"The Disposable Neighborhood"

Falstaff Brewery Plant One, Former Forest Park Brewery

Falstaff Beer, once brewed and bottled in over ten locations around the United States, including four plants in St. Louis, has a long tradition going back to the Lemps. The old Forest Park Brewery, where the Griesedieck family began producing Falstaff after buying the brand from the Lemps during Prohibition, was one of two breweries where beer was distributed to the public after Prohibition ended. Falstaff never built a brewery in St. Louis, but bought up old defunct breweries instead.

The offices are now again a brewery called Six Row Brewery.

I never looked very closely at this building, driving by on Forest Park Avenue, but it actually is fairly interesting, and upon closer inspection had the massing and accoutrements of many other more well-known breweries in the city.

After Faltstaff began brewing beer at larger facilities, this brewery changed to a bottle shop and plant.

Forest Park Avenue has many such old industrial uses, and the Falstaff Brewery is one such great example.

Please visit this great Falstaff Beer site, where I learned most of my information about the old brewing company.

Council Tower Brick Mural Complete

The scaffolding is just about all gone now, and the giant brick mural once again graces the side of this important landmark in Midtown.

Grand Viaduct, Styrofoam and Bad Decisions

As I remarked recently, for some St. Louisans, this will be the third Grand Viaduct over Mill Creek in their lifetimes. Let us hope it is the last. I still can't believe they tore down the old one; august and massive, it was our own Brooklyn Bridge, right in the heart of the city. But alas, as you can see at 3:34 in this old movie, it fell victim to "progress."
Now sixty or so years later, I was driving on the exit ramp under the new bridge, and spotted these large white monoliths. I finally realized they were huge blocks of styrofoam, which are also being used in the filling of the old Tucker Tunnel downtown. I even glimpsed some of the old masonry for the original bridge, but I was not able to photograph before it was covered by new construction.

Regardless of the cost of revamping the original bridge, I can't imagine it being more than the cost of building two new bridges in its place in as many generations.

Vandeventer Place, Revisited

Four years after I first covered Vandeventer Place, there still is a paucity of information and photographs of what was once the grandest private street in St. Louis. I only could find a couple of grainy postcards that preserve the appearance of the once august street.

I often tell people that if even Vandeventer Place (or Gaslight Square, for that matter) isn't safe from decline and the wrecking ball, then none of our built environment should be taken for granted.

I drove up Spring Avenue recently, and when I passed through the block where Vandeventer Place once stood, I took a photo to the right and to the left. It is hard to believe that even just sixty years ago Richardsonian Romanesque mansions and Gothic Revival castles once stood. Instead, I saw a chain-link fence blocking one of the ugliest buildings in St. Louis, the Veterans' Hospital...

...and on the other side, a forlorn and rapidly deteriorating "youth services facility," or as one of my students who works there calls it, the teen jail.

Below, I made an attempt to stitch together the Sanborn Maps for Vandeventer Place, hoping to give you an idea of its former glory. Coming later today.

The Italianate and Second Empire Legacy of Grand Center

While Grand Center and the surrounding neighborhoods are now well-known respectively for being the theater district of St. Louis and acres of parking lots and desolation, the area first saw life as a wealthy residential section of the city. While photographs commemorate the 1880-1900 housing stock of the area, very little of it remains, replaced by newer historic houses, skyscrapers and theaters.

But if you look closely, there are survivors of that earlier, more tranquil era of the neighborhood. On nearby Belle Place, a couple of houses scattered amongst later houses and vacant lots remind still stand.

This amazing Italianate country house sticks out on its block, several decades older than the surrounding building stock, and out of fashion by the Twentieth Century.

Nearby, a stately house with a Mansard roof represents the Second Empire history of the neighborhood. Interestingly, its newer neighbors have not survived.

Looking at the Sanborn Map for the street, it looks like there were probably numerous other Italianate and Second Empire houses on the block; the newer houses are four-squares but the map shows slender houses, more reminiscent of the older architectural styles.

If you look closely, you can see these first houses built on these streets all over the area west and east of Grand.

Council Tower Brick Mural Nearing Completion

I was going to document every stage of the relaying of the brick mural on the east side of the Council Tower, but they worked so fast I didn't get a chance to photograph it until it was almost done. Apparently, the different colors of the mural are achieved through paint, and not different glazed bricks. I will be excited to see it done.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 7: The Anheuser Busch Sign

Everyone is familiar with the Budweiser Eagle sign that sits in sight of the westbound lanes of Highway 40 in Grand Center. But have you ever taken a look at the building it sits on?Apparently it was one of the few buildings not torn down in the leveling of the Mill Creek Valley, of which it was a part. Its actual address is for a street that doesn't exist anymore with the building of the interstate, 3562 Market Street.It also sits on what is probably one of the strangest shaped pieces of property in the city, an oval completely surrounded by highway and an exit ramp.Imagine, sixty years ago while standing at this doorway below you would have been looking out at Market Street, or as it was alternately known as, Manchester Avenue. Apparently Anheuser Bush fixed up the sign back in 1997 at a cost of two million dollars.It was last the site of Sterling Lacquer, which still owns the building but has since moved to a more convenient location at Brannon and Arsenal. I've heard the eagle sign itself came from the old Sportsman's Park on North Grand Boulevard.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 6: The Brick Mural

