In Lafayette Square — the neighborhood between Highway 40 to the north and Interstate 44 to the south — stands the oldest private lane in St. Louis. Called Benton Place, you can think of it as the primordial fossil of the suburbs. Its model evolved into the sprawling suburbia of St. Louis County.
On Benton Place, a grassy meridian splits the street right and left as you enter off of Park Avenue. The strip of greenery is long and oval shaped, with century-old oak trees shading the privately funded lane on either side. Stately, 1880s-era houses run north and south of the oval, and at the back of the lane, there is no exit. The charter of Benton Place bans public traffic and commercial development.
Most would call Benton Place downtown, but at the time of construction, it was west and south. Set upon a hill, it was away from the industrial smog blanketing downtown, which was caused by tanneries, smelting plants, mills and industry that made the blue bloods of St. Louis so rich.
But while Benton Place was one of the first private lanes, the very first private street in the city was Lucas Place, constructed in the aftermath of the St. Louis Fire of 1849.
SEE MORE: "St. Louis’ First Suburbs Are Now Some of the Most Beautiful Neighborhoods in the City [PHOTOS]"In May of 1849, a paddlewheel steamboat called the White Cloud caught fire on the St. Louis riverfront and lit 22 other steamboats ablaze. The flames spread throughout downtown, lasting eleven hours, and destroyed 430 buildings. Because of the devastation, and the cholera plague, "Wealthy citizens became convinced that it was no longer desirable to live in downtown St. Louis," according to an accounting from the Campbell House Museum. James Lucas and his sister Anne Lucas Hunt offered a solution: At the west end of the riverfront development, far enough away from the commoners, Lucas Place would be the first private neighborhood with its own charter.
The charter set property prices so high that only the richest people could afford to live there. It also outlawed commercial ventures but did not close the street entirely. With the First Presbyterian Church fortifying the eastern end, and Second Presbyterian Church as a bulwark to the west, Lucas Place abstracted itself from the city, deterring traffic from the ash-burnt and plague-invested St. Louis of the 1850s and the hoi polloi who inhabited it.
Benton Place and Vandeventer Place followed the blueprint, pricing themselves competitively, but they tweaked the Lucas Place model, closing their lanes to all street traffic and creating even more exclusionary enclaves.
The final home built on Lucas Place was finished in 1877, the year of the Great Railroad Strike. In July of 1877, the working class of St. Louis shut down economic production for nearly a week, and mansion owners filled their bathtubs with water because the strikers threatened to shut off service to the rich neighborhoods. The downtrodden wanted living wages, an eight-hour workday and no child labor. A rich person living on Vandeventer Place at the time might step outside and find an unforgiving scene: smog from their coal-burning steamboat business, diseased people on the streets and furious workers who were ready to crash through the dining-room windows, Gangs of New York style.
The fire and the strike are hinge points in nineteenth-century St. Louis history. The fire justified reinvestment in infrastructure, which made the city more equitable and livable to a larger population. New sewer and water systems were built, and trolley lines expanded transportation west leading up to the 1904 World's Fair. But as the remade downtown grew to envelop Lucas, Vandeventer and Benton Place, the exclusive nature of a private lane at the western edge of the city vanished, making the real estate less desirable for the young aristocratic class. That's when the man who designed Benton Place got another idea: What about Benton Place, but bigger? And west-er?
The surveyor and city planner Julius Pitzman got the gig to engineer Portland Place, Westmoreland Place and Kingsbury Place in the Central West End. Instead of the more modest Lafayette Park, these behemoth mansion neighborhoods would line the north side of Forest Park. The Chase Park Plaza, the Racquet Club and the imposing churches along McPherson and Kingshighway shored up the walls, strengthening the eastern defense of the neighborhoods with space and capital. These same ramparts against the lower classes are still part of the neighborhood's character, as dramatized in 2020 when attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey pulled guns on Black Lives Matter protesters who dared to breach the defenses.
Strolling down Portland Place, you'll notice similarities to Benton Place. The neighborhoods maintain the streets through a charter, with a gardened strip of oval parkland in the center and humongous mansions on the north and south sides. Each of the soaring homes is a unique architectural style with plenty of yard space in between. They were built to be impressive to the visitors of the 1904 World's Fair. Think of driving the private lanes as browsing a catalog for rich people visiting from back East. Wouldn't it be sophisticated to move to St. Louis?
The backs of these mansions have carriage houses, and hitching posts which can be found alongside the driveways — because horses were still the prime mode of transportation at the time. But even if every rich person had a carriage, how does the help get to the house? Lucas and Benton were close enough to poorer neighborhoods that the staff could get to work with a little bit of constitutional exercise, but if you build a giant neighborhood of exclusively rich people at the far west end of the city, you'll need a way for the staff — who cook and clean and service the nearby amenities — to commute.
