Found St. Louis

09/28/2025

This house at 6513 Bradley Ave in the Lindenwood Park neighborhood is a Sears House!

I’m sure everyone is familiar with Sears, the department store that used to be everywhere. Sears started out in the 1800s as a mail-order watch company. Over the years, they expanded into farm supplies, groceries, jewelry, stoves, toys, clothes, etc.

In the early 1900s, Sears introduced a concept called Sears Modern Homes, where you could just...order a home from a catalog. You could buy homes ranging from tiny cottages to huge mansions.

Sears would ship out all of the building materials via train. Some homeowners would have contractors build these houses, others would get a group of friends and family together to build the homes themselves.

It is estimated that over 70,000 Sears homes were built throughout the United States.

The largest single collection of Sears homes is only an hour outside of St. Louis, in Carlinville, IL. Two coal mines were opened there and the company running the mines purchased 156 Sears homes for their employees to live in. It was the largest order for Sears homes in history and today there are still 152 of the homes standing!

This house is so freaking cute, I cannot deal with it.

09/21/2025

This utterly hideous nightmare at 2933 Dodier was originally built in 1903 for the president of a lumber company. The house did not look like this when it was built.

Fast forward to 2024 when an out of state investor purchased the property.

The “investor,” Red Door Legacy aka Lighthouse Estates owns (I’m guessing) 20-30 properties here. They buy vacant buildings, board up as many windows as possible, cover the whole thing in a thick coat of maroon or black paint, and all of their buildings end up looking like this. The paint hides not only the many boarded-up windows, but tuckpointing and structural issues that may be happening with the property. I can’t imagine what they’ve done to the interior.

I really have nothing more to say.

09/14/2025

In 1923, St. Louis Public Schools decided that they needed to build a massive stadium to host their football, baseball, and soccer games. They bought this huge piece of land at Kingshighway and St. Louis Ave.

This concept was new and a little weird. Nowhere in the country had any Board of Education built a publicly funded stadium entirely separate of any school.

The original plan was to create this massive stadium that seated 50,000 people (WHAT) at a total cost of 1.25 million. Parents were furious at the idea of spending that much money on a stadium when there was still a pressing need for new schools. As a compromise, the Board of Ed scrapped the original plans and came up with a smaller, much cheaper stadium that would seat 15,0000 at a total cost of $300,000.

The stadium was designed by RM Milligan (who designed schools like Beaumont, Buder, Vashon, Scruggs, Dewey, Roe, Long, etc) and had the most modern features like dressing rooms! and showers!

It finally opened in 1928.

The stadium wasn’t just used for football games. In 1963, Bob Hayes set the WORLD RECORD for the 100-yard-dash (9.1 seconds) right here!

It also hosted pageants, festivals, various entertainment events, etc. The Moolah Shrine Circus was held here annually.

In the 1960s, bleachers had been added to the fields of five city high schools, so football games were being hosted at the schools. The stadium fell into disuse and in 1969, the wrecking ball took it away forever.

08/23/2025

The vacant Millenium Hotel in downtown StL is set to be demolished to make way for a giant new development.

In 1964, St. Louis decided to build a massive hotel with a revolving restaurant at the top. It would do a full rotation each hour. The whole revolving restaurant thing was a mid-century marvel that went out of style in the 80s. I’m very depressed that I’ve never been in one. We should have a rotating restaurant in every city in this country!!!!

This hotel was originally called the...Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn? When I read that I was like hold up. Are we talking about the frozen lasagna Stouffer’s? The Lean Cuisine Stouffer’s? They were running hotels? Apparently the brand started out as a dairy stand that evolved into restaurants that expanded into hotels that expanded into frozen lasagna.

Stouffer’s finally opened in 1969. A second, smaller round building was added to the site in 1974. It seemed like there was a lot of hype as it was being built, but once it finally opened, the hype fizzleed out. After a few years, it became the Clarion Hotel, and in 1992, it became the Regal Riverfront Inn, which eventually became the Millenium Hotel. The Millenium Hotel finally closed in 2014.

