Landmarks’ What Are Buildings Made Of? Partners with North St. Louis YouthBuild

North St. Louis YouthBuild and the Friedens Neighborhood Foundation

Photograph by Brian Marston.

Landmarks' spring 2008 What Are Buildings Made Of? partnership with North St. Louis YouthBuild was a great success! Headed by Director Brian Marston, YouthBuild's 2007-2008 school year focused its attentions on Hyde Park's Friedens United Church of Christ campus at the intersection of Nineteenth Street and Newhouse Avenue. Since its founding in 1858, Friedens' has been an active presence in the Hyde Park community. In an effort to maintain that presence and make it pertinent to current needs, the Friedens Neighborhood Foundation sponsored the program, established to give local high school dropouts the opportunity to earn their GEDs and construction certificates. YouthBuild held math and reading classes in Friedens' Sunday School Hall while students learned construction skills through rehabilitating the church's former school building into apartments. By the end of the year, eleven students had earned their GED, eighteen obtained their HBI PACT construction certificates, and ten completed their Transitions College Prep Course. The hope is that the good work at Nineteenth and Newhouse will emanate through the rest of the Hyde Park neighborhood and set an example for community revitalization.


School building prior to renovation in 2007. Photograph by Brian Marston.	School building in August 2008.

Landmarks' four-session program, funded by the Regional Arts Commission, coupled architectural history with field visits to enhance students' appreciation of their neighborhood and show the possibilities presented by historic rehabilitation. Easily adaptable to projects citywide, its curriculum is aimed at middle-school-aged students to adults.


Photographs by Brian Marston.

Assistant Executive Director Michael
Allen leads an architectural tour of
Hyde Park while students and
researcher Lindsey Derrington look
on. Photograph by Brian Marston.
Landmarks' Curriculum

Landmarks Assistant Director Michael Allen prepared and presented a slideshow lecture on vernacular architecture using images from Hyde Park and comparable city neighborhoods. The lecture included information on the development and use of historic materials like brick and iron and the development of architectural forms and styles found in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Themes of the lecture served as foundation for a walking tour of the neighborhood in which the physical environment helped clarify points made and expand on the history of the neighborhood, patterns of urban construction and settlement, and the crisis of urban decay. Along the tour, students analyzed historic construction techniques relevant to their work in rehabilitating the historic school building. During the third session, students took a close look at a large historic preservation project in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood to the south. Old North St. Louis Restoration Group Executive Director Sean Thomas led students on a tour of the $35 million Crown Square project, in which twenty-seven historic buildings are being rehabilitated using state and federal historic rehab tax credits. The tour showed the transformative power of both skilled labor and strong neighborhood support for historic preservation in a north city neighborhood. For the final session of the program, staff invited historian Kris Zapalac from the State Historic Preservation Office to give a presentation on African-American heritage sites in Hyde Park and nearby parts of north St. Louis. The final session emphasized that the history of the neighborhood is ongoing, that there are multiple significant ethnic histories manifest in the architecture of Hyde Park, and that current residents have the power to shape the neighborhood's history.

Hyde Park

During the first part of the nineteenth century the area now known as Hyde Park was far north of the city limits, home to the remnants of Indian mounds and the country estates of such early elites as the O'Fallons, Angelrodts, and Bissells. Saint Louis' rapid mid-century growth quickly altered the area's rural character though as eager industrialists began building up the once picturesque northern riverfront to capitalize on its convenient location for the manufacture and transportation of goods. In 1844 several landowners platted the town of Bremen just west of this growing industrial district to take advantage of its development. Bremen quickly became a residential nucleus for those moving north in the hopes of finding employment; a steady influx of Irish and German immigrants led to its incorporation in 1850.

From Street Front Heritage: The Bremen/Hyde Park
Area of St. Louis. Map by Pat Hays Baer.

Five years later Saint Louis swallowed up Bremen, along with a number of other satellite towns, in a broad boundary extension to the north and south. From then on the area was known for Hyde Park, established there in 1854. Soon the numbers of Germans settlers far outpaced the Irish and the neighborhood, subdivided between 1860 and 1880, quickly developed a solid working-class German identity. Residents traveled by foot to work in nearby industries such as the Krey Packing Company and Mallinckrodt Chemical Works. Small business owners provided residents with essential needs from groceries to locally brewed beer. Various religious communities soon gave rise to church spires which loomed high over the red-brick, low-rise neighborhood.

