As I was photographing Forest Park’s Cabanne House last weekend, I realized that while the Second Empire style survives in St. Louis, many of its most exuberant examples have long since been demolished. But the Second Empire style, most easily recognized by its distinctive mansard roof, has left its mark throughout St. Louis, particularly east of Jefferson Avenue in neighborhoods such as Lafayette Square and Hyde Park. It’s worth reinvestigating why this style was so important to the Gateway City in the decades after the Civil War.
The Second Empire style takes its name from the rule of Napoleon III, the emperor of France from 1852 to 1870. If this confuses you, because you thought for sure there’d been a democratic revolution in 1789, you’re correct. But that democratic revolution fell and was replaced by Napoleon Bonaparte’s “First Empire,” and after he was twice defeated, he tried to install his son, Napoleon II, as the new emperor. The victors would have none of that, so the Second Empire was ruled by Napoleon III. To further addle things, the Third presided over the French Republic from 1848 to 1852, after Europe had been wracked by revolutions—including one which had overthrown King Louis Philippe in France.
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Napoleon III was captured at the Battle of Sedan by the Prussian army in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. But by then, he’d embarked on a complete remodeling and professional urban plan of Paris, designed by the Baron von Haussmann. It used the long straight allées that had been featured in French garden plans for centuries, then lined them with tall buildings, each capped with a mansard roof. Describe it, you say? A steep pitched roof, pierced by dormer windows and capped by a low-pitched roof. Essentially, this “gambrel style, hipped roof” hides another full story. The style had been used for French royal residences since the 16th century, popularized by the architect François Mansart and his nephew, Jules Hardouin Mansart. The old Victorian Period house in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho is a perfect example of a Second Empire house with a mansard roof.
As was their wont, American architects and builders copied whatever was culturally or politically dominant at the time in Europe. The Neoclassical style was logical in the late 18th century because of the discovery of Pompeii and other trends; the Italianate style was logical because so many American gentlemen were taking the Grand Tour through Europe before the Civil War. With the rise of Napoleon III in the 1850s and ’60s, it made sense for Americans to model their upper-class residences after the brand-new boulevards of Hausmann’s Paris. Is there any irony in the fact that they were building those French-inspired houses for German-American businessmen who would no doubt celebrate the crushing defeat of that French Emperor’s armies in 1870-71? Not to mention the founding of the German Empire at the Palace of Versailles, the very symbol of the supremacy of French culture.
In the decades after the fall of Napoleon III, we eventually see architecture in America shift away from the Second Empire, no doubt in some part because of his humiliating defeat. But in the meantime, architects in St. Louis were experimenting with lavish, ostentatious manifestations of the Second Empire.
Lafayette Square has wonderful unified streets of Second Empire houses. (Check out the east side of Mississippi Avenue across from the park.) But I think one of the most amazing partly surviving examples is on North Park Place in the Hyde Park neighborhood. The block is labeled “F. Watkins Row” on Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, and only the eastern two townhouses survive. But the 1876 engraving provides us with a tantalizing view of what must have been a lavish wall of houses, with a soaring mansard roof tower in the middle. I suspect that a portion of the row was destroyed by fire, and a later, now-demolished row of houses was built in their place. The original two houses on the end survive and have been restored.
The Second Empire was not just a flat mansard roof, but possessed turrets and articulation, exhibiting an exuberant playfulness that has been lost throughout St. Louis. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Midtown, which was built up after the Civil War, then cleared by urban renewal after World War II. Again, historic photos and Pictorial St. Louis gives us an understanding of just what was lost. Large, free-standing houses with elaborate front porches sat on corner lots, such as the William McKee residence at 3028 Pine Boulevard, the Moses Frailey residence at 3650 Lindell Boulevard, and the Charles H. Peck residence at 7 Vandeventer Place. As important as Lafayette Square was, Midtown was a much larger upper-class residential district, yet its Second Empire homage was largely erased in the mid-20th century. The lone survivor stands at 3534 Washington Boulevard.
Second Empire masterpieces weren’t all residences of the wealthy and famous, although some were owned as investment properties. Second Empire rowhouses, the majority sadly demolished, often had elaborate slate roofs and rhythmic rows of towers jutting out front. Take the row at the corner of Compton and Pine in Midtown, or the LaMotte Row at the corner of Lawton and Channing in the Mill Creek neighborhood. Nicholas DeMenil constructed a row of rental houses along 7th Street just west of South Broadway, on the edge of his property, just in front of his entrance to the Cherokee Cave system. When Lee Hess purchased the property, he adapted the old Second Empire rowhouses into his Streamline Moderne “museum,” which also provided access to the show cave under the streets of St. Louis.
They’d been transformed into an entirely different sort of attraction.
