The Dart Veers North

Check out dArt St. Louis: 100 people threw a dart at a map of the city of St. Louis and photographed the spot where their dart landed.

Looking through the photographs, I am struck by how many were taken in North St. Louis. While I was not present to watch the dart throw -- perhaps the north end of the map had some kind of advantage -- I think it's great that the interesting and varied locations of the north side received so much attention. By my count, at least half of the photographs come from the northern half of the city.

What will be interesting is to re-photograph those locations in 25 years. What will these places look like then?

Richard Nickel's Chicago: A Review

This article first appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of the NewsLetter of the Society of Architectural Historians, St. Louis Chapter.

David Norris, friend of photographer, salvager and historian Richard Nickel, once said that "I think what Richard had to teach was that if you find some way to express your deepest convictions, you should exercise that talent to the very utmost of your ability. . .even if it leads somehow to your destruction." Nickel died in 1972 while rescuing interior ornament from Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange building, then under demolition. The attitude toward life’s work that Norris summarizes is readily apparent in the vivid, arresting images in Richard Nickel’s Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, published at the end of 2006. The book amasses many of Nickel’s images of condemned Louis Sullivan buildings, as well as his glimpses into other long-gone parts of Chicago: Chicagoans enjoying the carnival at Riverview Park; a Loop landscape prior to the Congress Expressway; downtown offices with stenciled lettering on frosted glass doors; youth making a strong show of protest at Grant Park in 1968; other hallmarks of a vibrant urban culture in which the built environment is both backdrop for human action and a pivotal character.

Richard Nickel’s body of work is the result of chance. After serving in the Army immediately after World War II, Nickel was seeking a mission in life and use of the free tuition the GI Bill offered. Newly-divorced, the young man happened upon photography classes at the Institute of Design, founded and directed by Bauhaus transplant László Moholy-Nagy. There his primary instructors were noted photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Siskind taught a class in which he assigned his students to photograph the surviving buildings of Louis Sullivan. Because he was draft-exempt, Nickel was put in charge of the students’ efforts and an exhibition held at the Institute in 1954. No matter; the young photographer had enthusiastically taken up his assignment, and took steps that made the study of Sullivan’s architecture his life’s work. Under Siskind’s direction, Nickel embarked upon a still-incomplete book entitled The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan. After completing his courses, Nickel continued the book project but began to get sidetracked. Chicago seemed to be disappearing around him, and Nickel responded by documenting doomed buildings (Sullivan’s and others’) through drawing floor plans and taking photographs and then, when demolition was certain, salvaging ornament.

Most of the images in Richard Nickel’s Chicago were never printed in Nickel’s lifetime, making the book a remarkable document. Nickel took some 11,000 photographs in his life, but mostly made contact sheets unless a client was willing to pay for development. Even more remarkable than the book is the way in which Nickel was able to capture so carefully each scene without ever seeing a large print. Somehow Nickel was able to deftly find the drama in the still life of many architectural scenes, and carefully transmit the sorrowful scenes he witnessed directly. Those images are his best known, although most in the book are new to even his admirers. Less known are Nickel’s gentle shots of people at festivals, expressing the glee, anger or longing in what seem to be private moments between subject and photographer. Those images show a breadth to Nickel’s body of work previously unknown.

The architectural images convey both respect and resignation – a painful combination. The parade of lost masterpieces is staggering – Adler and Sullivan’s Schiller Theatre, Meyer Building, Rothschild Building, Babson Residence and Stock Exchange; Burnham and Root’s Church of the Covenant and First Infantry Armory; Holabird and Roche’s Republic and Cable building. Even the photographs of surviving landmarks like the Rookery and the Auditorium Building have a weary gaze, as if the photographer has doubts of their permanence at the hands of his society. Nickel conveys the glory of these buildings while making statements about Chicago’s arrogant disregard for them; he poses wry scenes that are statements of protest in which the beauty of the building makes the loudest statement.