Friedens United Church of Christ

Original sanctuary, completed in 1861.

Friedens Evangelical was established in Hyde Park in 1858. Prussian ruler Frederick Wilhelm III had created the Evangelical Church forty years earlier by ordering the union of the Lutheran and Reform faiths in his state. Though the move was unpopular with most, a number of early Evangelical advocates began planting roots in Missouri in the mid-1830s. The religion stressed community, ministry, and the Gospel over dogma and emphasized the equality of all before God. Rather than adhering to a rigid doctrine that would restrict one's personal relationship with their creator, members believed that each was entitled to define that relationship as they saw fit as long as they outwardly expressed their faith through dedication to the overall group. A group of pastors from rural areas surrounding Saint Louis formed the German Evangelical Synod of North America in 1841, and 1849 saw the establishment of the first Evangelical congregation in the city. Eden Theological Seminary was established in 1850.

The third Evangelical congregation in Saint Louis, Friedens began modestly in 1857 when a small group of German immigrants began holding nighttime services in the basement of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church at Ninth and Penrose Streets. Within a year worshipers adopted a constitution as a formal congregation and the twenty-six-member-strong Friedens was born. In 1860 the church purchased its present site, a former orchard, for three dollars from Mrs. S. Newhouse. Ground broke on a new $7,300 church building soon thereafter, and members dedicated their new Romanesque style home on April 21, 1861. The congregation quickly grew. In 1864 members founded a cemetery north of the church off Broadway, and in 1865 were able to move their pastor out of the church basement and into a new parsonage. In 1895 they were able to do the same for their school children by completing a two story schoolhouse to the church's south. By this time Friedens' swelling numbers had spawned two daughter churches, St. James Church in College Hill and St. Stephen's on Halls Ferry Road.

Sunday School Hall.

The turn of the twentieth century saw the peak of the church's development as it solidified its hold on the corner of Nineteenth and Newhouse with an extended parish complex. In 1902 the congregation commissioned architect Otto J. Boehmer to design a Second Empire parsonage just west of the church on Newhouse and in 1906 it erected Sunday School Hall across Nineteenth Street. To celebrate its Jubilee Year, Friedens razed its sanctuary in 1907 and again commissioned Boehmer to design a new one. Boehmer, a first generation German-American living nearby at 3500 Palm Street, was a natural choice for the project. While known primarily for his residential and commercial work throughout Saint Louis (as well as for presiding over the city's most exotic collection of cacti), he had also designed religious structures throughout the north side. For Friedens, Boehmer used the English Perpendicular Gothic Revival style.

Otto Boehmer's 1907 sanctuary in 1957.

While the new (and current) building's orientation remained the same as the old, its square, eighty-foot tower on the corner of Newhouse and Nineteenth insured the church would both physically, and spiritually, lord over its intersection. The new sanctuary, parsonage, and hall cost $88,000 altogether. The congregation's achievement marked the increasing establishment and success of its members; increasingly, children of early immigrants began owning rather than renting their homes and occupying more middle class positions such as teachers, nurses, and clerks where their parents had worked as day laborers, firemen, and teamsters. The church continued to grow with hundreds of members involved in Friedens' many groups and committees such as the Churchmen's Brotherhood, Women's Guild, Tabea Sewing Circle, Reapers, Guildchrist, Evening Guild, and the like. Though the parochial school closed in 1911 (an event probably related to the opening of Clay School nearby in 1905), its Sunday school programs continued to thrive and confirmations ran high.

1909 Sanborn map showing Friedens campus.

Corner of Blair and North Park Place
after 1927 tornado. Photograph
courtesy of Elizabeth Wahl.

Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church,
apse after 1927 tornado.

Friedens suffered a blow when the great tornado of 1927 streaked through Saint Louis on a northeast course from the Central West End to Hyde Park and across the river to Granite City. The storm killed eighty-two people and caused over $25 million worth of damage throughout the city. Much of Friedens' interior, including its art-glass windows, was destroyed. The greater Evangelical community, including students from Eden Seminary, came to the church's aide; by 1932 the congregation celebrated its seventh-fifth anniversary with the installation of a new chancel, altar, and organ. Two years later, with the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Churches, it became known as Friedens Evangelical and Reformed. The congregation remained a strong presence in Hyde Park through the 1940s but the 1950s saw, for a variety of reasons, an accelerated number of residents migrating to North County. In an attempt to keep the Friedens community alive, the church opened Friedens Chapel at 1060 Chambers Road in Bellefontaine Neighbors in 1956. The following year the Evangelical and Reformed Church joined with the Congregational Church to form the United Church of Christ, of which Friedens remains part today.


