Rebuilt to Suit

Hendricks specializes in Italian sports cars. His daughter Anna's middle name is Aurelia, after a certain Lancia model ("We had to tell her grandmother that it meant 'fair hair' in Italian," he confides). The storage room at the back of his garage is crammed with old Italian parts. In the middle of the mess sits the shell of Hendricks' own 1955 Lancia Aurelia, which he intends to rebuild, once he clears through the customer waiting list, which he estimates to be four years deep.

Hendricks embodies the spirit of the Locust district. He's connected to the car industry that birthed it. He's a passionate advocate of the district and committed to reimagining it for the 21st century. Rather than simply return his property to its former state, he and his wife, architect Lynn Grossman, opted to rebuild in what he describes as a "modern European vernacular" — a phrase that sounds funny coming out of the mouth of a grease monkey but starts to make sense the more you talk to him. He's a cultured fellow who quotes Shakespeare, likes a good bottle ("at least") of Scotch and has strong opinions. "We decided to discard what was no longer relevant, while at the same time respecting the character of the neighborhood," he says.

That character was built on the back of the automobile. With the rise of the car in the early 1900s, the industry found its St. Louis home along this stretch of midtown. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the city's dealerships, repair shops and parts companies were centered in the Locust Business District, and the buildings still show it. In 2005 the National Register of Historic Places recognized a two-and-a-half-block stretch as the Locust Street Automotive District, a designation that has made Hendricks and other property owners eligible to receive tax credits for rehabbing their buildings. (Hendricks declined the credit, because it would have limited his ability to add his modernist touches.)

Jassen Johnson, who had begun investing before tax credits were on the table — he and his partners are grateful for them now — half-jokingly describes the architectural style as "early automotive." As evidence he points to the eccentric detail work that adorns many of the edifices, from tires in terra cotta to turtles stamped into bricks. (One building Johnson is working on features bricks with decorative tension springs stamped into them; when completed, the space will house a sushi bar, a second restaurant yet to be determined and, on the top floor, an expansion of the Toky Branding + Design firm. Toky's flagship location, an anchor of the neighborhood, is located across the street from the Dinks Parrish Laundry building.)

Most of the original buildings were showrooms, but as cars started breaking down, companies realized they needed supplies nearby, so parts shops opened up. When urban sprawl pushed the dealerships westward, the parts shops remained, though they too eventually pulled up stakes, leaving much of Locust abandoned. One old remnant, the Locomobile Company of Missouri Building, at 3029 Locust, was transformed in the 1950s into Premier Studios, a combination television soundstage and recording facility. The narration and studio segments of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, a 1960s nature show featuring Saint Louis Zoo icon Marlin Perkins, were recorded at Premier. Miles Davis laid down tracks there, as did Ike and Tina Turner.

When Carter Hendricks opened his shop in the late 1980s, the area was, in his words, "a Wild West neighborhood with a lot of problems."

"It was pretty sad," adds Jeff Williams, who owns Zane O. Williams Signs & Displays on Locust. His company bought the six-story building in 1992, and he has hired Johnson to redevelop it into apartments and retail space. (He plans to relocate his company a few blocks north.) "I'd come in on a Sunday morning, and there'd always been a couple of small boys sitting across the street," Williams recalls. "There'd be these dirty old men parked in front of my building." Williams learned from police that the boys, some as young as twelve, were prostitutes.

"There was considerable deterioration, a lot of vacant and abandoned buildings on Locust and Washington. We had a lot of vandalism going on," confirms Alderwoman Marlene Davis, whose 19th Ward includes the Locust Business District. Davis deems the area's renaissance "a pioneering effort."

Like Johnson, Hendricks and Williams, Erich Kollinger is a Locust frontiersman. Five years ago Kollinger bought the old Cadillac dealership at 3222 Locust, which he has transformed into some of the most luxurious apartments in the city, high-end, high-design lofts that sport polished concrete floors and raw brick interiors. The highlight, the fourth-floor penthouse, is a 10,000-square-foot modernist paradise that wouldn't look out of place in Architectural Digest, furnished with a Frank Gehry-designed chair, a simple, elegant Mies Van Der Rohe coffee table and an Antonio Citterio sofa. The kitchen features a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Kollinger himself is the current tenant, but if you're looking to rent, the asking price is $9,000 a month.