Ever faithful to his subjects, Nickel avoids taking photographs that are easily digested or ignored. Nickel prefers wide views and the occasional vivid close-up to iconic images. At first glance, the photographs can seem carefully workmanlike. Then, a detail jumps out – the postures of men standing in the foreground of a demolition scene, words on a church wall next to a gaping hole made by wreckers, the appearance of a church steeple in a photograph of a roof. As one studies the photographs, the intentional nature of the details becomes apparent. Nickel thought through his capturing of the details of every building he shot, just as the architects who designed them conceived of the intricate parts. Every foreground, background and shadow was chosen. The genius of Nickel emerges; he has taken photographs that reward a multitude of viewings and whose technique emulates the subjects’ complexity as much as any documentation can. Nickel’s photographs teach us the values of patience and observation, and of the power of making careful choices. These were the values that led Nickel to study and defend the works of Sullivan and other Chicago masters. These were the values that could have kept the buildings around as long as the photographs.


Cahan, Richard and Michael Williams, editors. Richard Nickel’s Chicago. Chicago: CityFiles Press, 2006. ISBN: 0-9785450-2-8.

CSB Records Again Freely Available through Geo St. Louis

Citizens Service Bureau (CSB) complaints records again appear to the public on the Geo St. Louis website. Apparently, city government was strictly interpreting a newly-enacted Sunshine Act compliance ordinance sponsored by Alderman Craig Schmid (D-20th). The ordinance specifies ways in which citizens have access to public records, with an emphasis on expanding access through established city policy. (More discussion on the CSB part of the law here.) Schmid claimed his intention was to put the city into compliance with existing state laws on public records, not restrict citizen access to CSB information. Schmid opposed the city's interpretation.

I noted on November 27 that the records had become password-protected.

Citizens' Service Bureau Records Now Password-Protected on Geo St. Louis

Geo St. Louis no longer displays records of Citizens' Service Bureau (CSB) complaints for parcels. Now, only users with passwords can access those records. The site instructs people who want a password to contact the Planning and Urban Design Agency via a generic feedback form. I wonder what precipitated the change, and I wonder who can get a password.

Many residents of Old North St. Louis, where I live, use Geo St. Louis to see just how much of a problem a property is. CSB complaints offer neighbors (and potential neighbors!) the chance to monitor the history of problem properties to determine if a recently-observed nuisance is part of a chronic pattern of neglect. Some neighborhoods lack staffed neighborhood organizations, and citizens may need direct access to CSB complaint records. Geo St. Louis has been a leader among American cities' public geospatial systems in terms of breadth and depth of information available to any site user.

While those records are public and a citizen has always been able to to obtain them with a written request, the sudden departure of open online access seems unnecessary.

Past the Margins of Chicago

Rob Powers (creator of Built St. Louis) has launched A Chicago Sojourn to chronicle the non-iconic corners of his new home. In his first post, Rob writes that "I've always gravitated to the forgotten: in St. Louis, in Milwaukee, everywhere I go. And so it shall be here."

Beautifully-designed Forgotten Chicago features photo essays on those traces of Chicago's past few celebrate, let alone investigate. Recent topics the Schoenhofen Brewery, pre-1909 street numbering system and Chicago's largest vacant lot, the site of US Steel's South Works. Jacob Kaplan and photographer Serhii Chrucky are the editors.

Sonic Atrophy Returns

Sonic Atrophy has returned to the internet after a two year absence. The website features photographs of abandoned places along with narratives on the anonymous site creator's experiences visiting and photographing the places. Most of the locations featured on Sonic Atrophy are in the St. Louis region, but some are located in other places including Peoria and Cairo, Illinois and Gary, Indiana.

Visit the website here.

Detroit Ruins

Photograph by Nicole Rork for Detroit Ruins. Used with permission.

I want you to look at a website of photographs of abandoned places...

I already sense the disinterest.

Well, hear me out. I want you to look at Detroit Ruins.

I want you to see how Nicole Rork offers a tour of the ruins of Detroit, Gary and a few other cities through images that are at once prosaic and beautiful. I want you to notice that she provides short histories of the places she documents, with accurate information and links to other sources. Rork captures the vividness of faded colors, the brightness in dark rooms and the larger world in confined spaces. She's a bit of a conjurer -- taking shots with views wide enough to suggest that life in some form is lurking right outside of the frame of the still scenes she documents. Perhaps she is confronting that force somewhere while her camera takes its picture. Perhaps not. Does it matter? The subject matter itself gains a new life through her gaze.

I want you to look at Detroit Ruins.

Richard Nickel, Thirty Five Years After Death

Chicago salvager, photographer, historian and activist Richard Nickel was killed thirty-five years ago on April 13, 1972 while salvaging at the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Thirty-five years later, Nickel's legacy is evident in the contemporary preservation movement. Today architectural salvage, systematic photographic documentation, appreciation of commercial and industrial buildings and concern for the effects of widespread demolition are widely understood as important components of historic preservation -- even if not as widely implemented as they should be.

