This house from the 1840s on North Tucker is a survivor. It is one of what were thousands of houses on the north and south side of downtown that were demolished for urban renewal in the mid-Twentieth Century. Most of those houses were never replaced with anything except parking lots or junkyards. I travel to other cities such as Cincinnati and its Over the Rhine neighborhood, Manhattan or Washington, DC and its DuPont or Logan Circle neighborhoods, and I think about how much more successful St. Louis would be if there were real, walkable neighborhoods adjacent to downtown–you know, like most cities–instead of a warren of train tracks, interstate overpasses and vacant lots, many of which will probably still be vacant in a couple of decades at their one-hundred year mark of having been cleared of their buildings.
I’d imagine that remaining 1849 fire “brick surviving” Federal Neoclassical facade built house (before it became a three families or more tenement near a generations long gone Fenian Barrio known as the Kerry Patch) would’ve caught the visual fancy of Roscoe Misselhorn. An Illinois farm boy who cared about the architectural well being for Saint Louis City’s, aka Market Street County’s pre older parts than those greater Veiled Prophet 2.0 organizational elites, both before 1979 (when the Missouri National Guard went against those protesting Homer G. Phillips hospital staff members) and after 1979, all within a time when London/Westminster’s pre Zimbabwe Rhodesia Colony was still on a world map beyond just Apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union
Thanks for photographing this antebellum period built house when it’s still standing “for now” 🙁