AIR CONDITIONED DRAGONS

Regular readers of my blog have seen many posts about St. Louis' wildly unusual City Museum. It was founded by the late sculptor and odd-ball entrepreneur Bob Cassilly and his former wife, Gail Soliwoda. They had a workshop where they created sculptures and other decorative elements, including this facade. It has been vacant for years and is badly deteriorated in the rear. The current owner applied for a demolition permit but preservationists are working to save its wonderful terra cotta face.

Gee whiz fact: you oldies may have heard that in 1972, a mentally ill man went after Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's with a hammer. Cassilly, who was in Rome on his honeymoon with his first wife, was the person who tackled him and prevented him from doing further damage. Cassilly grew up in the suburb of Webster Groves, where I live.

BOARD OF ED

A block or so west of the building in yesterday's post is another that has been preserved. Obviously, it was formerly the headquarters of the St. Louis Board of Education. The terra cotta decoration isn't nearly as elaborate but it is still handsome.       

FADED GLORY

A few days ago I posted a picture of an old downtown building. A poster covered one of the vacant ground floor windows that said "Where Will St. Louis Take You Next?" I said I would come back to the building itself and then got distracted by the opening of the baseball season.

The place is called the Railway Exchange Building. It makes me think of a bunch of rich guys in top hats like in the Monopoly game literally exchanging railroads. It occupies an entire block and is vacant. Our biggest department store, Famous Barr, was there, along with the headquarters of The May Company, a major national retailer. Big downtown stores withered, Macy's sucked up everything and then closed the place. It's been empty for some time.

But the terra cotta facade is a wonder. If there is no use for the building itself the decoration should go in a museum. It is fairly well preserved and I don't want us to lose it.                

DETAILS, DETAILS

Details of the ruins of the old Sears building on South Grand. There is a sign indicating that the owner wants to pass it off for redevelopment. We wish them good luck. The terra cotta decoration is less elaborate than the Dinks Parrish Laundry we saw a couple of weeks ago. It looks like some of it on this building has been stolen but local artists have added their own ornaments.

MORE OF THAT FANCY STUFF

More terra cotta decoration. A local friend gave me a tip about this. I've driven by but never paid attention. It is the old Sears building on South Grand Boulevard near Gravois. That thing in the top center is not a letter N for Napoleon. It is a scroll with the date of construction, 1925.

The details are worth a look, which we will come to next.      

MORE TERRA COTTA

More terra cotta.  Why someone would call a building Cinderella is beyond me. The original owner wouldn't want businesses to start in rags before they achieved riches. (Too much of St. Louis has followed the opposite trajectory.) It apparently started as a skating rink (meet your Prince Charming on wheels) and then, two years later, was converted to a movie theater. One of our town's leading architectural and social historians, Chris Naffziger, wrote a wonderful article six years ago describing its decay and restoration. Maybe this Cinderella held closer to the original story. See https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2014/03/12/cherokee-streets-cinderella-building-finds-its-prince-charming?showFullText=true 

It is located on funky and eclectic Cherokee Street on the South Side. The ground floor is occupied. Don't know what if anything is upstairs.         

TIME CONSUMING

Details of the facade of the Dinks Parrish Laundry. I realized as I edited these pictures that I don't know a thing about how terrra cotta is made. I looked up the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_terracotta, and don't understand all of it. Complicated! I can't imagine how much time and money it took to produce and install this, or how the economics worked on a humble commercial building.       

 

A friend told me about another unusual laundry. It is not as complex and harder to photograph due to its location but still interesting. We will see it tomorrow.

DINKS PARRISH LAUNDRY

A bit of fancy, a stone wedding cake on Olive Street in midtown. It was a major commercial laundry for many years, the two names referring to the families who owned it. The laundry went out of business some years ago. There may or may not still be some loft apartments upstairs. The ground floor left houses a new microbrewery. The rest of the ground floor is vacant.

This may be the most elaborate surviving terra cotta work in town. One online reference describes it as "either a heavenly flight of fancy or the product of a bricklayer on LSD: Moorish architecture on steroids, replete with spires wrapped in carved grape vines and snowflakes, flower blossoms and clamshells." 

Some detail of the facade tomorrow.