Courtesy Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collection
Pine Street Livery
Edward Henry's Ninth and Pine Street Livery and Boarding Stable, northeast corner of Ninth and Pine
There’s something icky about a garage: the oil stains on the cement, the tang of chemicals in the air, the angry whirring of hydraulic drills. An old-timey livery stable seems so much more wholesome. Yet look—next to the barn, there’s a saloon. That proximity definitely caused some situations, like the night that Morris Gahan and Charles Noye, stablehands at Kramer’s Livery and Undertaking, drank a lot of whiskey, went back to the barn, and quarreled. Noye shot his friend in the mouth with a .45 pistol. Gahan’s giant, white teeth—“nearly as strong as those of a horse,” as The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quipped—stopped the bullet. He fell down; he got up. He spat out the lead bullet, three teeth, some blood, and took a nap in the hay. “I felt no pain, and I didn’t know I had lost my teeth until I heard them rattle on the stable floor,” he told a reporter. “I picked them up with the bullet, and will keep them as souvenirs.”
Suicides gravitated to the stables, as did mad bombers—including one maladroit who constructed “a regular Chicago anarchist’s bomb” from dynamite, bullets, sand, sawdust, and a defective fuse. Liveries were weird magnets, too: there was the horse, tickled under the chin, which laughed itself to death; a stablehand who coughed so hard he gave himself a hemorrhage; and a little mustang named Nuts, who memorized the address of 111 boarding horses, and led them home unaccompanied. If teeth rattled on the stable floor, so did dice, and there were always horse thieves around—some dumb, like James McGann, also known as the man who had a fight with a bass viol during a midnight burglary. After “his fingers swept across the strings of the bass fiddle, evoking a Wagnerian crash of music,” he turned, punched the instrument, and was arrested escaping with it. His horse-thief career went about as well as you’d think. A more clever fellow “blondined” Butcher Maybrie’s coal-colored pony with peroxide, disguising him as a sorrel—though the horse’s curly coat gave him away. The thief was caught and thrown in the Clayton jail; sadly, the horse did not get to keep his new chic look. “Mr. Maybrie says he will not attempt to keep his horse’s hair light,” the paper explained. “Blondine costs too much by the barrel. And besides—he prefers the natural black.”
