Remembering the deaths of Richard Nickel and Louis Sullivan

Thirty-eight years ago today (4/13/1972) photographer & preservation activist Richard Nickel died in Adler & Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building as he was trying to save a few more pieces before the wrecking ball finished off the building. Nickel was my current age, 43.  More info on Richard Nickel.

Interestingly, Nickel died one day before the 48th anniversary of the death of architect Louis Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924).  I recently visited Chicago for the opening of the new Louis Sullivan documentary, Louis Sullivan:The Struggle for an American Architecture, by Mark Smith.

St. Louis is fortunate to have three works by Sullivan.

Two of the three bear the name Wainwright. No trip to Bellefontaine Cemetery is complete without seeing the Wainwright Tomb.

Here is the trailer for Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture:

– Steve Patterson

St. Louis’ first ban on smoke

On April 8th St. Louis took action to get rid of damaging smoke.  The year was 1940 and the smoke was from coal fired furnaces. The problem had been building for years.  Time magazine explains:

The burly head of Bernard Francis (“Barney”) Dickmann, the enterprising bachelor realtor who is St. Louis’ mayor until at least April 6 (municipal election day), last week literally was in a smoky fog, and had been there for many winter weeks. The murk over St. Louis has been so thick that the new Governor of Missouri, Lloyd Crow Stark, an enterprising nurseryman, could not see the city streets when he flew over during an inspection of the Ohio-Mississippi flood. He wished that Mayor Dickmann would sign a pending city ordinance to abate the smoke which makes St. Louis grimier than notorious Pittsburgh.   (Medicine: St. Louis Smoke Monday, Feb. 22, 1937)

Dickmann was reelected as Mayor but it would be another three years before he’d get a bill from the Board of Aldermen to sign into law.

During Mayor Dickmann’s administration, the city also enacted a Smoke Ordinance, and took steps to reduce the air pollution created by the extensive use of coal for home heating and industrial use in the city. (Wikipedia: Dickman)

A key figure in banning smoke was future mayor Tucker:

Tucker served in Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann’s administration from 1934 to 1937, during which time he served as City Smoke Commissioner. From 1939 to 1941, he was secretary to Mayor Dickmann’s Survey and Audit Committee which sponsored the Griffenhagen Report on St. Louis City Government. In part of 1940 and 1941, he was Director of Public Safety. (Wikipedia: Tucker)

Can you imagine smoke so bad you had to use lanterns to see during the day? It took years to ban the cause of the smoke because many fought the change.  Today, 70 years later, I’m so glad they got it done despite those who objected.

– Steve Patterson

The Soulard voting riot of 1852

Voters in the region will go to the polls tomorrow.  In St. Louis County voters will be asked to approve Proposition A to help fund local public transit.

It was on this day in 1852 that voting led to a riot. From the book “St. Louis Day by Day” by Frances Hurd Stadler:

“This election day was filled with bloody rioting between recently enfranchised Germans and native-born Americans with the battlefield centered in the Soulard Market area. Early in the morning First Ward poll workers discouraged Whig voters from casting their ballots.  The discouragement increased until some would-be voters barely escaped with their lives. When the rumor spread that Germans had taken over the First Ward polls, a large group of Americans moved in.”

From the history of Soulard Market:

In St. Louis, the burgeoning German immigrant population sided fervently with the abolitionist North, while most of the Americans and French were Southern sympathizers. During mayoral election day in April 1852, some German men began preventing, by the threat of bodily harm, the presumed opposition from voting at the Soulard Market polling place.

Word quickly spread of this action, which enraged the American population. A mob of 5,000 Americans moved through the streets that afternoon toward the market. They were greeted by firsts, rocks, brickbats, and even gunshots, but 200 or so of the Americans broke through and seized the Soulard Market poll with shouts of “Free suffrage!”. The violence lasted into the night; persons were killed and a nearby tavern was set ablaze.

Voting tomorrow should be less dramatic!  If you are a registered voter in St. Louis County please support Prop A.

– Steve Patterson

Poultry in the city was once common

We don’t know where our food comes from. Sure, the supermarket.  But where does the supermarket get it? My grandparents and parents had gardens their entire lives.   Before the 1950s industrialization of our food production, people in cities and suburbs raised food.  Large facilities such as the 1869 St. Louis County Lunatic Asylum at 5300 Arsenal, now known as the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, raised the food they needed.

“On April 23, 1869, St. Louis County Lunatic Asylum opened its doors to 150 mentally ill people. Work began in August 1864. Designed and built by architect William Rumbold, it is the second governmental facility in the state to serve this population. Rumbold’s vision was to recall Imperial Rome, resulting in the cast-iron-dome and plans that called for fine imported marble pillars for the front portico.” (Source)

As a side note remember that prior to 1876 the city was located within the boundaries of St. Louis County.

As you can see when the facility was 40 years old it had a number of buildings behind it to the South. If we look closer we get a better idea of the uses:

There near the center is the hen house and poultry yard, over on the right is the dairy and on the left is the greenhouse.  The pink structure is a brick bread room.

Food production within the city is not a new concept, it is an old one that many are thankfully discovering and reintroducing.  I’m not suggesting we eat only what we can grow ourselves, I just don’t want the “animals belong on the farm” to prevent people from raising some of their food in urban areas.  Thanks to John Palmer for pointing out the hen house on this map to me.

– Steve Patterson

Before the highway cut off downtown from the river

The razing of 40 blocks of St. Louis along the riverfront began on October 10, 1939. There was no plan at that time, a design competition wasn’t held until 1947.  So St. Louis created the biggest surface parking lot on what was the original village.

Ground breaking for construction of the Arch was held nearly 20 years later, on June 23, 1959.  For 20 years the only reason to connect with this location was to get to your car in a sea of cars.

Two years after the ground breaking we see that all that had changed was the reduction in the amount of land for surface parking.  By this point the city’s leaders saw this site as a wasteland, nothing we’d ever want easy pedestrian access to.

Future mayor Raymond Tucker was 43 (my current age) when the city razed these blocks.  One of his first duties as mayor would have been the ribbon cutting at the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.  He was 68 when the depressed highway lanes created a permanent divide between the central business district and what would become the Jefferson Nation Expansion Memorial we know today.  He and others leaders at the time must have thought they were making good decisions for the future of our city.

But to them the site was simply parking.  They worked hard to get the Arch funded and built.  Tucker saw the Arch completed but not the landscaping, he died in 1970. This generation of men had experience with a very different St. Louis than us today.

Thank you to to Tom Bradley & Jennifer Clark of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial for the use of the above images.

– Steve Patterson