Julius Pitzman is known for designing most of the famous private streets in St. Louis, starting with Benton Place in Lafayette Square. But he also surveyed large portions of St. Louis, leaving his mark on a wide swath of the city, and not just in exclusive neighborhoods. Pitzman worked on Lafayette Square over the course of several decades, even into the early 20th century. However, much of his surveying and laying out of additional semi-private streets on the south side of the park off Lafayette Avenue has been forgotten. That’s due to the devastation caused by the construction of Interstate 44 in the second half of the 20th century. While not true private streets, they maintained restrictions on building types and uses similar to their more restrictive counterparts.
What is now Preston Place was the Lafayette Addition, owned by Charles Gibson, laid out with the assistance of Julius Pitzman, published in Plat Book 5, page 67 on April 28, 1859. Again, it was not technically a private street, even though it looked like one when Pitzman designed it starting with Benton Place on the north side of Lafayette Square in 1868. While the street was given to the City of St. Louis, the plat required that the public right-of-way reverted to the owners on the street if Preston Place was opened up to Geyer Avenue on the south, or if a “highway” went across the land. It raises the question if the construction of Interstate 44 across the addition voids the agreement.
Get a weekly dose of home and style inspiration
Subscribe to the St. Louis Design+Home newsletter to explore the latest stories from the local interior design, fashion, and retail scene.
Charles Gibson’s concerns were valid. To the west, Park Place was laid out just to the south of Mississippi Avenue in 1865 by Solomon Smith, who was the owner of the St. Louis Theater. Smith had operated the theater with Noah M. Ludlow since 1837 with a capacity of 1,600 people. Apparently, Smith felt that audiences’ tastes in St. Louis were too conservative, leading him to open the theater. Like many businessmen, he augmented his primary business with real estate speculation with Park Place. However, the street was opened up to Geyer, and is now the heavily trafficked Mississippi Avenue with an overpass crossing Interstate 44. There are only a few houses left from what had been another attempt at a quiet enclave.
Another private subdivision that seems to have existed for only a short time (and may never actually have) was Parade Place, which was the division of property owned by John C. Rust, who ran a hardware business in the city. There are around nine advertisements by Obear Auctions in the Daily Missouri Republican over the course of April and May 1866, but after the date of the sale, there are no more records of any houses being built or lots sold. They would have been small lots at that; the subdivision would have been what are now the backyards of the houses on the west side of Mississippi Avenue and the east side of Nicholson Place.
The property of David Nicholson and Christian Staehlin would form the next street, which would become Nicholson Place. Like many of the dead-end places on the south side of Lafayette Square, it originally started as large squares of land bought directly from the City of St. Louis based off Charles DeWard’s survey of the Commons. In fact, some of the plat maps actually include markings for the rocks placed by the surveyor when he first divided up the land like a giant chessboard. On the east side of the long parcel, Staehlin lived down the street from his brewery at the corner of Second Carondelet Avenue and Lafayette; the site is now onramps to interstates 44 and 55. On the west side of the land, Nicholson lived in an Italianate country house. The grocer had made a name for himself in the bourbon business, and likewise sold off his excess property as an investment to augment his main financial interests. Filed on November 17, 1875, in Plat Book 10, Page 69, the Nicholson Place Addition was a subdivision of the earlier Payne’s Addition. Both Staehlin and Nicholson’s houses were demolished, and a Romanesque Revival house rose on the northeast corner. It, too, was eventually destroyed in the 20th century. Much of the rest was destroyed for Interstate 44, but David Nicholson 1843 Bourbon Whiskey is still for sale.
Easton Place, now called Waverly Place, also dates back to the earliest years of the subdivision of land around Lafayette Square. Charles Gibson, who had been involved in Preston Place, had built a large Italianate villa, similar to others scattered throughout the St. Louis Commons, in 1851. At the southern end of the land was the Archibald Gamble Residence, which actually backed up to Geyer Avenue. There is a photograph that gives us an idea what this house looked like, which was a hybrid of various Italianate elements. In between the Gamble house and Lafayette Avenue were a host of three-story Second Empire homes, owned by various upper-middle-class St. Louisans. The street was replatted in 1902, and perhaps lost the most, with well over a dozen houses demolished for the interstate. It also bears the distinction of having a portion of the street being cut off into another neighborhood, McKinley Heights, to the south.
The final street was platted out late, but the owner of the property, William Simpson, had purchased the land in 1877. Finally, the plat was filed on April 10, 1902, for Simpson Place, teaming up with Jacob Christopher; the subdivision of Lot 4 of Block 14 of the Commons was thus named the Christopher Addition. Two large lots at the front of the subdivision received flanking Romanesque Revival mansions, one of which was owned by Simpson; while the Central West End was just beginning to become the new fashionable neighborhood in St. Louis, Lafayette Square had not given up yet. The plat map is recorded in Plat Book 16, Page 69. The rest of the 23 lots were divided up with modest homes typical of the early 20th century. Sadly, all but one of those houses was annihilated by Interstate 44, but the two mansions survive.
While the story of the streets laid out south of Lafayette Square might be one of destruction, there are still plenty of houses surviving that give us an idea of just how urban this section of the city once was. Before the construction of the interstates and the widening of Gravois, a city resident could walk from the riverfront through dense, red brick neighborhoods, first passing through workings class neighborhoods like Soulard, by City Hospital, and enter an urban oasis in Lafayette Park. The beautiful remnants of the streets, even in their fractured state, that were developed out of the countryside outside of St. Louis around that landmark after the Civil War still give us an impression of what that experience once was.
