I’ve looked at the entrances of Parkview twice before, once back in October of 2012, and then again in May of 2018. It straddles the City-University City boundary, as I think many people realize, and I suppose back when it was laid out by Julius Pitzman in 1905, it really didn’t matter; St. Louis was booming and so was that part of the County.
As can be seen in the above plat map, Pitzman’s design is really sort of a Baroque swirling back and forth in square confine which at the time was flat, open land, perhaps influenced by his recent work in the rugged topography of Clifton Heights.
All of the houses were built in a relatively short window in the decade after the subdivision was platted.
What’s special, and perhaps my favorite feature of the area, are the two triangular parks at the southwest and northwest corners of Parkview, breaking the monotony of the street wall.
Red brick prevails, but there are also some outliers, like below.
I looked at the garage of the house on the right below before.
My wife & I house sat in a house in this neighborhood years ago. It was a very cool ‘haunted’ house. The first morning after spending the night, I went down to the kitchen, and I heard the sound of running water. There was a small bathroom off of the kitchen that neither of us had been in before. The lavatory had two separate hot & cold faucets, and one was turned on full blast! I guess the resident ghost(s) were having fun with us! -It didn’t scare us tho, since our own little bungalow in south city was haunted also.
That’s quite a story!
Yeah, University City does have allot of beautiful early 20th century built residential buildings. Plus it’s a historic hindsight pity that Julius Pitzman put a larger percentage of his land appropriating, micro scaled, real estate district plans for a couple of old Versailles like gated communities over Tower Grove sized parks like a younger life span George Kessler did, especially for those “then younger” areas of Saint Louis City between Grand and Kingshighway between Circa 1878 and November 1914, at least his later life Clifton Heights plan had no private roads in it’s blueprint 🙂