I supposedly visited Chamberlain Avenue in between Clara and Belt avenues back in August of 2009, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out where half of the photos I included in that post seventeen years ago are actually from. A couple really are from Chamberlain Avenue, but the others–who knows.
Anyway, I came back and took some photographs that are of much better quality, first heading east from Clara looking at the north side of the street…
Of course, this is the Chamberlain Park Addition, surveyed by Julius Pitzman in 1887. Bartmer Avenue, one block to the north, is the main drag in the addition, and of course I’ve looked at it several times over the years. This whole area was once the Maplecrest Estate.
As is typical, and could be seen in the Sanborn Map above, it was originally wood frame houses, then brick houses, and then as can be seen below, apartment buildings began to be built on two or three lots combined together.
If the city had not continued to sprawl out to the suburbs, surely more houses would have been demolished for more apartment buildings. Note how narrow the automobile driveway is between the mirror image wings.
Even large, expensive, upper middle class houses were built in tracts, as the two houses below demonstrate.
Turning around and heading back west, we see some real bangers on the south side of the street, such as the one below. This was the home of Dr. James and Athalia Aldrich. Dr. Aldrich was the president of the National Medical Association.
The West End was a neighborhood filled with some of the elite members of St. Louis society and professional class.
Below we have an interesting twist, where it looks like this one, while possessing the massing of nearby shingle style houses, it appears to have been always stucco. It is a unique house, and one that most people never know about in this quiet corner of the city.
The phrase **”main drag”** is American English slang for the **principal or most important street** in a town or city — the main thoroughfare where businesses, activity, and social life are concentrated (similar to “main street,” “high street,” or “main stem”).
### Etymology and Origin
The word **”drag”** in this sense emerged as **19th-century British and American underworld/criminal slang** for a **street or road**. It first appears in print around the 1850s:
– John Camden Hotten’s 1859 slang dictionary defines “drag” as “a street or road” (with “back-drag” meaning a back street).
– An 1851 example from Henry Mayhew’s *London Labour and the London Poor* uses “main drag” to mean a public/high street.
The **”main drag”** phrasing itself is attested by the mid-19th century (around 1851 in some sources) and became more common in American usage by the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The underlying reason for “drag” → “street” comes from an earlier slang sense of “drag” meaning a **vehicle** (especially a wagon, cart, buggy, or sledge) that is literally **dragged** or pulled — originally by horses (from as early as the 1750s in slang). By extension:
– The **route** along which such a vehicle was dragged became called a “drag” (i.e., a street or road).
– This transferred sense appears in the mid-1800s and is the direct source for “main drag” as the primary street.
(Some etymologists note a related but separate development: thieves’ slang later used “drag” for an **automobile** by the 1930s, which influenced “drag racing” from the 1940s onward — often done along the “main drag” in towns — but the street meaning predates that by decades.)
In short:
**”drag” (vehicle pulled/dragged) → “drag” (street/route for pulling) → “main drag” (principal street)**.
It’s a classic example of how slang evolves from concrete, physical actions (dragging something) into metaphorical place names. Today it’s informal/colloquial but still widely understood, especially in the U.S.