Like most urban centers, St. Louis developed with a central tension between the rich and the working class — in order to have a vibrant culture, restaurants, factories, hotels, transit, sewers, garbage collection or any of the things that make a city a city, you need working-class people living close enough to do those jobs. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this led to bleak urban conditions where slumlords packed as many working families as possible into one building, and the workers had no choice but to tolerate the conditions because it was close to where the jobs were: downtown.
Horsecars, omnibuses, trolleys — and then cars, buses and light rail — changed this dynamic. Portland, Westmoreland and Kingsbury's westward project were functional because the greater distances between the owners and the workers who created their wealth could now be traveled more easily. Servants, maintenance, cooks, waiters, tailors, gardeners and staff could commute on the city's transit network while their bosses courted westward exclusivity.
At first, the idea of a private place like Lucas makes sense. The wealthy get together and draw a line. They pay the city for the property, and then no one can cross that line. Let's say they pave the streets and dig the sewers and build the houses and string the electrical all on their own. They pay for private security themselves, but still, water, waste, internet, gas, electricity are all hooked up to larger regional systems.
Their neighborhood associations negotiate service contracts in much the same way that all 88 St. Louis County municipalities must coordinate 88 relationships with regional service providers like Ameren, Spire or Missouri American Water. Private streets can't recreate an entire city's worth of goods and services. Neither can Richmond Heights, Ferguson or Oakville.
And there is a clear good derived from living in proximity to urban St. Louis — intangible goods, such as access to the city's culture, but also in the general infrastructure which makes living in any city affordable via population density. In a weird evangelical sense, a private neighborhood is a way of being in the city, benefiting from that density, but not of the city, all on your own behind the walls.
The Parkview neighborhood's website calls it the "Saint Louis Urban Oasis," which prompts the question: Where's the desert?
Cut in half by the city-county divide, Parkview mashes up all three of the Central West End places, and test runs a pivotal suburban theory: Curved lanes deter traffic. As the final capstone of Julius Pitzman's designs, Parkview has a U shape at the center, and radiating out are concentric streets with parkland confined to triangular plots like kidneys on the western back ends. Between Washington University and the Delmar Loop, Parkview doesn't constitute a huge plot of land, but it is a huge obstruction for traffic since there is only one way in and one way out.
By 1916, most of Parkview's 255 houses were complete. The neighborhood is designed to be "soothing and peaceful" to the eye, according to its National Register of Historic Places application. Lanes curve gently out of sight, and the homes are not ostentatious, cold or empty manors. Property lines are knit closer together than those of Kingsbury Place, the homes are smaller, and the pedestrian walkway which runs through the center — Limit's Walk — also serves as the city of St. Louis border with the county. Each home is far more affordable than Pitzman's previous mansion districts, but still, each Parkview home is cast in a unique architecture. The snail-shell bend of the streets gives many of these three-story houses a distinct position on the block. Instead of factory owners showing off their bank-like status homes, Parkview feels cozy and designed for families with kids who can play in the low-traffic streets. It was a great reason to move west at the time of construction, even if you weren't a banker.
Pitzman died in 1923. Most of Lucas Place was torn down for hotels, parking lots and downtown business. Vandeventer Place was torn down in 1947, after World War II, to make room for a new Veterans Administration hospital. The gate entryway and fountain at the head of Vandeventer Place can still be found up by the Jewel Box in Forest Park, which Pitzman helped design.
In the 1950s, America began the post-war boom with Pitzman's suburb schematic in hand, and St. Louis' population fell for the first time. St. Louis County grew exponentially, minting new suburban neighborhoods. The city set about destroying middle-class Black neighborhoods like Mill Creek, clearing huge swaths of the urban fabric for gigantic interstate highways and displacing Black residents into homes vacated by white people, who were encouraged to move west.
While the St. Louis fire had mandated the city be rebuilt with brick, the county was more of a blank slate. U.S. government policy and municipal law subsidized the rapid expansion of county suburbs such as Webster Groves.
Today, Webster is a case study in the in-between phase; it is Parkview and Town and Country combined. It has curving lanes and cul-de-sacs in many neighborhoods, and some Webster homes are built with stone and brick. But many incorporate cheaper options such as wood, drywall and cement. And instead of the stone walls of Westmoreland Place, distance from the city is the prime deterrent of outsiders.
In the 1930s, federal home-loan specialists drew maps of St. Louis with color-coordinated sections marking what was good for development and what was ready to be bulldozed for "urban renewal." Black neighborhoods were marked in red ("hazardous"). In 1940, Webster Groves was marked green ("best") because it contained, in the words of the federally-employed researcher, "not a single foreigner or Negro."