Edward Lifson, himself an interesting interpreter of architectural history, commemorates the anniversary of Nickel's death and celebrates the new book Richard Nickel's Chicago in a segment from NPR that ran earlier this week.

Although not as famous as many contemporaries, Nickel sparks an intensity in people as they consider his haunting images, fiercely-argued writings and the awareness he kindled in people still alive today. Years later, for American historic preservation, Nickel stands as a pioneer whose accomplishments have not been fully considered (or even recorded) and whose ideas will provoke our minds for generations.

Where is Gaslight Square?

After work, I headed over to the Metropolis-sponsored reading from Gaslight Square: An Oral History by my friend Thomas Crone. The experience was unique, to say the least: Thomas narrated his own reading with stories about the making of the book along with bits of history and gossip that did not make it through. His presentation summoned forth ideas about a history with a palpable intangibility. After all, the reading took place in one of the new houses on Olive Street that sits on the site of long-gone building where the famous events went down. Through the windows of the new house, all one can see are other new houses occupying the sites of building vital to one of the most culturally formative stages in St. Louis' recent past. (The exception is the brick building that once housed Ben Selkirk & Sons auction house, newly rehabbed at the southeast corner of Whittier and Olive.)

Listening to Thomas invoke the history of this place in its stunningly reference-stripped incarnation gave me great appreciation for his work. While his account is not a thorough narrative of the events that went down, it is an essential record of impressions, memories, ideas and connections between his interview subjects and one place that doesn't even seem like itself anymore. Without buildings or other landmarks, an urban place could very well die in collective memory over time. Those who directly experience a place during a particular incarnation won't live forever, after all.

However, with Gaslight Square there is an enduring key to a place otherwise lost. Even away from the place itself and the author's voice, the book offers a chance to help us know where Gaslight Square is -- in many senses. Thank goodness the book exists!

New Blairmont Map Online

We have a new Google Earth map of north St. Louis properties owned by companies controlled by developer Paul J. McKee, Jr. See the map here.

The map, created on March 13 and sent by a concerned resident of the St. Louis Place neighborhood, shows 637 properties owned by McKee's companies.

For reference, this map includes pinpoints on adjacent properties owned by city-owned corporations like the Land Reutilization Authority, Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority and the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority. Also included are properties owned by Pyramid Construction and the partnership between the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance and the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group.

Crone Reading from "Gaslight Square" at Gaslight Square

Thomas Crone will be reading from his book Gaslight Square: An Oral History on Thursday, March 29 at 6:00 p.m. in Gaslight Square. Well, our literary friend will be reading at one of the new houses standing where this history went down -- at 4155 Olive Street, to be exact.

The event is sponsored by Metropolis St. Louis, which asks that people RSVP to policy@mstl.org.

Update from Landmarks Association

Landmarks Association of St. Louis has posted its newsletters featuring its 2006 Eleven Most Enhanced and Eleven Most Endangered buildings here. While the lists are not news, the newsletters with detailed information about each building have not been available online until now.

Collecting Stories

I just stumbled onto an article on Gaper's Block about last year's visit of StoryCorps to Chicago. Following up on the amazing work of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration to document oral history and folklore during the Great Depression, StoryCorps traveled the United States last year over six months to record the tales of today's Americans:

The aim of StoryCorps is to continue that work; listening to today's accounts and allowing for a shift in some of the particulars, you quickly realize that's exactly what it's doing. And, just as the WPA interviews were archived, with the permission of participants, their present-day counterparts are submitted to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as well.

The Chicago visit began with an interview of our friend Tim Samuelson, the city's official cultural historina, and his wife Barbara Koenen. However, StoryCorps selected a wide range of culturally-connected participants and, perhaps most important, interviewed many volunteers of all backgrounds.

Reading this article coincided with an invitation that Claire Nowak-Boyd and I received to appear in a similar film project. The coincidence has got me thinking: Why doesn't someone set out to document the oral histories alive in St. Louis?

While many people are doing the great work of photographing and researching places, some of the strongest and most compelling accounts of places come through stories, anecdotes and amazing recollections of this city. Many of the most astute observations about the places of this region have come to me from conversations with people who have never published a word.

