We now jump ahead to the north a bit due to the redevelopment that annihilated a large swath of Compton Hill, which I wrote about at St. Louis Magazine. First known as Lafayatte Town and then the Gate District, I still call this neighborhood by its historic name.

While the majority of the urban fabric, which was very old, dating to the 1860s to the 1880s, was demolished, I’ve discovered that there’s a not insignificant number of original houses surviving on the eastern end of the block up against South Jefferson Avenue across from Lafayette Square. We’ll be looking at these blocks today and the next three days. They’re rare and critical windows into what are now extremely rare examples of houses built right after the Civil War in St. Louis.

These houses are part of the St. Vincent’s Addition, surveyed by none other than our favorite surveyor Julius Pitzman in 1888, so a bit of a latecomer for subdivisions in this area where there are other surveys nearby from the 1850s.

As can be seen, these houses are much later than your average house in Lafayette Square, just across South Jefferson, but just wait until you see the other three streets coming up later this week.

While there are these survivors, most of the block is early Twenty-First Century in-fill, which I have not photographed.

The later date and name of the subdivision and street has a logical explanation; it was the location of the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Cemetery, which itself was named after the famous French saint, whose name was given to an important charitable organization still active in St. Louis. I wonder if it was a charitable cemetery where the indigent were buried. It closed in 1865, but supposedly graves were still being found when Interstate 44 was constructed. If that were to be true, the cemetery had to have expanded dramatically from its original plat in 1852, where it was still far to the north of Lafayette Avenue.

Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis is little help, as it shows nothing but vacant land with a couple of paths crisscrossing the land. The cemetery was gone, it seems, but there was no interest in dividing the land; perhaps it was tied up in ownership or title issues.