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Found St. Louis, St. Louis, MO (2025)

01/22/2025

Three days ago I had never heard of a man named R. Buckminster Fuller and now I’m obsessed with R. Buckminster Fuller so here’s a post on R. Buckminster Fuller.

Born in Massachusetts in 1895, kicked out of Harvard twice, daughter died from polio and meningitis at age 3, developed a huge drinking problem and considerd su***de in Lake Michigan so his family could survive from his insurance payout.

He recovered from his mental health troubles...and the inventions came pouring out of him. This guy’s brain was on another level. Another planet. Another galaxy.

Fuller invented the Dymaxion house which looks like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie. How do I describe this thing...well, it was based on the design of grain silo. It was never mass produced but it looked damn cool.

In the 30s, Fuller invented the Dymaxion car. The idea was to create an aerodynamic vehicle that could perhaps lead to...the flying car? Fuller knew it wouldn’t fly but he wanted to get the ball rolling for future generations. It was more of a protype that wasn’t meant to be mass produced...and it was awesome. Three wheels, could fit 12 passengers, get up to 120 mph, make a 180-degree turn and got 28 mpg.

Fuller was most known for his popularization of the geodesic dome. The most important dome to those of us born and bred in StL is Missouri Botanical Garden’s super dope CLIMATRON. Even the name of it sounds like a sci-fi movie - “CLIMATRON 6000 ON PLANET AERON “

What struck me the most was an idea he had for East St. Louis. The city of East St. Louis asked him to design housing for their 70,000 residents...and he came up with this massive dome that stretched out a mile and could house 125,000 residents. Each family would have 2,500 square feet of space. Spoiler alert: it did not happen.

Anyway, please browse these cool pics of R. Buckminster Fuller inventions.

01/20/2025

In April 1957, 28-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in St. Louis. He was being interviewed over dinner at the Chase Hotel. At one point one he looked around the room, and observed that “this would not have been possible ten years ago.”

That visit in 1957 was long before the “I Have A Dream Speech” but only a few months after the end of the Montgomery bus boycott. Today would be a fitting one to read about the bus boycott. It’s a reminder that mobilization and direct action leads to real change in this country.

When Dr. King spoke at the Kiel Auditorium during that 1957 visit to St. Louis, he electrified the 8,000 person audience for over an hour, without any notes in hand.

During that speech, he said the following:

“We must face the fact that segregation is still a reality in America. We are confronted with it in the South in glaring, conspicuous forms, while in the North it is present in hidden forms. Yes, old man segregation is on his death bed but history has proven to us that old man has a terrific breathing power.”

This photo was taken by a Post-Dispatch photographer during that visit to St. Louis.

01/12/2025

Our sidewalks don’t look historic. Old and crusty, sure.. but like, historic? No way.

I recently learned that some of our sidewalks are 135 years old!! What!!!!

In the 1800s, people were playing around with cement to figure out its most efficient formula. In the United States, the cement we know and love is called Portland cement. It’s made of limestone and a bunch of other stuff.

In the late 1800s, people were once again playing around with Portland cement. Someone added crushed granite to it and BOOM we’ve got granitoid. It was super popular in the 1890s and very early 1900s.

Granitoid was used for building, paving, all sorts of stuff. St. Louis LOVED granitoid sidewalks, so much so that we covered the city with them. Granitoid could withstand weathering in a way other materials couldn’t, and it was a lot smoother than brick and stone sidewalks.

Granitoid’s popularity lasted a few decades, but it died so concrete could live. Concrete was cheaper to make and easier to maneuver.

The coolest thing about our granitoid sidewalks is that some of the companies who poured them put metal markers in them. This post contains some of the granitoid markers found in residential sidewalks in St. Louis city. If you see one of these markers, you know you’re looking at some historic sidewalk!

01/10/2025

A few people have asked me to post about the Marine Villa neighborhood, which is south of downtown along the Mississippi. You can’t talk about Marine Villa without talking about Marine Hospital so here is a Marine Hospital post.

In 1798, Congress passed “An Act For the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” A fund was created and hospitals were constructed for the sick sea guys. The hospitals were originally built along the east coast but as commerce grew along riverways, hospitals started popping up in non-coastal areas. These were hospitals for merchant marines, not the Marine Corps!

StL’s Marine Hospital was completed in 1855, just off of Broadway and along Marine avenue. They grew their own produce, had two cows to supply milk, and the staff had a total of one horse. In 1869, they saw 495 patients, and there were 24 deaths.

During the Civil War, the hospital provided aid to Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners.

By the 1950s, it was no longer in use as a hospital and had been converted to an armed forces induction center. It was demolished in 1959 to build a new records center for the government. Evidently a historic fireplace from the Marine Hospital was saved and used in the director’s office at the new records center.

