The Genius of Julius Pitzman, Designer of St. Louis' Private Streets

The giant grid of streets, alleys and railroads that now lie over the top of the topography of St. Louis didn’t always exist. In fact, the terrain of the city was once much more rugged, with dozens of sinkholes, hills, and even Native-American burial mounds dotting the landscape. Slowly, over the course of the last 200 years, we have slowly manipulated Mother Nature, filling in those water-filled depressions and hauling away the mounds and hills that blocked progress. Today, the neatly graded and sculpted land under the feet and tires of modern St. Louis stands as a testament to the early surveyors and engineers that molded the land to build this great city.

Perhaps one of the most famous surveyors to work in the St. Louis region was the great Julius Pitzman, whose surveying company just celebrated its 150th year in 2009. Born in 1837 in Halberstadt, Prussia, in what is now eastern Germany, Pitzman immigrated to America in 1858; during the Civil War, he was badly injured and retired with the rank of Major. In the years following the war, when the City was still part of St. Louis County, Pitzman embarked on the surveying of the entire region.

Published in 1878 by A. B. Holcombe & Co., Pitzman's New Atlas of the City and County of Saint Louis, Missouri remains one of the most detailed and highly accurate surveys of the 19th Century. Looking over the map, one is amazed at how even almost 150 years ago most of the now iconic roads of the county were already in place, albeit probably in many cases only in a muddy, rutted form. Beyond seeing the nascence of the budding road system that would one day carry hundreds of thousands of commuters, Pitzman’s map shows the borders and owners’ names of each plat of land. The earliest landowners of the county read like a who’s who of famous St. Louisans: Lucas, Hunt, Gratiot, Destrehan and others.

Also of interest are the different shapes and types of land plats; the earliest French Colonial plats are long and slender, like the ones that stretched from Florissant down to the Missouri River. The narrow strips of land allowed farmers to work close to each other when Missouri was still on the frontier. Later, square plats of land that rotated off of the major cardinal directions showed the influence of Spanish land grants to early settlers. (The boundaries of Castlewood State Park illustrate just such a plat.) Finally, the overpowering Jeffersonian grid of the United States surveyors laid a giant checkerboard over the county, filling in all of the unclaimed land in between the earlier French and Spanish plats.

Pitzman’s influence continued as he began to design some of the most important private streets in St. Louis. Benton Place, platted in 1867 in the Lafayette Square neighborhood, predicted the future greatness of such projects. Supposedly the first private street in America, Pitzman laid out a tree-lined boulevard with spacious lots for the elite members of St. Louis society. Keeping out the riffraff was of paramount importance to the wealthy, so access was controlled through a single entrance on the south. On the north, a giant retaining wall blocked anyone from reaching Benton Place.

Further success continued with the now-lost Vandeventer Place in Grand Center, which expanded on the precepts of Benton Place. Pitzman almost certainly found inspiration for his straight, tree-lined boulevards from the grounds of palaces in his native Prussia. One cannot help but suspect the influence of the grand allées of Charlottenburg and Sanssouci, two royal palaces in Berlin that Pitzman may have seen, or at least studied, before leaving for America.

Moving west along with the wealthy members of St. Louis, Pitzman prepared to design the final private streets of his long career. Compton Heights (1889), and Parkview Place (1905) abandoned the Prussian discipline of the rectilinear private street and instead featured gentle, curving avenues that would go on to help inspire the modern suburban subdivision. Seeking to provide pleasant, picturesque vistas, Pitzman wrote regulations that demanded a pre-determined setback for every house in Compton Heights. Likewise, with the rise of the automobile, Pitzman platted much of the subdivision without alleys; residents entered their garages from driveways.

But perhaps Pitzman’s triumph came with his sensitive handling of Clifton Heights before his death in 1923. Sitting on a rugged series of hills, Pitzman carefully platted streets that follow the curves of the hilltops, while placing a placid lake in the valley below the houses. Unlike many of his previous designs, this subdivision saw the building of much more modest houses than his previous private streets. Perhaps that is Clifton Heights’s greatest legacy: good urban design should be for everyone, not just the wealthy. As America increasingly sprawls out into the countryside, creating forgettable and generic places, that legacy is all the more relevant.

Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via e-mail at naffziger@gmail.com.