Obviously, a total historical documentation effort aimed at the built environemnt of St. Louis is impossible. There have been some impressive efforts, like the mostly-forgotten Heritage/St. Louis photographic survey of the 1970s that endeavored to photgraph every historic building in the city. There is the work of Larry Giles to collect and conserve hundreds of thousands of physical artifacts related to the story of this region and its architectural life. There are numerous collections of literature, artifacts and other items in institutions ranging from the St. Louis Public Library to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

However, one thing not being documented much are the statements of those who have shaped and been shaped by the architecture and unique places of St. Louis. At a moment when we still have access to the people who participated in the early rehab boom of the 1970s as well as those involved in the urban renewal era before that, we have the chance to record those stories and idea that won't make it into print or into the form of a building. We could save the stories that we will regret losing.

StoryCorps and other efforts do great work that inexpensive media makes very possible today. St. Louisans should consider whether or not such an effort would be beneficial here. At a time of great change in the shape and form of the city, when massive rebuilding efforts are underway, an oral history project centered on the built environment seems particularly useful.

Worth Watching: Vanishing STL

Anyone who spends much time studying the lost buildings of the city -- especially those in the central corridor -- is bound to run into architect Paul Hohmann. Now chief architect for Pyramid Architects, Paul has been involved in many rehabilitation projects over the years. Privately, Paul has studied our city's historic architecture and amassed a wealth of knowledge and photographs. Sometimes I have concluded that Paul and I are the among only a handful of people in the city to have paid attention to an obscure building that was demolished -- or at least the among the few who still mourn its loss and recall its details.

Now, Paul is sharing his record of lost buildings through a new blog specifically dedicated to local buildings that have been demolished since 1990, Vanishing STL. So far, Paul has posted two entries. The most recent is on the well-known Beaumont Medical Building on Olive Street, wrecked for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts building. The other entry is about the lesser-known Olympia Apartments at Vandeventer and West Pine.

The entries have abundant photographs to covey both the facts and the beauty of these lost buildings. While the perspective is retrospective, notice the present perfect tense of the blog name. The name is apt given that the vanishing of the historic city is far from over, and far from slowing.

The Industrial City

Rob Powers has published his long-awaited Built St. Louis tour, "The Industrial City." The tour is an overview of remaining historic industrial sites around the St. Louis area, covering both abandoned and occupied sites. Included are the National City Stockyards district, the Laclede Gas Company gasometers, the Cahokia power plant, the Carondelet Coke plant, US Steel's Granite City works and many sites along the north riverfront of St. Louis.

Check out the tour here.

Jill Mead's Photographs

Jill Mead has started posting architectural photographs from St. Louis and Kansas City to Flickr. Her photographs show a compelling level of detail, from terra cotta pieces to old enamel neon sign boards.

View the photographs here.

New project: Postcards from North St. Louis

In the past two weeks, I've started a new little project, a flickr photoblog-of-sorts called Postcards from North St. Louis.

PNStL is pretty straightforward: I post photos of the North Side of St. Louis. They are labeled by neighborhood, and I caption them to tell you a little more about the picture. The nature and quantity of information in the caption varies widely by picture. I was going to try to update weekly on the same day every week, but my chaotic life and the ever-changing weather quickly put a stop to that. So it's updated regularly, but not daily.

With this project, I don't want to show you exclusively sunny things, but the stuff I post is going to lean towards the happy, the positive, the curious, the special, and the mundane. Mundane, you ask? That's right. I want you to show you my neighbors cooking dinner and playing with their children and walking their pets. I want to show you North Siders vegging out on the couch in front of the TV. Or reading. Or talking on the phone. Why is that?

I find that a lot of people are terrified when they heard the words "North St. Louis." The first words that most folks can conjure to their mouths when they hear I live here is "Is that safe?" A neighbor of mine recently told me that the thing she most hates about people asking her that question is that it's so insulting--besides dissing yer neighborhood, the speaker is letting you know that they don't think you have the common sense to select a decent place for yourself to live.

And I've heard worse: "I was going to ask you how the neighborhood is, but if you live there I guess it's fine." "Pardon me, but you don't see many white folks living on the North Side." "What? That's a SLUM!" ...etc etc etc. Yes, these are all actual quotes (and for the record, I thanked the speaker of the second quote for his honesty). Even a fair number of locals I know who are otherwise smart, thoughtful, and well-informed seem to picture abandoned buildings or TV crime reports when I say the words "North City."