Full disclosure, I found a couple of newspaper articles mentioning that a tunnel leading from the hospital to the river was used as a site on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people to escape, but I’m just not comfortable citing mid-century sensationalistic Globe-Democrat articles as fact without further research into the matter. If anyone knows a person who studies the Underground Railroad or who might have more information on the topic, I would be very appreciative.

I’m also including a few pics of marine hospitals in other states that have not been demolished.

Cover pic is StL’s Marine Hospital from the Library of Congress.

01/05/2025

I need to warn anyone reading this that I get a little corny here.

When StL folks read the newspaper on Saturday, January 30, 1982, the weather report casually mentioned that there would be some rain that night, and it would turn into sleet. Over the course of the next 24 hours, when 14 inches of snow blanketed the entire city, St. Louis was woefully underprepared.

The city shut down. Buses stopped running. Doctors and nurses couldn’t get to work. No planes, no trains, no automobiles. Total emergency.

Four men died from heart attacks while shoveling snow. A fifth was found in his stalled car - also died from a heart attack. Around 16 deaths in total were attributed to the snow. Two women had to give birth in their homes since there was no way to get to a hospital.

Mayor Schoemehl was criticized for the city’s poor response. When a resident stated that this would never happen in Chicago, Schoemehl scoffed and said it would be too costly for us to gear up the way Chicago would. The National Guard offered assistance but the Mayor declined it....until he realized we desperately needed their help and they were finally brought in to help clear snow and tow abandoned vehicles. The National Guard’s commander had to be picked up by police because he was stuck in his home.

St. Louis residents stepped up. Volunteers with four-wheel drive vehicles delivered much-needed medications and medical supplies to residents stuck in their homes. City residents helped dig out ambulances that were stuck. Blocks mobilized to dig out every car on their street and dig out entire paths in the road using only their shovels. An article noted that “the volunteers were everywhere, relentlessly helpful, relentlessly cheerful.”

Reading about the ‘82 storm just drove home why I love St. Louis so much. We have the best residents. We may fight (often over the absolute dumbest stuff), but when it’s crunch time, we’ll take care of each other. Family.

All pics are from the Post-Dispatch. Cover photo: kiddos playing in the snow on their first day back at Lafayette School on Ann Ave (school is now lofts)

01/02/2025

I love a good clue.

Near the intersection of Tower Grove and Vandeventer is the teeniest tiniest street.

It’s named Race Course Ave. There are only four buildings in the whole city that have an address on Race Course Ave!! I’m so jealous of them.

Horse racing has existed in St. Louis since 1767. The 1767 track was primitive compared to what we think of today, but it had to start somewhere, right?

In 1808, people were racing horses up at Fort Bellefontaine (which is now a park). In 1812, there was a course next to Bellefontaine Cemetery. Over the years, one race track would close and another would open.

Fast forward to 1863 and you’ve got this group called the Laclede Association. They decided to build their track in the neighborhood now known as Forest Park Southeast. It became very popular...but kinda short lived. The track closed down in 1869 and they sold off the land for development.

Other tracks would open throughout St. Louis but in 1905, organized betting was made illegal, and that marked the end of horse racing in StL.

PS: In this neighborhood there is a street named Hunt. It’s named after Charles Lucas Hunt, the secretary of the Laclede Association. Kentucky Ave, also in the same neighborhood, is said to have been named that due to horse racing’s popularity in that state.

PPS: I thought this might be the shortest street in StL but H**p Ave is pretty tiny so I’m not sure !

12/28/2024

I love St. Louis alleys SO FREAKING MUCH. There is so much history lurking in them.

This concrete container is an ash pit. In the days of coal burning, people generated a whole lot of ash. The ash had to be dumped somewhere, so homeowners would dump their ashes in these containers for collection and disposal.

Although the ash pit wasn’t intended to be a trash bin, people often dumped their garbage in them and would burn the contents to bring the trash level down.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the constant smell of burning trash wasn’t exactly pleasant. Smoke laws created in the early and mid-1900s stopped a lot of the random burning activities.

As coal went away, so did our ash pits, but you can still see evidence of the former ash pits in alleys all over St. Louis (although these pre-cast concrete pits seem to be most prevalent in the neighborhoods that were developed in the 1920s-40s). The pics in this post are all from alleys in the Southampton neighborhood.

12/10/2024

In episode three of Weird Cool Things About Tower Grove Park, I want to talk about the maze. It was often referred to as a labyrinth and that sounds way cooler and more dramatic than maze so I’ll also be referring to it as a labyrinth.

Between 1868 and 1870, a labyrinth was constructed in Tower Grove Park. “Consisted of hemlock, spruce, and cedar hedge, surrounded by a row of Osage orange.” From what I’ve read, this seems like another feature that Henry Shaw saw in Victorian England and brought over here.

All the articles I read about it seemed to consist of people extremely annoyed that it was always closed lol.

