Just west of the Lafayette Avenue bridge that leads to Soulard Market, there is a small neighborhood of beautifully preserved houses. Whether it’s in Soulard, the LaSalle Park neighborhood, or the larger Frenchtown area may be debated, but not the importance that this section of the oldest remaining houses in St. Louis is still surviving.
It looks like these houses were renovated in the 1980’s, judging from some of the additions.
The interstate cutting through between this pocket of stability and the market shows just how much the interstates slashed and destroyed much of St. Louis.
The density of the neighborhoods is reflected in the 1876 Compton and Dry View of the city, and in the 1889 Whipple Fire Insurance Maps. At this moment, most of the hundreds of thousands of St. Louisans lived east of Jefferson, which is sometimes amazing to imagine.