So, I want to offer some images (besides the trash on the biased TV news) for you to picture when you hear the words "North Side." Because yes, I know about the Great Mythology of the North Side too, and I know that this is an amazing and often unbelievable place. Sometimes, I walk down the vacant 14th Street Mall and I feel the weight of all that history, and my mind feverishly spins elaborate daydreams based on the Mall's incredibly cinematic landscape. But to me, a person who lives here every day, the Mall is also just a street. The legendary Mall is just the street that I walk down when I am going to so-and-so's house, or if I want to buy a can of soda at the hardware store. The other day, I dragged my pajama'ed self out of the house and I happened to walk down the Mall on the way to go get a key cut and have some chit-chat at the hardware store. And do you know what? The Mall smelled like laundry detergent, quite possibly the most mundane smell known to man. That is what I want to show you.

I want you to see the mundane side (and the beautiful side, and the neutral side, and and and...) of North St. Louis because to those of us who live here, above all, it's just the place where we live our daily lives. Some people like it, some people don't (I love it!), but overall, this is just our place before it's anything else.

So please, have a look: Postcards from North St. Louis

One from None - nice caption, & nice photo.

While snooping around for some info on a Granite City ghost sign, I inadvertently came across a nice, tiny little blog post from Shreveport, LA.

This explains, very simply, a lot of the reasons why I am fascinated by vacancy, and why I think it's an interesting time to live on the North Side, and what I'm thinking about when I'm walking down the 14th Street Mall.

St. Louis Building Arts Foundation Launches Virtual Library

While 52nd City broke the news first, I think that it's still important to note that the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation has created a Flickr account where one can see scans of some of the thousands of interesting items from its library. The recent scans of images from the Mullins Sheet Metal Statuary catalog are intriguing. Another post on the Flickr page is a recent photo of preservationist William Weiss looking at a photo of himself from long ago (from the Foundation's collection). What a great way to showcase one of the most unique architectural study collections in the United States -- one completely assembled by Larry Giles working mostly alone.

The library collection has not been exhaustively cataloged, but it likely contains over 25,000 volumes and twice as many sheet drawings, photographs and primary documents. (My estimates may be conservative.)

The unspoken message is that there is a lot of cool things in the collection, and if you want to see more than a handful of scanned images you can help take the Foundation to the next level at which its holdings may be more widely available.

Ruins and Ideology

A new online journal of urban exploration, Liminal City, is in the works. The first issue is not yet published, but the site hosts an engrossing essay by Michael Cook entitled "On the Excavation of Space and Our Narratives of Urban Exploration." His essay takes aim at the "endless cataloguing of the picturesque" by documentary photographers and writers who study ruins as well as the restoration of ruins. Cook wants more narrative and less science in the representation of urban exploration.

Not surprising, then, that Cook critiques my essay "Narrating Abandonment" (see page two of his essay) and finds my arguments too hostile to mystery and awe. However, his description of my essay's larger point as a call for "a politics of urban exploration that would build a radical counter-hegemonic discourse" is the best summary I have read. Cook seems opposed to "civilized time," which is all well and good except the stance side-steps every social problem ruins pose. I can't apologize for looking at an abandoned building and thinking that it is resource that people need for shelter of lives or activities, and that the architecture of an abandoned building is socially beneficial and should be restored and conserved. The social imbalance caused by capital distribution hardly afford most people the romance of the picturesque. Exploring abandoned places is exciting, but mostly depressing; and abandoned factory reminds me of the structural un- and under-employment of our times, while and abandoned house reminds me that affordable, clean housing is scarce in this nation. Ruins can be aesthetically and experientially stimulating, but rarely to those people who live amid -- or inside of -- them. What some people call "scientism" others might see as steps toward resolution of great social problems. Rehabbing a vacant building often creates expensive housing, but also creates affordable housing and jobs. Romanticism is an ideology with resonance among the middle and upper classes.

Or, to put it simply for those who have been following Ecology of Absence: I once enjoyed exploring derelict buildings; now I live in one. That is an oversimplification, but it's not far from the truth. Cook raises good points, but from a framework at odds with mine, which is driven not by my own desires but by the needs I see around me as I live in a city recovering from de-industrialization and massive decay.