I knew there had to be something special about this house. This was the residence of Louis Obert, whose brewery was directly across 12th Street and whose grave I looked at back in October of 2018.

It’s a great example of the more ornate expressions of the Second Empire that was once more common in St. Louis before urban renewal cleared away large portions of the City in the mid-Twentieth Century.

The Oberts lived in the house at least until the 1950s, according to records. Their brewery was very compact, squeezed in the half of the block of Twelfth Street across the street from their house that is now a parking lot for the Anheuser-Busch Brewery Visitors’ Center.