The hedge maze - sorry - labyrinth was removed sometime around 1910. I guess if you weren’t gonna let anyone access it, why even have it.

The labyrinth that is currently installed at the Botanical Garden was created in 1986 as a tribute to Shaw’s original Tower Grove Park labyrinth.

12/08/2024

This is my second episode of Cool Weird Things About Tower Grove Park.

I always through this house facing Magnolia was built for the purpose of housing the park’s superintendent but I was WRONG.

When this house was built in 1869, it was not within Tower Grove Park.

See, Henry Shaw had an idea. Reserve a strip of land that borders the park and goes 200 feet back. Create lots, lease lots, build villas, lease villas, use the rent money to fund the Botanical Garden. Imagine that for a second. Houses lining the entire perimeter of the park. We’d only be able to enter the park from certain entrances! While the park would technically still be public, I bet it wouldn’t feel that way.

The house we’re looking at was a prototype. It was later used as the superintendents residence.

Shaw had a lot of good ideas, but this was a flop. No one wanted to build villas they couldn’t even own. If he had been willing to sell the lots, maybe it would’ve worked.

Shaw died, the land was tied up in litigation for years, and finally it ended up in the hands of the city and was incorporated into the park.

This house isn’t even my favorite evidence from this story. If you look at some of the entrances to the park, you’ll see pillars that were strategically placed 200 feet into the park to mark that original setback line.

12/01/2024

I’ve spent three years trying to get a pic of the ruins in Tower Grove Park but every time I go, there are like 12 brides in line to take pictures. Today was my day..

In 1863, a glorious hotel opened up in downtown St. Louis. The Lindell hotel (named after the same family that Lindell Blvd was named after) had over 500 rooms, including dining rooms, billiard rooms, conversation rooms, club rooms, reading rooms, writing rooms, and more rooms we’ve never heard of before now. It had grand staircases. The bricks used would be able to pave 38 acres worth of road. Italian marble everywhere. It was super fancy.

In 1867 it burned down. I mean, it REALLY burned, you could see the fire from 30 miles away.

Henry Shaw took some of the beautiful limestone rubble from the Lindell Hotel. He got with his head gardener James Gurney (who was responsible for those awesome lily pads) in the park, and together the two designed and built the fountain stone and ruins sculpture we know today.

11/24/2024

I grew up on Devonshire at Kingshighway and I’m kicking myself for never wondering why Devonshire was so wide. Why wasn’t I a more perceptive 8-year-old??

Devonshire is wider than all the other east-west streets that surround it, but WHY? It’s no Chippewa, no Kingshighway. It’s not a major thoroughfare.

Well it was created to be wide so a streetcar could run down it. It looped at Devonshire and Macklind and then went downtown to Broadway and Pine.

I think it looped at the northwest corner of Devonshire and Macklind because those mid-century homes are newer than the buildings on the other corners. So cool.

11/13/2024

This is a carriage stone appreciation post.

In the olden days you couldn’t just hop into a horse-drawn carriage. Those things were high. Like one of those lifted pick up trucks but instead of engine it’s horse.

You needed a step up to get in that carriage! Some call them horse blocks, some call them mounting blocks, some carriage steps, but I feel like “carriage stone” has the best ring to it so I’m going with that.

You can find these carriage stones in historic neighborhoods all over St. Louis, but they are most easily spotted near the curbs in front of old mansions.

I’m sure some aren’t original to the home - for example the 1896 tornado decimated the Lafayette Square area so badly that many of the homes on Mississippi are new… I’m guessing the stones in front of those homes are just there to match the character of the neighborhood.

My favorites are the stones that have an early homeowner’s initials carved into them. It makes researching old homes so much easier for me lol.

Stone-cutters were highly skilled craftsmen and those carriage stones were just one of many things they created.

Given how much work has been done to streets, sewers, sidewalks and lawns over the last 150 years, I’m surprised we have as many carriage stones as we do.

Here are a few pics around town. The first pic I included is from Park Ave in Lafayette Square. Initials “EL” are for Ernst Link, an important beer dude in StL history.

10/29/2024

Just wanted to share my favorite little fact about the Uncle Bill’s on South Kingshighway (RIP). If you look closely at the sign, you can see the name of the restaurant that Uncle Bill’s replaced - DiFranco’s Restaurant. That lil cocktail glass in the corner was part of DiFranco’s logo too.

10/26/2024

3621 McRee
Tiffany
Built 1895

So many of our glorious buildings are credited to the architects that designed them but without the builders and laborers, we’d have nothing.

Peter Holscher had this house built as his residence in 1895 and it will not come as a surprise to you that he was a stone cutter.

What’s even better is that he worked on Union Station. He didn’t design it, and his name isn’t anywhere on the Wikipedia page or any of the websites that praise the beauty of it, but because of his expertise in stone work, he was in charge of the er****on of Union Station’s tower.

