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Presented by Mary Doyle
Bricks, Everywhere!
It's a typical occurrence in St. Louis: you're digging a small hole to plant something and hit a hard spot. After further excavation you find an old brick buried in your yard. It's thicker and heavier than a regular brick, it's tan, and after brushing away some dirt and moss the stamp of a name appears. A brick is a mundane thing, but this one feels special. It’s a little piece of history, part of an old building that stood in the place of your century-year-old home. This is a brick worthy of display, perhaps as a doorstop or a garden accessory. The name stamped on the brick might even be your street name: Hydraulic, Christy, Laclede, St. Louis. Its smell is reminiscent of a cobblestone street after the rain, mud and wet clay, from a time with trollies and touring cars and men in black bowlers. As you set the freshly cleaned brick on your porch to display, you might wonder what that brick used to belong to and what happened it? What did your street look like when it was paved with Laclede bricks and lined with a different group of brick buildings? What else is under your house?
A hand-formed brick.
Artist's rendering of an Evens & Howard location, of which there were several.
The River City, or the Brick City?
St. Louis was known as the Brick City because of its placement over a large deposit of mineable clay, a region known as the Cheltenham Belt. At one time at the height of clay mining, fire clay, shale, and brick production there were about 50 manufactures in the area. Rumor has it a hospital of ill repute once stood at the corner of Macklind and Sublette to provide care to the ladies of the evening who serviced the large miner population of St. Louis, many of them Irish and Italian who built the Hill and Dogtown neighborhoods. In a small city like St. Louis, one could imagine the amount of smoke churning from these brick factories, who early in the 1900s contributed about 13% of the GDP, and the young filthy miners enjoying a Lemp beer after a long day digging heavy clay; the poor women who hoped they were planning on bathing before they came calling. One could hear the banter of laborers, the metallic scraping of their lunch tins on the floor beside their stools, the clip clop of horses pulling carriages across the cobblestone outside. What did these men and women think of their new home in America? Did they ever think we may still be displaying the fruits of their labor over a century later?
Lasting Beauty
The styles of St. Louis homes are so varied and artistic. There are many homes with turrets all over the city, adding a bit of magic. Walking down the sidewalk, henbit and purselane poking through the cracks the roots of a sweet gum or sycamore tree forced open, it's easy to admire all the personal touches on each home. The houses may look the same passing by in a car, but while on foot there's an opportunity to appreciate the detail: glossy green bakery brick on the porch, corbelling near the eaves, speckled bricks, and classic red. The sounds of the city play in surround sound: cars zipping by with loud music, kids in the backyard, an air conditioner kicking on, an ambulance speeding down the highway, a screen door swinging shut. What did the neighborhood sound like when this little castle was first built? Were children running around in the alleys enjoying the feel of their bare feet on smooth cool bricks?
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