Editor’s Note: Across the country, America’s history is being erased; statues are being removed, sports teams and even animal and bird species are being renamed to appease the WOKE. Following is a short walk down the 200-hundred-year memory lane of an historic St. Louis neighborhood, which has managed to retain its original flavor.

From the corner of Mississippi and Park Avenues in the historic Lafayette Square neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, the neighbors and passers-by have long admired the architecture of Victorian-style homes, listened to bands play on summer nights in Lafayette Park, or observed General Thornton Grimsley parading his cavalry around the loop in 1850, showcasing his military prowess. Standing in this same spot today, one can count up to nearly two hundred years and reflect that almost everything looks and sounds the same as it did long ago.

This is what it means to be part of an historic neighborhood. One does not just live in the community; the community lives on in the people. Its scent remains in refurbished old wood and the fresh clay dried in new bricks. Against the powerful cultural trend to tear down what is beautiful but decaying and build anew what is ugly but practical, the people of Lafayette Square have fought to preserve their history. Theirs is a success story, and one which merits a glance back in time.

It all began with the westward movement of American settlers. Even before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, what is today Lafayette Park was already known as “the Commons,” hundreds of acres set aside for hunting, raising livestock, and gathering resources. Having completed their expedition, Lewis and Clark’s findings were being published and attracting more and more settlers to the area. The Gateway City of St. Louis offered the perfect opportunity for businesses to supply the adventurous souls heading west; one could make a fortune selling the necessities for travel or bartering the riches from previous westward explorations to the traffic passing through.

St. Louis was becoming not just a launching site for travelers but also for settlement. Men whose names remain well-known in the city made their debuts at this time. Henry Shaw’s iron company boomed, and frontiersman and businessman Robert Campbell’s fur trade expanded, providing the wealth Shaw would later use to create the Missouri Botanical Garden and allow Campbell the freedom to lavishly decorate his home with the Victorian furniture that visitors can still see today in this preserved landmark.

Living among these famous men were others lesser known but with similar stories of success. One was the aforementioned General Thornton Grimsley, a merchant in the saddle trade who patented the military dragoon saddle — the upgrade to the first cavalry saddle. Grimsley was a member of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, and he enthusiastically supported retaining a portion of the Commons for the enjoyment of all the city’s residents. Another was Edward Bredell, who was involved in mining and merchandise. These men chose to settle in the Commons, which would later become Lafayette Square.

In those days, the specter of “the wild west” not only existed beyond the cities but often within them as well, and as much as parts of St. Louis boasted of wealth, they were riddled with “wild west” style crime. When St. Louis Mayor John Fletcher Darby, who served from 1835 to 1837 and 1840 to 1841, saw that crime was increasing in the Commons, he provided a solution: he encouraged people to move into the area so that the presence of law-abiding citizens might serve to drive out the rabble.

Thus, the public grounds were sold in 1836 to make room for housing, and the modern-day Lafayette area quickly became a seat of wealth in the city. Grimsley and Bredell both settled here, and not far from them Charles Gibson, who had been awarded “the Grand Cross of the Prussian Crown” by Emperor William II, and who would become the man responsible for keeping Missouri neutral during the Civil War. His neighbor and, consequentially, his daughter’s father-in-law, was Archibald Gamble, a retired lawyer who built a lavish Victorian Italianate mansion designed by local architect George Barnett.

Barnett’s style appealed to many local homeowners, and soon the architectural theme of Lafayette Square became the Victorian style. Today, strolling through its streets or having the opportunity to peek into these proud, long-standing homes during a house tour offers a nostalgic treat only found behind such old, elegant brick facades. The original tamers of the Commons likely never dreamed what would emerge from this piece of urban wilderness.

As new houses took shape, there arose a debate over a thirty-acre parcel of land that had been held in reserve. Homeowners argued that it should be set aside as real estate for public education. But Catholic residents in the area disagreed, arguing that public education “would not benefit the children.” (Public education was growing at that time with the influence of big government advocate Horace Mann, who favored the total takeover of education by the state, so these residents may have been prescient. (See Book Review: Indoctrinating Our Children to Death—Ed.)

In any case, Mayor Darby considered his options and approved the residents’ proposal to reserve the land as a park. In 1844, these thirty acres of no-man’s-land became the first public park in St. Louis. Shortly thereafter, in 1851, the area surrounding the park was formally christened “Lafayette Square” after the famous French soldier in the American War of Independence.

The creation of the park was a turning point in the neighborhood’s history, as it would become and remain the focal point of the Square. Yet the residents’ dreams of a beautiful place of recreation remained in the realm of imagination. Overgrown with brush, the park was such in name only, and those living nearby continued to use the grounds as grazing land for livestock. Little by little, the mayor and board of aldermen worked to make the dream of the park a reality. A fence was erected to keep cattle out. A fountain was built in the midst of the hills, and paths were cut through the trees.

Before long the wild land was tamed. A painting of the park from this period shows women in petticoats pushing strollers along the paths; bright parasols dotting the landscape, and men and women laughing around the fountain and across the bridge that had been constructed. The urban oasis soon attracted additional prominent local figures who built homes nearby. Stephen Barlow, president of “the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern railroad company,” who was also involved in the “Free Soil” movement against slavery, erected his house across from the park on Mississippi Avenue. (The Free Soil Movement was a small but “influential political party in the pre-Civil War period that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories.”)

