It was hiding in plain view. This old photograph of the French Market, which I had posted way back in October of 2020, featured a very prominent gable roof with windows that are obviously that of a church or chapel.

Digging deeper, I discovered that the block of South Broadway, Hickory, 6th and LaSalle streets once contained the Convent of the Sacred Heart. If you look to the east, there’s even a Convent Street intersecting with South Broadway right at the former front door.

The land was given by John O’Fallon himself, back in 1824 when this was actually on the outskirts of the town of St. Louis. I dug up the actual deed of O’Fallon giving the land to Sisters St. Philipine Duchesne, Octavie Berthold and Lucille Mathieron, recorded in Book N, pages 326-328 (that’s really old). There was already apparently a brick house on the property, and unlike modern property descriptions that give a subdivision name, block and lot numbers, the land’s legal description was merely described by who its neighbors were, which in this case were Auguste Chouteau and James Mackay.

As the city grew up around the convent, it became an extremely valuable piece of land, as you might imagine, and the photographs illustrate how it offered an oasis of calm along a bustling South Broadway on the Near South Side.

Even better, the Whipple Fire Insurance Maps Special Risk Volume has every part of the complex labeled, so we know how the convent functioned. The original chapel was labeled “C”, and while not labeled as such, “A” was almost certainly a larger, later chapel.

This isometric projection of the complex is just lovely.

Below, these plat maps show the property holdings of the Sisters, which included land across South Sixth Street to the west. South is to the left and north is to the right.

The deed recorded in Book N goes into considerable detail about what the Sisters were expected to do in exchange for the grant of the real estate from John O’Fallon. Set amounts of money were to be provided to girls who entered the orphanage until the age of eighteen, and a book was to be kept recording their names. Everything was laid out. The Sisters eventually moved further west, to their new campus in the Central West End, I believe. The property was sold and the warehouses that cluster along French Market Court replaced the convent buildings.