Folks have applied the name Hell’s Half Acre to hot springs, lava fields, Civil War battlefields, a New Jersey golf bunker, river rapids, a cowboy movie, and vice districts across the United States, including in Nashville, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.
Our Half Acre sat between Wellston and University City, a tiny 700-foot-long sliver of unincorporated territory. Its free-floating status contributed to its wild character: It didn’t belong to any municipality proper, and so it was not under the jurisdiction of any particular police department. The heart of the neighborhood, officially North Cabanne, was the 6100 block of Bartmer Avenue.
At the turn of the 20th century, the St. Louis Star described it as a place where “saloons and gambling houses, with doors flung open, operated day and night, unmolested by the law… It was the little half-brother of every crime from petit larceny to murder.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave a more measured account, describing it during the day as somewhat resembling an “innocuous country village.” But once night fell, “men and women, most of them from St. Louis, engage in drunken bouts, sing ribald songs, and misconduct themselves so scandalously as to not just shock the entire neighborhood, but to keep it awake with the sounds of their carousals.”
The historical record backs the Post. It appears that most crimes in North Cabanne were petty and as petit as the neighborhood itself: drunken brawls, bloodless holdups, backroom dice games. Gangs did reportedly beat and mug people, but it’s tough to find record of many murders committed there.
Eventually, 200 residents, led by Pastor Robert Evans, petitioned the governor for help. The St. Louis County sheriff, temperance societies, churches, and businesses allied themselves to the cause. In 1910, James Simpson was caught operating his saloon without a license; his place was the first to go. Then came the Sunday blue laws. By 1913, the Post reported, the last saloon on Bartmer, owned by C.A. Jackson, a.k.a. “the mayor of Hell’s Half Acre,” had shuttered and an evangelical church mission had taken its place. In the same article, an assistant prosecuting attorney quipped that North Cabanne had become so pious and dry, “it should be renamed ‘The Desert.’”
The last holdout was Tony Foley, “king of the county gamblers,” who operated an establishment on Bartmer until 1920. After his ouster, the Missouri Federation of Women’s’ Clubs, the Hodiamont Businessmen’s Association, and St. Louis County launched a crusade to “clean up the back yard of Hell’s Half Acre,” which meant, for the most part, demolition to make way for factories and businesses.
Hell’s Half Measures
There was crime in the Acre, but much of it was of a decidedly improvised and cartoonish quality.
July 1910
A crew of thieves, using a 10-foot fuse “and a large quantity of explosives,” blew the door off a safe ensconced in the office of the E.R. Darlington Lumber Company. The 100-pound door flew across the room and shattered a window. All the thieves found was $5 in loose coins.
March 1912
Twenty patrons fled William Murphy’s saloon on Bartmer during a holdup. The robber fled, too, but only after wagging his revolver around and demanding all the money in the cash register. The folks brave enough to stay told the police that at first they’d thought it was a joke because the perp was “a cute little kid, about five feet high,” who wore a highwayman’s mask, “a stiff derby, and a dark suit of clothes.” The shock of it all froze everyone in place as the cute little kid “walked out of the same door by which he had entered,” now $35 richer.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to cite the St. Louis Star, rather than the Star-Times.
