The good old days were not so great, I have realized over the years of researching St. Louis and reading primary sources or simply listening to the tales of residents who remember when the city boasted over 850,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of those people who helped make St. Louis one of the largest cities in America were living in squalid homes, many reaching the 100 year mark already in the 1950s. “Cold water flats” were the norm throughout the city, and heating required the delivery, shoveling and pollution of dirty Southern Illinois coal. Air conditioning and refrigeration were unheard of outside of the breweries or meat-packing plants. One can only imagine today the sight of hundreds of thousands of people sleeping in the parks of the city on the most brutally hot nights.
Years ago I stumbled across an old report commissioned by the Civic League of St. Louis’s Housing Committee, written by Charlotte Rumbold and published in 1908, only two years before my own grandfather was born. Entitled rather unobtrusively Housing Conditions in St. Louis, it gives little indication on the cover of the gruesome way St. Louisans were forced to live 100 ago just north of downtown in a quadrant defined by 7th and 14th on the east and west, and Lucas Avenue and O’Fallon Streets on the south and north. Those familiar with downtown know that much of that area is now parking lots, as well as the convention center, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch building, and some suburban-style offices. Perhaps the end of this story is already known; the city demolished this giant area of ancient houses, and it seems that its leadership still struggles to find a way to cogently integrate this vast swath of territory into the fabric of downtown.
Within just a few paragraphs of the beginning of the text, a familiar problem is identified by the committee assembled to address slum conditions in the poorest areas of St. Louis. It noted that the encroaching business district (remember, this area started just a block north of bustling Washington Avenue) was devaluing the residential districts nearby. The owners of the old houses, many of which were easily built before the Civil War, saw little reason to improve their buildings, knowing—correctly—that eventually the land would be sold for factories or other commercial uses. The houses would come down, and would be replaced by new buildings. But unfortunately, for the people who could only afford the rent in these aging houses, squalid conditions were the result. Any neighborhood leader in St. Louis today knows the frustration of one stubborn property owner digging in, sometimes for decades, waiting to “win the lottery” of real estate speculation, all the while dragging down the streets nearby. Some things never change.
The inner ring of St. Louis neighborhoods is famous for its alley houses, and Soulard, Old North, and Hyde Park have an interesting mix of “front houses,” as I call them, and the rear house, usually built to generate income for the owner-occupant in front. But the report records instances of slumlords even constructing “middle houses,” sandwiched in between the first two houses. The rooms in the middle house might “for all the sunlight they receive, be at the bottom of a well.” Another anecdote tells of a house that literally took up every square foot of its 25×125 foot lot. Any light and fresh air that reached the center of the giant tenement was at the mercy of its neighbors not constructing an adjacent building. Apparently the aforementioned house was “crowded with Italians.”
As the builders of giant Modernist public housing complexes later learned, communal yard space is maintained by no one; so it was in the backyards of those houses not completely filled with tenements, as tenants felt no sense of ownership of a space possibly shared by 30 to 50 people. Janitors, rare indeed, usually were paid with the least desirable unit in the building, and were probably too busy trying to keep rudimentary repairs complete. Clean water and waste water came within dangerously close contact; the one faucet, called a hydrant (if the house was lucky enough to have it), usually drained directly into the sewer connection a foot or two below. The report explains that the brick pavement around the sewer usually sank, leaving the pipe jutting up, and fetid water pooling below.
Perhaps a discussion of the latrines should go unspoken, but needless to say they were often several stories tall, reached by rickety bridges from the back porches of tenements, and served as the locus of diseases such as cholera. Children would play nearby, and when the latrines overflowed, the effluence filled the yards where chores and socializing normally occurred. One of the more shocking photographs documents a latrine on the other side of a wall from an operating bakery. I must wonder about the quality of the bread produced inside.
I could go on and on about the deplorable living conditions described in this book, but there is perhaps some encouragement in that civic leaders addressed the problems that could no longer be ignored. It is also refreshing in that the report does not engage in as much classist condescension as I have read in other contemporary accounts of the time, and the committee members seem generally concerned about what they witnessed. As mentioned above, the solution in the eyes of the city was simple: complete annihilation of the slums. Certainly, those formerly middle-class houses could have been saved, and we could possess today a neighborhood akin to Washington DC’s Georgetown or Boston’s North End, but I don’t judge leaders for not taking that route. I actually believe the St. Louis’s full embrace of suburbanization results from the memories of the overwhelming population density of the city before World War II.
And certainly, we cannot just dismiss these conditions from 1908 as simply being from another, more savage, time. Many an older St. Louis resident has related to me the conditions they grew up in during the 1930s through the 1950s, and while they have fond memories, they also remember having to use the restroom down the block, or sleeping nine children to a bedroom. Almost everyone mentions the filth of the coal, its black, inky dust ruining the health of millions over the decades. Housing and environmental regulations sometimes have become a victim of their own success, causing us to forget how bad it once was. But the plight of the poor in St. Louis still challenges us, as the recent revelations of lead found in the public school’s drinking fountains. Some problems, it seems, still continue to bedevil this city, despite even the best intentions of its leaders.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
