Kinloch Telephone Exchange. Courtesy of South Side Spaces/Kinloch Telephone Exchange Open House Facebook Page
Like many developers, Jason Deem’s got a knack for spotting buildings, seeing them in the urban environment in a way that many of us miss. With the Kinloch Telephone Exchange, he’d seen it on countless drive-bys on Jefferson, a 10,000-square-foot structure with a funky floorplan and huge ceilings, which make it seem even larger than it already is. But it took one special pass-by to make a deeper connection.
“I kind of came across it on a bike ride,” he says. “I was riding by, and noticed the door swinging in the wind. I just jumped the fence and walked inside, to see if there was anyone there to give me a tour. There wasn’t. I came back and screwed the door shut. A neighbor named Terry drove up and helped me get in touch with the owner, to see if he was interested in selling it. A few years earlier, he was going to sell it for a lot more. But this time, he said, ‘If you can close by the end of the year, it’s yours.’
“I saw a building with really good bones, a really stately building that I’d seen for years and years,” he adds. “You can see it driving down Jefferson. What caught my eye was the architecture, the ornate details on the roof lines. I didn’t really have a purpose for it than to see it come alive, have a function in the neighborhood, rather than being boarded up. I played with the idea of residential. Commercial was tough, because of the requirements—so we went with residential.”
That was in 2013. Lots of prep work took place between then and now, but the project’s first phase in ready to show off to the public, with a Thursday, November 12 open house, from 5 to 9 p.m.
“This thing’s been going on for so long,” Deems says. “Let’s plan a party, and we’ll have a deadline. It’s a massive project, and there’s always something to do here, but phase one is pretty much complete.”
As the 10,000-square foot building sits today, a large, high-ceilinged condo has been created in one section of the building. The expansive basement, meanwhile, has been taken over by South Jefferson Midcentury Modern, a vintage furniture dealer that uses the space for Saturday sales. Also in the basement is a trio of workshops from Anew Nature, “a St. Louis-based furniture upcycling company specializing in shabby chic.”
While those businesses have a natural tie to the past, the residence space upstairs isn’t without a few quirky touches of its own. For example, the original women’s room has been completely re-plumbed, with five, classic stalls kept in place, or, as Deem notes, “for a two-bedroom apartment, it’s got eight toilets.” The kitchen sink was saved from the City Hospital morgue, affixed with original autopsy room stickers. The counter-tops came from Wydown Middle School, where they once served as science lab tables.
While Deems says “there’s definitely a mix of used materials,” the basic structure’s intact, with the only wall removals coming from a later rehab of the building, when used by the Joseph Lipic Pen Company. The building’s history, dating back to the late 1800s, has been exhaustively researched by Emily Hood of Deem’s company South Side Space; it’s detailed at the building’s own website, kinlochstl.com.
Reminders of the building’s original use as a telephone exchange aren’t plentiful, per se, but they exist. As Deem points out during a quick tour, “there’s a manhole in the floor of the basement. You can go down in it and see a brick-lined corridor, where all the telephone lines would’ve gone out into the street. There was so much underground, even in 1904. There’s a manhole out in the street that corresponds with the Kinloch logo on it. Seeing some of that history is really cool.”
A week from Thursday, the rehabbed McKinley Heights treasure will be on display, with its old and new touches; for example, on the latter, there’s a three-wall mural painted by Screwed Arts Collective member Jacob Berkowitz. And attendees will get a chance to view a true “great room” that once housed all those phone operators. These days, it’s got a huge, but somewhat-painted-over skylight, and windows for days. It’s lovely in its own, incomplete way, the obvious target of the building’s second phase.
That room’s a reminder that the Kinloch Telephone Exchange of 2201 Indiana has a somewhat unwritten future, as well as a deep, working-class past.
For more information on South Side Spaces' open house for the Kinloch Telephone Exchange, click here, or visit the Facebook Event Page.
