Speaking of anomalies, and I always tell people to watch out for this, if you ever seen a cluster of newer houses in a neighborhood of much older housing stock in a part of the city that was platted out early, you need to be curious. In this instance, we are looking at the west side of Blair Avenue in between Newhouse and Angelica in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

These houses are hardly spring chickens, and look stylistically to be from the 1920s, but that is still very young for the area, where houses can easily date to the 1860s, but more often were built in the decades after the Civil War.

Consulting fire insurance maps, we learn this was a large single parcel was undeveloped well into the Twentieth Century. It was unlabeled, but there was a stone quarry, alternately named Perkinson’s and Laclede’s, which is now Windsor Park, just across Angelica. Was it related? I don’t know.

And this last lot didn’t see a house until the emergence of the Gingerbread style.