We head down Goodfellow Boulevard from Walnut Park to reach the West End, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the City. It was incredibly rural, as Pictorial St. Louis shows, in 1876. But by the early Twentieth Century, it had filled in with posh wood frame and brick houses of St. Louis’s professional and managerial class.

This is the Clemens Place Addition, platted on May 15, 1885 by Julius Pitzman, who again shows up again outside of the private streets, though these lots were clearly laid out for larger houses, as can be seen in their large sizes. The standard lot size for much of the city had been 125 by 25 feet, and these are easily twice as wide. Also, Pitzman has dispensed with alleys on the blocks north of Delmar, creating a more suburban feel for the neighborhood.

The West End was the target of severely misguided urban renewal which has now been largely forgotten. Between Hamilton and Goodfellow, almost all of the historic houses you can see in the Sanborn Map above have been annihilated. You can’t tell me they were all beyond saving, particularly because we know they would have been well-built and higher end, considering this was an upper middle class to upper class neighborhood. The house below indicates what was lost.

Below, this beautiful apartment building was demolished at the southwest corner of Goodfellow and Clemens.

This apartment was demolished at the northeast corner of Clemens and Goodfellow.

We cross over Goodfellow Boulevard heading east, and look at the block that ends in the Ruth Porter Mall, which old fire insurance maps show was formerly known as a Cabanne Way.

There are still some wonderful houses left before we get to the Porter Mall, which is a roadblock nowadays.

Beautiful rehabbing has been occurring in the belt of the city where there are many wonderful wood frame houses.

Turning around, there are still some lavish brick houses, as well.

I’m telling you, outside the private streets, the West End has better architecture than the Central West End.