Across the interstate from Soulard, which you can reach on a pedestrian bridge and St. Vincent de Paul, which just barely avoided being demolished, you find a short stretch of South Tenth Street in what I call Frenchtown.
As is evident, these first houses we’re looking at are in-fill, maybe easy to tell due to their concrete foundations but also from their perfect brickwork, which this deep in the city would be a little hard to believe at this point for original buildings.
But then we get to these beauties, which are clearly original, and somehow managed to survive the mass demolitions that struck the Near South Side in the years after World War II when an orgy of destruction struck so much of the oldest housing stock in the city.
It is interesting to see that now these houses are in such incredible demand that their neighbors’ lots are so valuable that people are willing to buy very expensive new houses directly across from interstates just so they can enjoy the amenities of Soulard so close by.
Here is much more recent in-fill that was built in just the last ten years.
And then we get to Park Avenue, where there is another recent in-fill building, and where there is a familiar row of houses that I’ve photographed before.
The three Second Empire houses have one of the most fascinating histories of any house I have researched. The original house was the one on the left, and it was originally constructed as a flounder house around 1852. The lot was purchased by Ewald Maurer from Benjamin A. Soulard in 1843. It was transferred to Wendolin, his daughter, in 1852, and Felix Maurer was living there in 1854. The original flounder section is still intact, with Greek Revival doorways into each room. In 1856, Gerhard H. Droege purchased the house, and by 1860, he had constructed an Italianate style addition, making the house worth $5000 in 1860. Droege was a partner in a dry goods company with John C. Buddecke. He was worth a total of $40,000 in 1870, and had multiple real estate holdings by then, and had a reported income of around $4000 a year in the early 1860s. He had the two row houses built next door as rental properties in 1882, and also had the mansard roof attached to the main house then. The original address for this house was 14 Buel Street, before the remembering of houses in 1867. The house was sold for $1600 in 1976, roughly 1/4 of its 1860 value, without inflation adjustments. The owners let me see inside, and I was able to see all the different details in the different parts of the house. The original flounder portion had later become the kitchen and servant area, and the doors and staircase were altered.
Interesting!