Today at a bookstore, I saw a St. Louis book that had an illustration of the riverfront on its cover. The illustration included the Millenium Hotel, because why wouldn’t it? It made me think about how that silly hotel with its revolving restaurant exists in just about every single riverfront picture from the last 60 years. I don’t know. Maybe I’m sad about its demolition. Or maybe I’m sad about the 20-year, 90% tax abatement that the new development will receive. When the original hotel was built in the 60s, it received a 25-year tax abatement, and all that got us was a bunch of failed attempts at a hotel, 2 soon-to-be demolished buildings, and less money for our public schools.

I’m sure this current batch of aldermen will explain to us why this tax abatement is so much different and better than the last!!!

Sorry, I went off on a tangent. Rest in peace, you revolving queen.

08/10/2025

There is a very lovely lake in Benton Park.

The lake is now without water, all thanks to a cave.

English Cave exists a teeny bit to the east of Benton Park. There’s a bunch of lore that it goes directly under the park (with more lore that there are entrances to it from the houses that line Jefferson Ave but that’s a bunch of shenaniganery if you ask me)

The cave is named after Ezra English, a brewer who popularized the cave and made it into a pleasure spot in the mid-1800s.

We’ve all heard a lot about beer caves in StL but my favorite factoid about English Cave is that in the late 1800s, it was used to cultivate mushrooms! A couple years ago, a dedicated team sent a camera down and found mushrooms still growing, I mean is that not the cutest thing or what.

Earlier this year, the Benton Park Lake sprung a little leak, which probably had to do with both the sinkholes under the park and the cave itself. The little leak turned into a totally drained lake. I hope the city can find a way to repair the lake because it looks like hot garbage right now.

08/02/2025

The St. Louis Public School district has been fighting a losing battle for decades

Here is a quick primer on public school funding in Missouri. Please keep in mind that this is a crazy formula far too complicated for my pea brain to understand, BUT, I can understand the basics. Public schools in Missouri receive a base funding of $6,375 per student.

If St. Louis had the population it had in 1967 (with 105,000 students enrolled), SLPS would receive $669 MILLION dollars at the base level. Today, SLPS total enrollment is 20,000. That $669 million has been reduced to $127 million.

I realize this is a gross oversimplification of school funding. Federal, state, and local levels all play a part in school funding. Regardless, one thing is for certain - when you lose kids, you lose money.

There have been some news articles out discussing how SLPS may be forced to close half of their schools. I'm furious. St. Louis is furious.

We have historic, high-maintenance buildings that are now housing one-fifth of the students they were built for.

Someone's gonna need to get real creative before we end up bussing kids to the opposite ends of the city just for them to get an education.

07/27/2025

THE ONION HOUSE
4148 Connecticut

In 1882, Gerhard and Maria Ludewig, along with their four children (one of whom was only two months old) got on a boat and travelled from Germany to the United States. Gerhard was listed as a farmer in Germany, but when he arrived here he became a cabinet maker.

The family built this house in 1892. I believe members of the family owned and lived in it until at least 1950. That’s pretty incredible given all of the rapid changes to St. Louis in that timespan.

Truthfully I just wanted to post this because every time I’ve been by to take a photo the house was covered with scaffolding. The scaffolding is off so today I finally got my pic.

There are many articles about the family who has spent years rehabbing it - it’s clear a lot of blood, sweat and tears (get it...onion...tears....man I’m hilarious) went into this house. Truly a gem in Tower Grove South.

07/20/2025

The best part about this business card is that nowhere does it say what the guy’s actual career was. Frank Dausch was a barber lol.

This thing where barbers were LEECHING and TOOTH DRAWING dates all the way back to the medievel times. Before modern medicine, barbers were also...surgeons. They did stuff like tooth extraction, wound care, haircuts, amputations, beard shave, etc.
They were actually called barber-surgeons.

