Nothing remains of Colonial St. Louis on Washington Avenue  (“Wash Ave”) except a high limestone bluff into which one hundred  and ten years after the founding of St. Louis, James Buchanan Eads  ran a railroad tunnel. 

When you cross the Mississippi River from Illinois to St. Louis you  enter this tunnel from Eads’ Bridge and you exit it at Busch Stadium  – some eight city blocks west and south of where you entered – having traveled but one segment of The Lou’s labyrinthine  underground; the only one in fact that’s still accessible to the public. 

What local architects refer to as the canyon of Washington Avenue  would be unrecognizable to Jeremiah Connor of County  Roscommon, Ireland who laid out the widest street in downtown St.  Louis in about 1819, right down the center of his Common Field  property, and then deeded it to the community on condition that it  be named for President George Washington.*

An auctioneer by trade, the first sheriff of St. Louis and later its  treasurer, Connor** had the foresight to retain ownership of one  hundred and fifty feet of land on either side of the road that ran  from Fourth Street twenty-one blocks to the west, today Jefferson  Avenue. 

He envisioned businesses springing up all along this thoroughfare  and over the centuries, the prosperity of downtown St. Louis (or not)  could pretty much be read in the street scape of Wash Ave. So  many of the city’s historic and architectural landmarks would be  erected on what had been Jeremiah Connor’s property – James  Eads’ triple arched bridge, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassebaum’s  Convention Center, Isaac Taylor’s monumental warehouse for  Liggett & Myers and the south end of Bob Cassilly’s City Museum to  name a few. 

Both St. Louis University and Washington University spent their early  years on Wash Ave, some eight blocks apart, on opposite sides of  what had become a fashionable boulevard. They were bordered by  elegant townhouses, churches, hotels and shops that gave way to  department stores, garment factories, and warehouses – like those  of Liggett & Myers between 9th and 10th Streets, Jacob Goldman at  12th & Washington and Ely Walker between 15th and 16th Streets  – all three of which have been renovated as residential buildings  with shops at street level. 

By the turn of the 20th century Wash Ave had become the central  nervous system of one the nation’s busiest garment districts. Today  the American Institute of Architects Office and the  

Landmarks Association of St. Louis are handsomely housed at street  level within the Lammert Building, designed by Eames & Young for  Hargadine-McKittrick, the oldest dry-goods company in St. Louis and  Commerce Realty Company.*** Wash Ave would enter the 21st 

century with more distinctive turn of the 20th century landmarks  intact than any other street downtown.**** 

From the poetic, 19th century lines of 555 Washington Avenue to  the streamed lines and notched corners of the Mercantile Tower,  from Gyo Obata’s elegant salutes to Louis Sullivan’s designs for the  Wainwright Building (those rounded windows and leafy, terra-cotta,  relief designs on the Convention & Visitors Center) to Theodore  Link’s lotus columns on the International Shoe Company Building  (now Hyatt Unbound Collection’s The Last Hotel), Wash Ave reflects  the evolution of commercial architecture in St. Louis from the gilded  to the modern age. 

With the 1999 Washington Avenue street scape project complete  and the re-invention of St. Louis Centre as Mercantile Exchange  (“MX”) finished with the Laurel Apartments revision of the grand,  old Stix, Baer and Fuller Department Store, a key portion of the downtown revitalization puzzle has fallen into place. Wash Ave has  resurfaced as a city street with tremendous energy and geographic  potential, limited only by the vision of the dreamers and shapers of  the St. Louis prairie. Dream on! 

References: *Streets of St. Louis, William B. Magnan, Right Press,  Inc., Groton, CT, 1994;  

**http://stlouis.missouri.org/neighborhoods/history/cbd/text7.htm;  ***St. Louis: Landmarks and Historic Districts, Carolyn Hewes Toft  with Lynn Josse, Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc., 2002;  ****A Guide to the Architecture of St. Louis, George McCue and  Frank Peters, University of Missouri Press, 1989. 

Illustration Credit: “Perspective Drawing of The Eads Bridge at St.  Louis” by Camille Dry, from Pictorial St. Louis 1875 – in the public  domain at wikipedia.com.

Maureen Kavanaugh, author — visit Maureen’s blog by clicking  here.