There is another house dating from the early years of the Common Fields on Mackay Street. This house was apparently only one story originally, but then a second floor in brick was added at a later date. The Sanborn Maps helpfully label the building as “stone, 1st fl.” Update: You can also see it in…
Tag: Lafayette Square
Old Stone Building, Lafayette Square
Update: This building was apparently damaged by the Praxair explosion of 2005. You can see its condition in March of 2013 here and from 2018. Another post from December of 2025 included historic photographs. I learned of the existence of a very old stone house on a side street in Lafayette Square, predating the platting…
Score One for St. Louis City
Update: The coach in question was later terminated and the Rams moved back to Los Angeles. The Post-Dispatch reports that the new coach for the Rams will be living in Lafayette Square.
Back Door, Benton Place, Lafayette Square
The famous private street in St. Louis apparently once had a door in the retaining wall on the north side of the enclave. How long it has been cemented shut is a mystery. See pictures of the door and wall before it was closed in here.
Lafayette Square Side Streets
Update: I explored more of the side streets of the neighborhood in August of 2019. I forget sometimes that the strength of Lafayette Square lies not in the mansions on the square–though they are certainly amazing–but the side streets where more modest, but equally majestic homes help anchor the entire neighborhood. Here is a vestige…
Star Shoe Factory
One of the great ironies of the Lafayette Square neighborhood is that while it was born in the mid Nineteenth Century as one of the wealthiest sections of the city, it has spent much of its history as a low-income area, peppered with factories and many of its grandest homes carved up into boarding houses….
Lafayette Square Funeral Home
Update: This very historic mansion was damaged in the famous 1896 tornado, it was the McLaughlin Funeral Home for years, and then was sold to a new owner. See more of Missouri Avenue in this post from September of 2019. See another house with a roof replacement in this post from January of 2021 (last…
Betrayed by Their Foundations
Update: I looked at this block more extensively in early March of 2020. Nowadays many historic neighborhoods have strict building codes that restrict architectural styles. Builders now find themselves building in styles that were popular one hundred years ago, and many do an excellent job of reproducing historic styles. I was almost fooled by these…
Lafayette Square
As mentioned in the earlier post on 755, the Lafayette Square neighborhood would have been partially demolished in the construction of the North South Distributor. Ironically, not everyone apparently at the time was opposed to the prospect of interstates surrounding Lafayette Square on three sides. First of all, some homeowners liked the idea of having…