I really want to talk about bloodletting though, because that was wild. There was a common thought that all of our ailments stemmed from too much blood, so the solution was to drain the body of some blood when a person was feeling sick. One way was to slash someones vein and let blood pour out into an open container.

Another way these guys did bloodletting was through leeching, which was exactly what you think it was. Throw a bunch of leeches on a person and let them get down to business. Leeching became so popular that there were leech farms where people bred leeches to sell to apothecaries.

Frank Dausch was up on North Broadway doing all of this stuff (well probably not amputating people) in the late 1800s, when it had become far less common. Soooo wild right ?

PS: Leeches have been used in modern medicine but not in this way!!!
PPS: You know those cool old barber poles? It is thought that the red and white symbolize the blood and bandages from the barber’s historic role as a barber-surgeon!
PPSS: I found this business card at the Kirkwood Historical Society - 302 W Argonne

07/13/2025

I just love this cutie on Chouteau near 18th.

It was constructed in 1892 for the St. Louis Kuenstler Verein, an association of German-American artists. This was created as a public art gallery for members of the association to exhibit ther work.

In 1908 it was converted into a factory that made overalls.

In 1914, it was taken over by the Lafayette Brush Manufacturing Company, who received a contract from the German Army to manufacturer 2200 cavalry brushes (whch I think were brushes to groom their horses with?)

From the 1940s-60s it was a printing company.

I don’t know. Something about our buildings having more lives than a cat. So cool.

Chouteau has lost a mess of extremely cool buildings. Somehow, this guy survived. What a babe.

07/06/2025

This Tuskegee Airmen stuff is wild.

In 1927, when Christopher Newman was five years old, his family came to St. Louis from Mississippi as part of the Great Migration.

That same year, St. Louis had a massive parade to celebrate Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight. That parade and that flight lit the spark in Newman that would eventually send him off to Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama.

He flew 84 missions during WWII. Once while in Italy, he had to crash land his plane, it caught fire, he spent almost 3 months in the hospital, got out, turned right back around and got in another plane. Another time, while flying over the Adriatic Sea, his plane was hit by enemy fire. He had to bail from his plane and land in the sea. He floated in that sea alone for six hours until he was rescued. All of this stuff happened before he even turned 23!! CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE???

As if that wasn’t enough, he went into the Korean War and flew another 97 missions.

Newman was one of the most courageous people I’ve ever read about. He passed in 2022 at the age of 100 but his legacy lives on.

Soldiers Memorial currently has a (FREE FREE FREE) exhibit on the Tuskegee Airmen. I hope you get a chance to check it out.

06/16/2025

Why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a 150-year-old farmhouse just sitting in the middle of University City?? I couldn’t believe it until I visited it!

This house at 6826 Chamberlain was built around 1873 for a family of German dairy farmers, the Sutters. Shortly after the home was built, the Sutters sold the property to another German farming family (this time it was vegetables, not cows), the Meyers. Roman Meyer would grow his vegetables and take them into the city for market. University City to downtown StL is about 11 miles… wonder how long that trip took with a wagon full of produce in 1873.

As University City grew and was ripe for development, the Meyers sold off most of the land, but kept and continued to live in the farmhouse. The house was owned by the Meyers for over a century, which is probably the only reason it’s still standing today.

The coolest part about this house is that both the Sutters and the Meyers are actively involved in its preservation and storytelling. If you ever get the opportunity to visit, please check it out. (I’ll link their website in my comments)

06/09/2025

I typically don’t use my platform to share current events but as a Ward 8 resident with zero representation at this time, I’m sad to see that most people in the ward don’t know about this event tomorrow. If you live in Ward 8 please come to this. There are a lot of candidates and it’s important we vote for the one that will best serve all the communities within our ward!!!

📢 Ward 8! Meet ALL 5 Alderperson candidates at our upcoming forum to fill the vacant seat! Get your questions answered and learn their visions for our community. Join us Tuesday, June 10, 6:00-7:30