I’ve photographed these houses before, but I still really enjoy coming back to see them again. They’re duplexes, built on North Park Place in 1870, and they have survived for the most part, thought one duplex has been demolished.

They’re split between two different plates of Compton and Dry, so you can’t see all six at once, but there they are. Note the “ghost” house on the right; in printmaking, if you make a mistake, you can often burnish out the lines, but here it’s clear they didn’t do it successfully!

Sadly, many of them are vacant, thought people have restored several of them.

The large service wings out the back, where there would be servants’ quarters and kitchens, stick out from the back further than can be seen from the street, as demonstrated in the Sanborn map below.

This wall is intriguing, and gives a window into St. Louis’s past topography. The streets of St. Louis, as they are now, did not naturally occur as flat, or smoothly rounded. Street grading clearly came in after these houses were built in 1870.