalized in countless paintings and drawings by Romantics. The only problem? Those iconic images captured a horribly overgrown and untended mélange of trees and bushes—in no way the original vision of the Late Renaissance architect and landscape designer. A modern visitor will discover a much better tended Villa d’Este, stripped of its tangle of overgrown foliage and dramatically different than its representation in Turner’s paintings.
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Photo by William Swekosky, 1940; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
John F. Slevin House, 4227 Virginia
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Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Brick Italianate villa
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Photo by Chris Naffziger
Abandoned Italianate villa in Tower Grove East
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Photo by Chris Naffziger
West Belle Place Italianate villa demolition
In America, that idealized vision of a picturesque Italian countryside translated into the Italianate style. Italianate villas feature low-pitched pyramid roofs surmounted with cupolas and heavily bracketed cornices, much like their counterparts in bucolic Italy. (Think of the villain’s mansion in the Vito Corleone scenes of the Godfather Part II.) In the heat of the summer, the windows are opened, and the hot air is drawn up through the cupola, cooling these city mansions. (Of course, in real life, the landed gentry would have headed out to their country houses in the summer—the Italian word for that season is estate.)
While the villas of Italy are always made of stone or brick, American builders, particularly in the countryside, also constructed these houses in wood frame. Porches (which are frequently missing altogether) feature slender, classical columns and flat roofs. Eventually, open gabled roofs appear as well, replacing the pyramid roofs and shifting the towers to the side.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Henry Shaw's house in Shaw's Garden
In Pictorial St. Louis, which viewed St. Louis in 1875, we see countless Italianate villas out in the countryside west of the city proper. Perhaps the most famous survivor is the immaculately preserved Tower Grove House in the Missouri Botanical Garden, which of course was the country house of Henry Shaw. Note that his “city house,” which was moved from downtown, is in a different style. In the 19th century, architectural styles were chosen according to the building’s location and function, and they generally adhered to carefully prescribed rules. Shaw’s city house is still influenced by Italian architecture but follows the lines of the “Palazzo” style, harking back to the Florentine influence of Venetian city palaces four centuries earlier.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Adam Lemp residence (left)
Fans of the Lemp family may remember that Adam Lemp built a unique Italianate villa sometime before the Civil War on his cave property, on what is now DeMenil Place.
Read also: What was Lemp’s Cave really like?
While a clear photograph of the villa does not exist, the one photograph that does shows us an interesting version of the Italianate style. Instead of the traditional full two stories, Lemp’s villa was one-and-a-half stories, allowing for a monumental front doorway facing the primary elevation. Out back, a full two-story servants’ wing accompanied the main house. As was typical, a cupola rose above the low-rise roof, but there also seems to be a “widow’s walk,” a porch around the tower allowing for what would have been mostly unobstructed views of the Mississippi River. Lillian Handlan, The Lavender Lady, would later live in this villa with her husband, William Lemp, Jr.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The James B. Eads residence in Compton HIll, 1880
As an illustration of how the Italianate style began to fade and adapt in the 1870s and ’80s, we might also look to Compton Hill, the estate house of James B. Eads. While not stereotypical Italianate in the 1860s sense, Eads’ villa illustrates the adaptation of the style as the competing Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne Style crept in after the Civil War. Compton Hill still possesses the low-pitched roof, but the cupola is missing from the design, and the massing of the house is more solid and regal than before. The front porch still features slender paired columns and half lunette lintels over the windows and front door, showing the influence of the Renaissance.
Sadly, Italianate houses such as those owned by the Lemps or Eads took up too much land for the rapidly growing city of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Comparing Pictorial St. Louis to the modern streetscape of St. Louis, one quickly realizes that those large squares of property that once held a single house are now replaced with two or three apartment buildings or, sadly, a parking lot for a nearby store. Villas and other mansions along major streets such as Grand Boulevard fell as that thoroughfare transformed itself into a commercial corridor. A couple of years ago, on West Belle Place, a masterpiece of the Italianate style was callously demolished, while in Tower Grove East another example stands in limbo.
What’s been destroyed makes the preservation of what remains all the more important.