But perhaps the most influential homeowner was General Grimsley. The average neighbor might frequent the park not only for parties or good conversation, but more likely to witness the daily event of General Grimsley’s cavalry parades. The side-burned saddle merchant knew no better spot to train his troops, and perhaps flaunt his military prowess, than upon the neat paths that wound among the tall trees. Grimsley was, of course, the neighborhood “eccentric,” but he became a necessary part of the daily happenings there.

Like an epicenter, the life of the neighborhood branched out from Lafayette Park, and anyone walking down Park Avenue on a given evening could simultaneously hear music floating down from its pavilions or smell hops lingering in the air from nearby beer gardens. This was Lafayette Square in its golden age, before the winds of changed rolled in.

In 1896, a historically destructive cyclone blew through parts of St. Louis, leaving the Lafayette Square area in shambles. Houses were heavily damaged. Roofs were pitched. Some buildings never recovered. St. John’s Episcopal Church — which today is the home of St. Mary’s Assumption Catholic Church — still lacks the top half of its bell tower, a reminder of the twister’s impact on the neighborhood more than one hundred twenty-five years ago. As for the park, photographs reveal it was barely recognizable as residents stood dazed among felled trees and a solitary statue.

For the sake of the 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis turned its attention to restoring the park to its former beauty, but other parts of the neighborhood were not so lucky. Many of the ornate Victorian homes were too expensive to repair. The original homeowners had passed on, and it remained up to later generations to decide how much they were invested in preserving the legacy of the past.

For many years, the houses remained standing but were in disrepair. Lafayette Square had escaped scarring from the Civil War unlike other St. Louis neighborhoods, but during the World Wars it was not protected as a historic site, and crime once again increased. The city began scheming to find more useful purposes for this tract of land.

During the 1950s & ’60s, St. Louis created plans for building projects and plans for interstate highways; plans which required the destruction of the old to make way for the new. Blueprints were drafted to install a new route through the middle of the city and, unfortunately, it would have cut through Lafayette Square as well, displacing more than seventy villas that were in the way. Michael Pfefferkorn — a correspondent to the mayor during this time — compiled a crisis list of city neighborhoods in need of restoration. Lafayette Square was at the top of his list.

Much like the French general after whom it is named, Lafayette Square stood a fighting chance to oppose demolition because it had a powerful ally — the neighborhood youth who took up the banner of preserving the area. Before attempting to bulldoze the neighborhood, the city compromised by essentially “putting it on sale.” Ornate Italian villas were listed at unbelievably low prices. One homeowner, for example, bought “a 23-room mansion on Park Avenue directly across from the center of Lafayette Park...[for] a shocking $12,500,” which is equivalent to less than $100,000 today (Webster, 2023).

The niche homes that exuded history, wealth, and a bygone age proved tempting to new home buyers. Parallel to the results of Mayor Darby’s plan over a hundred years prior, as more and more people moved in, crime declined and the charm of the area blossomed. The people united and formed The Lafayette Restoration Committee in 1972 to save their neighborhood from destruction. Visible changes were made. On the front page of Preservation News was the story “St. Louis Highway Rerouted,” as the committee successfully lobbied for redirection of the road.

The restoration was not easy. Scripted reconstruction plans for homes would cost thousands of dollars. But in 1974, the committee rejoiced to receive government funds as Congress passed Historic Preservation Loans legislation which “insured loans to preserve, rehabilitate, or restore residential structures of historic value.”

Continuous efforts on the behalf of homeowners worked to pique both local and visitor interest in the neighborhood. Pamphlets advertising house tours and booklets providing detailed explanations about the architecture of the villas were posted and published (Lafayette Square Restoration Committee, 1976). The French Restoration Committee also took interest in the area and hosted “Lafayette Days of Celebration” to showcase the historical celebrities after whom many of the streets are named: Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclede, for example.

Finally, in 1978 a grand committee — the Preservation Alliance of St. Louis — was founded to save many of the city’s neighborhoods. In the first volume of its newsletter the Preservation Alliance expressed its purpose in upper-cased type: “FIX IT, DON’T TEAR IT DOWN!” Five of its twenty-five members were advocates for Lafayette Square and among them was Mike Pfefferkorn. The neighborhood’s pride was being restored, and no one could have expressed it better than a local newspaper headline titled: “Lafayette Park, We Are Back.”

Today, hundreds of documents about historic Lafayette Square are available in the archives of the Missouri Historical Society, and their existence is no coincidence. Contemporary homeowners have taken up where past generations left off. They maintain their Victorian homes, expensive as the process may be. Lafayette house tours are still organized and advertised throughout the year. Nowhere else is a visitor to St. Louis likely to be more charmed than by the pastel-colored, cornice-crowned, three-story dwellings while walking up and down the cobblestone-sided roads heralded by old-fashioned street signs.

At the corner of Mississippi and Park, a coffee in hand, one may observe the residents chatting as they jog by, hear the fountains running in the park ponds, and listen to the breeze whisper about the long history of this unique neighborhood.

References

Theresa Kallal a junior attending the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is completing her major in dual languages - Spanish and French - and enjoys widening her cultural competence through the many opportunities St. Louis and its unique history has to offer. She hopes to continue her studies abroad in Spain, and spend time in Europe polishing her language skills, which she hopes will benefit her in business or nonprofit work.

Want to be notified of new Education Reporter content?
Your information will NOT be sold or shared and will ONLY be used to notify you of new content.
Click Here

Return to Home PageEducation Reporter Online - January 2024