I watched in sadness as the giant abstract brick mural came down brick by brick over the last two months. Unique, and so 1960's in its composition, I saw it just about every day I passed through the intersection of Compton and Market.But there's good news; apparently it was only removed because it had no known method of adhesion to the wall behind it. It had already fell over the lower fifth of the wall, and the rest was doomed to fall off at some point as well. The underdrawing, which the masons used to make the mural, is now revealed for the first time since the 1960's.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 5: The Old Del Taco Building

I like how the curve of the Del Taco building contrasts with the other buildings included in the National Register nomination.Once a gas station and then a taco stand, the building cuts a distinct profile at the corner of Grand and Forest Park Avenue.While the building was built as an auto-centric gas station, it could easily be converted into an oasis in the sea of concrete around the intersection.Efforts to save the building seem to have succeeded, and its redevelopment will hopefully come soon.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 4: Accessability and Social Justice

I couldn't help but notice what a horrible pedestrian environment Grand Boulevard provides south of Laclede to Chouteau. Perhaps the most galling problem is the double-decker interstate that cuts right through the middle of the area.
Imagine being in a wheelchair, or even maybe a little less mobile than the average person, and walking through this mess of broken cement and weeds at the corner of Forest Park Avenue and Grand. For the residents of Council Plaza, the majority elderly or wheelchair-bound, this is not a theoretical exercise, it is reality.Then, after you somehow manage to cross over the broken pavement, you're faced with the overpass over the traffic sewer that Forest Park Avenue is at Grand. Pedestrians hate the roar of traffic, and avoid areas where they're subjected to it.Do you remember when Highway 40 only went under Grand? Already, in the 1960's, streets were being designed to move cars, not people.Nowadays, you are faced with the double-decker interstate at the same spot, with the claustrophobic east-bounds lanes above you...
...and the east-bound lanes roaring by below you. It's not surprising that the Fox Theater doesn't recommend its patrons take Metrolink, located south of the interstate to evening shows. A little known fact: Highway 40 follows the path of the old Manchester Avenue through this area. If you look closely at some of the buildings through the area, you can see storefronts facing the highway.When I visited Council Plaza, while gazing at the buildings, I couldn't help but notice all of the people sitting around inside the complex, almost like they were prisoners. I don't blames them; take a walk up Grand from the interstate sometime and imagine doing it in a wheelchair, or with a walker.I think it is a social crime that American society has gotten to the point where its elderly and disabled are warehoused away in an isolated apartment complex, removed from everyday society and the benefits social interactions provide to the psyche.A first step would be to fill in the underpass for Forest Park Avenue under Grand; the bridge is deteriorating and will need to be replaced soon. Why not fill it in and create a humane, pedestrian-friendly intersection? I frequently use Forest Park Avenue, and I would be fine with having my trip extended by 30 seconds at a traffic light at Grand, just so this intersection could reflect the energy so long suppressed in this area.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 3: The Apartment Towers

Out in the middle of the open, right on Highway 40 but largely forgotten by just about everyone in town, I became fascinated with the two large apartment buildings of the Teamsters' Plaza development, designed by Schwarz and Van Hoefen. The shorter, Grand View Apartments, facing north-south, and the taller Council Tower, which faces east-west. As can be seen in the historic photo above, shortly after their completion, they were two of the first developments built in the Mill Creek Valley, along withe accompanying Del Taco building and office and shopping center built at the base of the Grand View Apartments.What makes this complex more than just your normal apartment building complex is the funky art that adorns the buildings. Take the large, abstract medallion hanging on both ends of the Grand View Apartments.Or the stylized, abstract lines of the fountain out front; at first I thought it was damaged, and then I realized it was the artist's composition. I like it nonetheless, and the effort the builders took to enliven the complex.The glass enclosed lobby, separating the ground from the second floor, is a perfect example of Modernist architects using technology to show off. The walls become superfluous, and the steel piers hold up the building above.Council Tower, still one of the tallest residential structures in the whole metropolitan, also featured two large brick walls on its east and west sides. The brick murals, truly unique to St. Louis, are still vivid in my memory from being a child in the 1980's.The west brick mural is gone for good replaced by a surprisingly nice white wall, but the east side is slated for restoration, so I've heard. I will cover the slow dismantlement of that side later this week.The rest of the grounds around the towers are in rough shape, including this gazebo or pavilion-like structure, which is not original, apparently.The grounds between the towers were largely vacant the day I was there, no doubt because of the intense heat that had settled over the city. It is a pleasant spot, decorated with oddly incongruous classical revival cement sculptures.I know the complex is under renovation, but this has to be one of the ugliest parts of the whole development, where someone at sometime cinder-blocked up the entrance to the parking garage in as brutal a manner as possible.I actually covered the complex years ago on this site, and it's interesting to go back and read what I wrote back then. Read the historic nomination form here.