The next couple of weeks I’m going to be looking at that strange, awkward strip of land that extends from South Grand Boulevard to Tower Grove Avenue between Magnolia Avenue and the north alley behind Botanical Avenue in the Shaw neighborhood. Why is the space between Magnolia and Botanical not wide enough for another street, yet wide enough to create really, really long lots facing the former street? Well, the answer lies in the old common fields of colonial St. Louis, in the are known as the Prairie de Noyers, or Walnut Prairie in French (we’ve looked at a map that shows these fields before here, second photo down). Owned by L. Bompart, J. Plaitt and René Beauvais, as opposed to Mary L. Tyler and Henry Shaw, this old field’s existence still expresses itself in today property lines.
And as you can see in these maps, it was slowly subdivided over the course of the late Nineteenth Century as the property owners sold off their land, though houses were not really built until the early Twentieth. As I’ve mentioned before, due to my research of plat maps in the Recorder of Deeds office, this was incredibly common.
We’ll start our tour in the southeast corner of this old farm field, at the former home of René Beauvais, which we’ve looked at before back in April of 2013.
The former country home, which keen-eyed readers will have seen in the third map above, had already been converted into a senior citizens’ home by the late Nineteenth Century, a use which is retained to the present day.
To the west is another large institution, the Missouri School for the Blind, which has been located on this spot since 1906, with roots going back to 1850.
The building was built in phases, and one new wing out the side was not completed until later in 1912.
The second wing was completed in the 1950s, and I think you can tell that additions were built out the front, leaving the original buildings behind.
It is quite a large number of buildings and wings sandwiched onto a relatively small piece of land, but it has remained here now for over a century.
This photo gives a good idea how later wings protrude out the front of earlier ones.
The Blind Rehabilitation Services Building to the west, at the northeast corner of Magnolia Avenue and South 39th Street looks to be from the late 1970s or early 80s.