Even as the civil rights era won new victories, racist housing covenants gained huge amounts of ground at the same time. That was true at the federal level and encoded in local laws — 80 percent of St. Louis County homes built by 1950 had racial covenants, St. Louis Public Radio reports, citing the research of a University of Iowa professor.
As Harvard University history Professor Walter Johnson's Broken Heart of America details, when the St. Louis developer Charles Vatterot sought Federal Housing Association funding to develop the suburb of St. Ann, his proposal included a requirement that "no lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race."
By the 1980s, the St. Louis suburbs were expanding as mass-produced, low-density, single-family structures dependent on cars and highways. Pitzman's private places had been built to last hundreds of years, but that aspiration decayed in the baby boom. Still, exclusive, quiet streets were available to more (white) American families than ever, like for workers in the Fenton Chrysler plant, for example. West county contractors use nearly identical blueprints for the huge swaths of new houses constructed with various combinations of drywall, pine, cement and decorative brick sealed by Pink Panther insulation. It's the domain of strip retail and big-box stores — wine moms, golf dads, 1.5 white children, grass lawns; you know the vibe. Homeowner's associations replaced the private-place charter, and for the most part, gates were not necessary because distance and the legacy of redlining proved to be the best barriers.
The specific prototype for this came from Levittown, New York, but the theory of the suburbs had been developing for the past century in St. Louis. The real innovation came from the poorer white "middle class" moving west just like the rich people of Benton Place.
More than the fire and the general strike of the nineteenth century, white flight is the most important context for understanding urban St. Louis. The urban fabric of the city decayed because of suburbanization, the city-county divide and the highways which serviced both. All of this kept the city spread out, segregated and largely unable to maintain public goods like schools and transportation. Even more than redlining, racist real estate and banking practices, and resistance to school integration, white flight to the suburbs dislocated St. Louis' urban tax base and collapsed public institutions in the city. Its legal and architectural groundwork was first worked out in Julius Pitzman's designs and built upon by urban planners such as Harland Bartholomew.
In the 100-year story of St. Louis urban development, patterns repeat: The privileged benefit from the public, who work in their factories, kitchens and offices, even as the rich follow a historic impulse to gate themselves away. In the process, the wealthy have a fundamental dependence on the public, whose commons they enclose.
Colin Gordon, the Iowa professor who revealed the prevalence of racist covenants in St. Louis County, argues in his book Mapping Decline that while the central thread of St. Louis' sprawl has been private property, the idea of private markets and private choices is nonsense. "Property, after all, was not just bought and sold: it was restricted by private agreement; it was parceled out (subdivided, annexed, incorporated) and zoned for more or less exclusive uses; it was sustained (or not) by local infrastructure and services; it was valued and taxed; it was blighted (or not) and redeveloped (or not) by efforts at urban renewal." Sprawling suburban developments were rewarded, while older transitional neighborhoods were penalized or ignored.
But the fate of the region might be changing. "As for migration trends, I think it's complicated," says Next STL contributor Anthony Nipert. "St. Charles County is growing at a pretty impressive rate, and I think a fair share of that is flight from north county and also the new construction being preferable to the more dated suburbs in west [and] south county." Young, educated white people have also begun reversing the path of previous generations, moving back to the city. A study conducted between 2010 and 2015 found that St. Louis is among the national leaders in its educated group choosing the city over the suburbs. Meanwhile, Black flight continues on the north side, where mega-property owners such as Paul Mckee have neglected whole neighborhoods of historic buildings, letting them collapse or burn in fires that endanger firefighters.
As tempting as it is for city dwellers to believe the 2019 ranking of St. Louis as "among the best places to live," according to U.S. News & World Report, banks and the white civic leadership of the previous century have laid waste to the birthright of people who live here. The destruction of the common good in St. Louis — which extends to the architecture inherited from previous generations and had once included a functional public school system — impoverishes all of us.
"The solution to all this is familiar," Gordon writes at the end of Mapping Decline. "The first goal ... is to displace local fragmentation with some form of regional governance." That basically means a city-county merger: "The goal is not just to throw a larger jurisdictional net over metro areas but also to draw that net tighter." Greater density, and a regional approach to taxation, can rebuild public goods like transportation, schools, parks, water systems and more. With a strong public core, the westward suburb fringe would have a harder time "poaching" the St. Louis tax base.
St. Louis built like that at the turn of the twentieth century — like it was preparing for a couple of thousand years more. Gordon argues we can — and must — learn from these historic lessons. "The future of our cities," he writes, "and of the plurality of Americans who live and work and raise their families in them, depends upon it."
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