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St. Louis Architecture Links
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Unless otherwise credited, all photographs on the site are my own. I use a Fuji FinePix A340 digital camera these days -- it's a great little camera, very light, very fast, very cheap. When I feel the need for real film, I use a battered old Pentax K1000 (fully manual!) with a couple of zoom lenses. I use the cheapest film and developing I can find (a necessity, considering that when I'm out exploring, I can go through as many as a dozen rolls of film in a single day.) I scan 'em on a Visioneer scanner (which I do NOT recommend as it tends to crash my computer a lot) and tweak 'em in Photoshop.
Please email me to ask before using any image from this site for the Web or other publicly-visible purposes. Odds are I'll say "fine, no problem," but I do like to know where, how, and by who my pictures are being used. After all, I've invested a considerable amount of time, money, and effort in creating this site and its contents... and besides, it's just the polite thing to do.
Simple. 1, it's my favorite building in the whole city, and 2, I wrote a big research paper on it in college, so the material was ready at hand.
Maybe! Check the site map, which lists most of the buildings on the site. If it's downtown, it might be on the Historic Downtown or Washington Avenue tours -- check the text listings.
In all probability, not too much. I haven't lived
in St. Louis since 1997; I can't exactly run down to the local library
anymore. : ] Furthermore, I really don't have any great degree of expertise
on St. Louis's architectural history. The buildings I know the most about,
and everything I know about them, are already on the site.
However, I do have photographs of many of the city's major present-day buildings; if you ask nicely I'm certainly willing to share (for the record, I've never had anyone not ask nicely; the site's readers seem to be a friendly and intelligent lot.) I also have a big stockpile of old postcard scans from Ebay saved on my hard drive, mostly covering downtown from the 1900s to the 1920s, which I'm also willing to share as long as it's for private use.
Again, probably not. The only St. Louis buildings I know by street address are those on the Historic Downtown tour. City Hall's the place to look for information on a specific address.
First try Google. It's the best search engine on the web. If you can't find it there, there's a good chance it simply can't be had on the Internet.
The Architecture Links page is a list of some of the major architecture-related sites that have proven to be long-lasting and informative. Most importantly, note the list of blogs at the top. Many of them are written / frequently visited by people who are highly knowledgable about the city.
Other places to try:
Beats me -- for the most part I don't venture into abandoned buildings. More to the point, regardless of whether or not I condone the practice, in the interest of legitimacy I wouldn't give out such information over the internet even if I had it. If you've made it this far, you're probably smart enough to figure out such things on your own anyway. There are other sites specifically devoted to such endeavours as well.
Copied from an informative email sent to me by one
ELB78@aol.com (later Rastanx4@aol.com), and enhanced by Slickwell@aol.com, here are some of the tallest buildings in St. Louis along
with their architect and date of construction. Note that the Gateway Arch (1965, Eero Saarien)
is the tallest structure in St. Louis at 630 feet, but it usually
isn't counted among the tallest buildings.
#1: Metropolitan Square, 600 feet, 42 stories. HOK Architects,
1988. According to this
website, it ranks as #396 among the world's tallest buildings. Some
interesting figures on that page, incidentally... New York City has 586
buildings over 90 meters in height. Chicago, 256. St. Louis, 14.
George McCue's "A Guide to the Architecture of St.
Louis" (1989, University of Missouri Press) is THE definative field guide
to the city's buildings. It covers all sections of the city proper, and
devotes several chapters to St. Louis County and even one on Illinois,
across the river. It's a bit dated, as it's over ten years old, but still quite useful.
I'm not sure if it's still in print, but here's a
link to its entry on Amazon.com.
If you're feeling less global and more local, Left
Bank Books is a great local bookstore in the Central West End whose
friendly staff would be happy to track down a copy for you. Give 'em a
call. Another rich source of information is the guide's predecessor, "The Building Art in St. Louis: Two Centuries". Also by George McCue, its third edition is only 8 years older than the Guide, and it contains many more entries (albeit with much less information on each.) You can probably find a used copy on the Internet. Try the following resellers: Abebooks, Alibris,
Bibliofind, and Bookfinder.
