The day St. Louis burned—and the architecture that survived

A look at the wonderful wood houses of the West End

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Many St. Louisans have heard the old story. Back in 1849, right in the middle of the infamous cholera epidemic, the steamboat White Cloud caught fire. The blaze spread to the other tightly spaced boats docked on the levee, and soon much of downtown St. Louis had burned to the ground. The culprit, claims the historical narrative, was the wood of which the city was built. Civic leaders hastily passed a series of laws reforming the architecture at the heart of our culture, thereby setting up the future success of St. Louis in the 1850s and ’60s.

Except that the truth is never so simple, the shared narrative never entirely truthful. First, there were already plenty of brick and stone masonry buildings on the levee by 1849, many of which burned down alongside their wooden neighbors. It is true, though, that St. Louis became a city famous for its beautiful red brick, which has created iconic neighborhoods from Soulard to Hyde Park to St. Louis Hills.

But as I began to discover the West End neighborhood (no, not the Central West End, the West End), I realized that even the old story about wood frame houses being banned within the city limits after 1849 was not so simple. Yes, there are still some old wood frame survivors that were built before their lots were annexed by the City, but remember, the current boundaries were set in 1876, and the vast majority of houses built anywhere in St. Louis date from after the 1870s.

The same goes for the West End neighborhood. While the current official boundaries are much smaller, the area traditionally encompasses many of the city blocks north of Forest Park and south of Page Avenue where the wealthy lived. These streets and lots were laid out for the early automobile, hence it is common to have, rather than alleys, long driveways cutting between the houses. The lots are large squares or rectangles, not the typical narrow lots common east of Kingshighway. Served, like most of the city, by streetcar lines, the area was unique in that it had its own right-of-way for the Hodiamont Streetcar, which runs between Cabanne and Vernon but also curves down between Kensington and Cates avenues. Also, prefiguring modern suburbia and showing the influence of Julius Pitzman, there are streets that break with the rigid grid and curve, such as Belt and Bartmer avenues.

Which brings me to the wonderful wood houses of the West End. The perfect place to start is with the personal home of Theodore Link, the architect of Union Station and the Central West End’s Second Presbyterian Church. His house sits on the south side of West Cabanne Place, a private street just off Hamilton Avenue, and it is a wonderful example of the Shingle Style of architecture popularized by his contemporaries on the East Coast. Breaking with the elegant millwork of the Queen Anne Style so common in the Victorian period, the Shingle Style instead focused on a contrived rustication, using cedar shingles and rough-cut stone to give the feeling of an English country home. However, as anyone who has owned a cedar shingle roof can attest, they are extremely expensive to replace, so many of the houses in St. Louis that I recognize as most likely once being clad in the Shingle Style have shifted to lower-maintenance vinyl siding.

Speaking of Queen Anne, there are remnants of that highly ornate style throughout the West End, though due to the age of these houses, much of the delicate wood has been removed because of weather damage. The usual explanation for the proliferation of the Queen Anne style was the advent of planing mills, where steam-power-operated saws could rapidly produce intricately designed ornamentation that could then be sold in the Sears Catalog and elsewhere. Homeowners could now decorate their houses with elaborate millwork without hiring a highly trained, and therefore expensive, carpenter or woodcarver. Even small towns, where I usually find the best-preserved Queen Anne surprises, had access due to the 19th century’s extensive railroad connections. A city such as St. Louis obviously had even more ease of access, and we see that not just in the West End but in Kirkwood or Webster Groves, railroad suburbs in the late 1800s.

But as usual with St. Louis architecture, there are always little departures, delightful details and variations. Looking closely at the Link House, one sees buff brick on the first floor. Hidden among the dense apartment buildings in DeBaliviere Place is a single-family house with a rusticated stone first floor but shingles on the upper floors and a beautiful curved turret on the front. In fact, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps show that there were many wood frame houses, not just brick houses, that had stone fronts, showing how St. Louis architecture never fails to present us with exceptions to commonly held assumptions.

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