There is a county in Texas called Lavaca - its population is 20,000. When it was time for them to construct their county courthouse, the foreman was so impressed with Holscher’s method of construction in StL that he used the same method for theirs.

Holscher left St. Louis for the east coast around 1900.

Fast forward to 1908, Washington, DC. Our glorious Treasury building was getting crusty and the sandstone columns on the east wing were deteriorating pretty badly. When it was time for them to be replaced with granite columns, who was the subcontractor for the job? THAT’S RIGHT. PETER FREAKING HOLSCHER. Word on the street was that Holscher used portions of the old cornices from the Treasury to construct his new residence in the area. If that’s true, I wonder if the stone on this McRee house is leftover from....Union Station? A girl can dream.

10/20/2024

In the early 1900s, the guys who were painting signs on buildings were called wall dogs. What’s left of their work is faded on buildings all over the country. Most people call them ghost signs.

Six months ago, a building in Clayton was demolished, revealing hand-painted advertisements on the building next door. Fox 2 News did a whole thing on it.

This building on Folsom in Botanical Heights has a similar story. If a ghost sign is this vibrant, you gotta ask yourself why.

This building went up in 1895, the signs were painted, and then by 1900, another building had been constructed next door. The signs were concealed by the building next door for over a century. There was a fire at the building next door, it was demolished, and these signs were revealed. Google Streetview managed to capture part of the story.

I think Pattison Whiskies was a very short-lived brand out of Scotland. WIthin four years the company went from being a small brand to being a national brand to going bankrupt and the owners being convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Apparently they spent an obscene amount of money on advertising and it’s pretty cool that we’ve got a little snapshot of their story here in StL.

The saloon in the top sign was probably called Star because directly across the street, the Liggett and Myers To***co Co was churning out Star brand to***co.

10/08/2024

Have you ever been near the entrance to Eads’ bridge and seen this sidewalk clock and been like “wow, that’s definitely a clock,” and for the rest of your life wonder why that clock is there?

100+ years ago, these sidewalk clocks were used as advertising devices for local businesses.

This clock was originally located on Delmar at DeBaliviere and used outside of the Bickel-Moll market for 46 years. In 1967, the market was demolished to deal with a faulty sewer line. The Land Reutilization Authority, the entity that acquired the market, promised the owner Ira Bickel that they would find a new location for the market. They were never able to find a location big enough, and that marked the end of the 109 year old small business.

The clock was saved, restored and placed on The Landing downtown in 1978. While it’s sad we lost the market, I do love that St. Louis has so many bits of history hiding in plain sight.

09/30/2024

ATTENTION: PIXY STIX WERE INVENTED IN ST LOUIS

In the 1930s, Kool-Aid had been selling their tiny little packets of unsweetened drink mix. A guy in Salt Lake City (J. Fish Smith) decided that people might be more interested in a dry drink mix if they only needed to add water. So he created a formula for the mix that also included sugar.

The local kids just started eating the powder mix on its own. So the guy renamed it Lik-M-Aid (now known as Fun Dip) and marketed it as a candy.

In 1952, Smith's son, Menlo, moved to St. Louis. The problem with Lik-M-Aid was that it still sort of SEEMED like it should be a drink. The packet it came in looked like a drink mix packet. He took the Lik-M-Aid formula and shoved it in a paper straw and boom, Pixy Stix were born.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Menlo had the folks over at the local Tums factory use their equipment to process that same formula into little disks and BOOM, SWEETARTS WERE BORN RIGHT HERE!!! WHAT!!!! INCREDIBLE!!!!

I need to buy some Pixy Stix and mix them with water so I can experience the original intention of the formula!

09/29/2024

This blue building on Dr. MLK and 20th is pretty cool.

It was built in 1918 for a furniture company and then later occupied by the Jack Rabbit Candy Co.

In 1914, StL had 89 confectionaries producing various candies, and that doesn’t even count chocolate!!! That’s wild! After the pain of the depression and the sugar rations of WWII, by 1952 there were only 10 manufacturers left. One of those was Jack Rabbit Candy.

Jack Rabbit was founded in 1918 and started out selling colorful hard penny candies. They graduated to stick candies (you know the old timey kind you see in those jars at museum gift shops lol), sugar puff balls, baked coconut logs, and their very popular candy apple.

Jack Rabbit stuck around until 1952, and closed shortly after the owner passed away.

This building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 bc I think at the time, the owner had planned to rehab this building into lofts (sometimes owners will work to get buildings added to the National Register bc you get tax credits for historic buildings). Sad to see it didn’t pan out, but happy to see its still standing. Hopefully one day it will thrive again.

The pics I’m including are just candy-related random nonsense.

(Most of this info was obtained from the National Register write up so thank you Melinda Wi******er, you rule).

Found St. Louis