A third recommendation is Landmarks Association's "St. Louis: Landmarks and Historic Districts", by Carolyn Toft and Lynn Josse. This book, revised in 2002, is far more up to date than the previous two, and is not a field guide but a full-sized book with numerous beautiful color photographs and rich background information. As a recent publication, it's available at most local bookstores or through Virginia Publishing.
If you have one day, do downtown. Start with the
Gateway Arch, which is simply the single most amazing object in
the region. The trip to the top is neat, but it's also time-consuming,
so I recommend skipping it if you're on a tight schedule. Your time is
better spent having a close-up look at the Basilica of St. Louis (the only
structure to survive the razing of the 40 square blocks that preceded the
Arch grounds) and the venerable Eads Bridge, immediately north of
the Arch. On the other side of Eads, you'll find Laclede's Landing, a small, well-preserved 19th century commercial district now full
of bars, clubs, and other nightlife.
From Laclede's, you can procede directly west along
Washington Avenue (which marks the northern boundary of downtown.)
Here you'll find several dozen old warehouse and garmet buildings from
the 1890s and earlier, all wonderfully elaborate. The Convention Center
is also here, for whatever that's worth. Don't miss the massive Merchandise
Mart on the 1000 block.
The fabulous City Museum is located on Washington
around 16th Street or so, and is not to be missed -- after the Arch, it's my #2 recommendation on things to see and do in St. Louis. Allow at least 2 hours
to browse through their collection of architectural fragments from St.
Louis and beyond, as well as the inventive, whimsical displays that fill
the remainder of the museum. If it's not winter, drop a few extra bucks and let your inner child run loose on the astonishing Monstro City playground.
Turn south at 13th Street, where you'll find the
main branch of the library and the curved facade of the Shell Building.
Christ Church Cathedral is immediately adjacent as well. There's a lovely but long-neglected little park behind the library; if the Washington loft district ever gets up to speed, hopefully the park will be revived as well.
Continue south to the Gateway Mall, the green
strip that runs west from the Arch. If you detour a few blocks west you'll
find Union Station, the city's former rail terminal, now a magnificent
shopping mall. Definately worth an hour or so of exploration, inside and
out.
After the station, ramble eastward along the Gateway
Mall. This is the city's civic corridor, where its City Beautiful schemes
came to fruition. Along the way you'll pass the Civil Courts (with the
pyramid on top), the elaborate City Hall, the Municipal Courts, and the
old Opera House, among others. One Bell Center is a restrained but impressive
post-Modern highrise with frontage on the Mall's north side. Past this
is Keiner Plaza, with its nifty stepped fountains. Do NOT miss the Wainright
Building, which is hidden by that bland post-Modern building in the
middle of the Gateway Mall. Finally, the Old Court House is the Mall's other
central piece of architecture.
To see St. Louis's most heavily urbanized streets, double
back a bit and head north, to Olive and 9th Streets. Here you'll be in
the heart of what survives of historic downtown. The Old Post Office
is the centerpiece, but don't miss the Arcade/Wright (empty and boarded
up at present) to the south, the Syndicate Trust and the former site of the Century Building on the west, the
American Theater a block or two north, the Union Trust and Chemical Building
to the east, and the Railway Exchange building further east. The Railway
Exchange forms one end of a downtown mall called America's Center, but
it's a bit down at the heels. Union Station's the better bet for shopping
and people watching.
If you've got time for just one other thing, there's
no doubt what it should be: the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Located
in the city's southern reaches, the Gardens are spectacular beyond belief
and are not to be missed. Tower Grove Park, immediately south of them,
is a beautiful old Victorian walking park and one of my favorite places
in the city. The nearby blocks of Grand Avenue (which marks the east end
of the park) contain a nice variety of shops and restaurants.