Congregation at Easter circa 1950.	Messenger, 1935.	Original chancel with choir circa 1920.

Above: 2223 Salisbury. Below: Commercial building at
Salisbury and Blair.

Below: Second Empire building at 19th and
Mallinckrodt.

Development of Hyde Park's Architectural Styles

The Hyde Park neighborhood contains a wide variety of 19th century and even 20th century vernacular forms and common styles. The neighborhood retains 19th century frame houses, including early gabled log homes (the earliest dating to 1828) and later Greek Revival and Italianate houses. However, most of the building stock was built in brick trimmed with native limestone, and most of what remains dates to the period of 1870-1910. One of the earliest brick houses in St. Louis, the Bissell Mansion (1828-30), is located in Hyde Park. House forms include town and row houses, double houses, ell-shaped half-flounder homes and even mansions. Residences tend to be in restrained Italianate, Second Empire or Romanesque Revival styles.

Commercial buildings exhibit a similar range, from the few remaining early two-story frame structures to mansard-roofed corner stores. There also are anchoring schools, factories and churches in a variety of styles. Of the latter, the magnificent French Gothic Holy Trinity (Joseph Conradi, 1899) and Bethlehem Lutheran (Louis Wessbecher, 1893-1895) stand with Friedens as the largest and finest in the neighborhood. Early 20^th public buildings such as the Lombard Romanesque firehouse at Salisbury and Blair (Albert A. Osburg, 1926) and an Art Deco police station (Albert A. Osburg, circa 1930) brought even more diversity of style to Hyde Park. Other landmarks include the north side's two iconic water towers -- one built to resemble a Corinthian column (George Ingham Barnett, 1871) and the other a blend of Romanesque turret and Moorish minaret (William Eames, later of Eames & Young, 1885-1886).


Bethlehem Lutheran.	Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church.	Italianate two-family flat.

The intersection of Nineteenth and Newhouse is home to one of the neighborhood's rare collections of Craftsman style architecture. Catty-corner from Friedens, the entire block between Newhouse, Angelica, Nineteenth, and Blair was once home to a large sinkhole which prevented its development with the rest of Hyde Park during the late 19^th century. Such sinkholes once pockmarked the north and south sides of Saint Louis before impatient landowners began filling them in. This one survived until at least 1891, likely meeting its demise sometime around 1905. With housing demands in the dense neighborhood high, contractors quickly bought up the block and built thirteen Craftsman style buildings on the north side of Nineteenth Street between 1909 and 1914 alone.


1875 detail from Pictorial St. Louis showing intersection of Nineteenth and Newhouse with Friedens and the large sinkhole on the northeast corner of the intersection.	Unidentified St. Louis sinkhole circa 1900.

More Examples of Hyde Park's Diverse Architecture


Homes facing Hyde Park along Bremen.	Lombard Romanesque firehouse.


1435-23 North Park Place.	Homes along 20th Street.

Continuing the Work

Landmarks' objectives in this partnership, to enhance students' appreciation of architectural history and to demonstrate the possibilities historic preservation holds for their neighborhood, are part of an ongoing process. For North St. Louis YouthBuild, our ultimate success would be inspiring students to continue putting their newly gained construction skills to work in the field of historic rehabilitation. Though the Department of Labor discontinued North St. Louis YouthBuild's grant because of funding shortages, work at Nineteenth and Newhouse established a high standard for resident and community-controlled revitalization. The program presents a unique method of community revitalization which allows local students to work with neighborhood organizations to reverse the effects of decay. By creating nodes activity in neighborhoods like Hyde Park, rich in heritage but suffering from decades of population decline and economic hardship, similar projects can hopefully lead to ongoing, sustainable growth.

Click on the images below to see just a few examples of what we've lost in Hyde Park, some just in the past few years.


Above: 3317-19 North Nineteenth Street. Below: 1400 North Park Place.	Above: 1403 Farrar Street. Below: Northeast corner of Bremen and Blair Avenues.