St. Louis has a strange way of destroying and then immediately memorializing what it has just annihilated. From the buyers’ remorse of demolishing the historic warehouses and the original platting of the French village by Laclede and Chouteau for the Gateway Arch, to the slashing cut that I-55, I-70 and I-44 inflicted on dozens of neighborhoods and tens of thousands of residents for the automobile, St. Louis seems to be constantly trying to reinvent itself, while simultaneously second guessing every major decision.
Perhaps no better example, and one that is now increasingly fading from the collective memory of St. Louis is the destruction of Vandeventer Place. Designed by the great Julius Pitzman, Vandeventer Place established the new Midtown neighborhood west of the old antebellum city limits around Jefferson Avenue, and placed Grand Boulevard at the heart of the city. Kingshighway might have more traffic today, but the Grand Bus, Number 70 boasts some of the highest ridership in the region.
And more importantly, grand private streets such as Vandeventer Place set the stage for Midtown to become a second downtown for St. Louis. The mansions that lined the streets west and east of Grand featured some of the best architecture of the boom years after the Civil War. Since the wind blows from west to east in the region, the wealthy kept moving west, just upwind of the dirty Illinois coal burned in tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the city. But for several wonderful decades, Midtown dominated the city until the smoke reached out west, forcing yet another migration to the Central West End.
Vandeventer Place, built on land owned by Peter L. Vandeventer in 1870, held 86 lots, and some of the most important architects of the 19th century designed houses on the street, including Henry Hobbes Richardson, who popularized the Romanesque Revival style in St. Louis (think the Cupples Mansion on SLU’s campus). The owners of the mansions on the private street even had small apartment buildings facing the side streets to hold all of their servants. It’s said that changes to the bylaws required unanimous votes, assuring that no wild or crazy decisions were made without grave debate.
But the new Grand Center, that of the 20th century, began to assert itself. Mansions along Grand were torn down and replaced with new theaters such as the Fox and St. Louis, while towering skyscrapers such as the old University Club rose along the streetcar-frequented boulevard. The old mansions on side streets became flop houses, and eventually surface parking lots for the nearby theaters. Vandeventer Place came down in two phases: the eastern half was demolished in 1947 for the new Veterans’ Hospital, and the second half to the west was demolished later for the juvenile detention facility. The entrance gates, designed by famed architect Louis Mullgardt and installed in 1894, were saved and reinstalled in Forest Park near the Jewel Box in 1951.
It is high time to reexamine the placement of the Vandeventer Place Gates. While I am certainly thankful that someone had the wisdom to save them from destruction, the current location does not befit their historic importance and function. The gates sit in the middle of a field, completely out of context and function, ignored and forgotten. Readers to my blog St. Louis Patina reacted with surprise that such an important architectural legacy is placed in such an out of way location (yes, the Jewel Box is nearby, but the gates sit off at a good distance from that landmark).
Now is the perfect time for the City of St. Louis to reconsider the relocation of the Vandeventer Place Gates as Forest Park Forever is in the midst of building a series of gateways into the park at major entrances. (Katy Peace, Marketing & Digital Media Manager for Forest Park Forever, tells us that the marker for the Wells/Skinker entrance to the park has been designed, and that construction is slated for the second half of 2017; she adds that there will be more information on the project available later this year.) I missed the 2001 controversy, when extravagant but beautiful contemporary art sculptures were proposed before being nixed by negative public backlash. I thought those were honestly very cool and would have been landmarks in their own right. But I also like the new ones proposed in 2015, designed by SWT Design. No other news source seem to have picked up on the obvious: they bear a striking resemblance to the Vandeventer Place Gates.
So why not relocate the Vandeventer Place Gates to one of the major entrances? It will create a sense of continuity, and historic context to the new gates placed at the other entrances. I was confused about the tempest in the teapot that was generated by critics of the proposed 2015 designs. They are simple, serve a purpose, and will probably acquire a patina in a few years from all of the automobile exhaust that buffets all four side of Forest Park. One thing is for sure, regardless of the future of the other new gates, St. Louis should do the right thing and move the Vandeventer Place Gates out of obscurity to a place of honor in Forest Park.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