If you've really got time to kill, here's a short
list of the city's neatest areas:
OH! And if you get the chance, take a tour ($5)
of the Fox Theater in Midtown. It's worth the money,
trust me. Call for days and hours. Check out the Continental Building while
you're in the neighborhood -- it's right around the corner.
Oh lord, YES. I would be eternally in your debt.
In particular, I am looking for good pictures of
the following demolished buildings:
From a St. Louis perspective, I'm a former Washington
University student who graduated in May of 1996, and moved to the East
coast (Philadelphia) a year later. After three years there, I moved to
Milwaukee to begin graduate school in architecture, at the University of
Wisconsin - Milwaukee. I graduated from UWM in December 2003 and eventually made my way to Chicago. Before Wash U, I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Because the architecture of St. Louis simply blew
me away when I first saw it and continued to do so for as long as I lived
there. There's nothing like it where I came from, and even after travelling
to many other cities, I have to say that St. Louis's architecture and urban
landscape still beats out that of almost any American city of similar size.
What really got my goose, however - what has always
struck me as totally unfathomable -- was how much of the city was being
left to ruin. I wanted to preserve all these sad old buildings somehow --
archive them, record them, make them available to the public, show people
what was going on in the city. All the ancient decaying shells deserved
some kind of memorial... even the ones that weren't gone yet.
The earliest version of the site came about in late
1996 when I was first thinking of
creating a web page, and considered what I could contribute to the Web
that would actually be original and unique as well as interesting to me
personally. This being back in the days before comprehensive search engines like Google.com, I hit on the idea of gathering together every
link on the entire web that related to the city's architecture -- kind of a one-stop shop for St. Louis building information. Hence the links section on the main page. Shortly thereafter came
a page of various buildings I'd seen demolished, another for abandoned ones (the long-defunct Lost St. Louis I & II pages), and a third for the Continental Building. Inspired by the "sequential tour" format of the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit site, I revamped, unified, and expanded all these in early 2000, bringing the site more or less into its current format.
Having started the project, I've been unable to let
it drop, even after moving away from St. Louis. A combination of nostalgia,
anal-retentiveness, moral outrage, sense of duty, and love for the city keeps me going. I drop by St. Louis whenever I have an excuse to do so -- whether driving back home to Louisiana or visiting friends who are in town. That wasn't very often when I was in Philadelphia, but I've been back many times since moving to Milwaukee (a scant 6 hours up the road) in August 2000.
Not right now! There's still a lot of other places I might want to live, too: New York, Boston, San Francisco, the list goes on. I'd love to back to Philly, too. But, St. Louis has a ton of raw material for renovation and preservation, which are two big interests of mine. So, who knows... maybe someday.
#2: One Bell Center, 588 feet, 44 stories. HOK Architects,
1986.
#3: Eagleton Courthouse, 557 feet, 27 stories.
HOK Architects, 1999.
#4: Firstar Center (formerly Mercantile Bank Center), 485 feet, 35 stories.
Thomson, Ventulett & Stainback, 1976.
#5: Laclede Gas Building, 400 feet, 35 stories. Emery Roth and Sons, 1969.
#6: Southwestern Bell Headquarters, 398 feet, 26 stories. 1926.
#7: Civil Courts Building, 387 feet, 13 stories. Klipstein and
Rathmann, 1930.
#8: Bank of America (formerly Boatmans, Nations Center), 384 feet, 31 stories. 3D International, 1981.
#9: One City Center, 375 feet, 25 stories. HOK Architects, 1986.
#10: Sevens Building, 312 feet, 24 stories. 1969.
#11: Park Plaza, 310 feet, 27 stories. 1930.
#12: Pierre Laclede Center, 309 feet, 23 stories. Smith and Enterzoth, 1970.
#13: 500 Broadway, 282 feet, 22 stories. Smith and Enterzoth, 197?.
#13: Continental Building, 282 feet, 22 stories. William B. Ittner, 1929.
#14: Equitable Building, 275 feet, 21 stories. HOK Architects, 1971.
#14: Bank of America tower 275 feet, 22 stories. HOK, 1976.
