What happened to Carr Square?

The neighborhood flourished for a century before modernist city planners replaced it with what they saw as the future.

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Neighborhoods in St. Louis were annihilated in the years after World War II in the name of “progress.” I’ve looked at Mill Creek in the past, and recently I investigated the vanished Kosciusko neighborhood on the near South Side. But a neighborhood that almost no one remembers today, but yet probably features in the family history of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of St. Louisans and Americans, is the Carr Square neighborhood north of downtown. I touched on the deplorable living conditions of one part of that historic section of St. Louis years ago, as the attention of the plight of the desperately poor living in the rundown tenements north of Washington Avenue came to light to early 20th century reformers. But the entire neighborhood was not so ramshackle, and it flourished for a century before being wiped off the map, replaced with what modernist city planners saw as the future. That future is now in the past, as well.

The neighborhood is named after William C. Carr, the judge who owned and platted out the addition to the City of St. Louis in the early 1840s (he is not to be confused with William Carr Lane, the first mayor of St. Louis). The land in the neighborhood is still known for legal purposes as William Carr’s Addition and Second Addition. Carr was born in Albemarle, Virginia, in 1783 and came to St. Louis in 1804 via Louisville shortly after the city had been purchased by the United States. He had already passed the bar to become a lawyer, and like John B.C. Lucas, was in the financial position to purchase parts of the old Common Fields just outside the boundaries of the colonial St. Louis. And like those early landowners, the rapid expansion of St. Louis allowed for huge financial gain as his Additions sold quickly as he subdivided them from 1842 through 1845.

However, it had not been easy for Carr; as the name circuit court implies, the judge had been required to ride on horseback across a wide area, as far away as Gasconade County and almost to the Arkansas state line. He was even accused of corruption but was acquitted on all charges. Carr was not embittered by the incident, and when it came time to subdivide his addition to the city, he included a park in the middle of the new residential area. The idea was not new; the Lucas and Chouteau Addition due west of the original town of St. Louis had given free land for the Old Courthouse to encourage development. Likewise, the way Carr Square interrupted the street grid followed trends in European city planning; St. James Place and Russell Square in London, for example, served as focal points at the termination of thoroughfares for their respective neighborhoods. Created by ordinance in 1842, this may be the oldest park in St. Louis.

Carr would only have a short period of time to see his additions to St. Louis grow into a thriving neighborhood. He died in 1851. The neighborhood was already densely settled by the Civil War, and numerous churches are visible in photographs and in Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, published in 1876. But already the neighborhood was getting a reputation among “polite society” as not being a flourishing immigrant community, filled with newly arrived German, Irish, and Jewish, but rather as a foreign, mysterious, and dangerous warren of narrow streets and tenements.

A Tour of St. Louis, published in 1878, includes a whole section on vice in the city, and not surprisingly for the staid authors, much of the action in the following chapters occurs in the blocks around Carr Square. Castle Thunder was the name of one tenement building, where the author noted that conditions were so crowded that people would sleep on the roof during the summer. Another tenement was called Fort Sumpter. Poverty in the neighborhood was integrated with white and African Americans living in close proximity; only later would segregation come due to the federal government’s intervention. The conditions of the properties were blamed on the occupants’ heavy drinking and not the landlords’ neglect. There was also suspicion from the powers that be of the often-unruly crowds that would occasionally rise up and march against the poor decisions of City Hall.

In reality, people who had arrived in America were working to provide for their families and move further west to the suburbs of their day, as St. Louisans still do. The German Protestants who first moved into Carr Square moved south to the streetcar suburbs of Dutchtown, and then Irish immigrants moved in, giving a portion of the area the name Kerry Patch. Sadly, due to the final demolition of St. Bridget of Erin, there is basically nothing left of the Irish heritage of the area. Then Jewish immigrants arrived, and Biddle Street and its market became the center for their community. Kram Fish at 1307 Biddle is a legacy that survives.

The Mullanphy Emigrant Home, built by the successful Irish-American family, served as a place for people who had just arrived in the city and needed a place to stay. The Mullanphy Tenement, which sits just north of Cass Avenue, was built as an example of a model apartment building, showing that lower-income people did not have to live in squalid conditions. Both buildings sit empty, waiting for someone to redevelop them. But other buildings, such as St. Patrick’s, have been demolished and only exist in photographs.

Along Franklin Street—which is now Dr. Martin Luther King Drive—there was a thriving commercial district, which has now been completely demolished. Perhaps that is what is so frustrating about what we have lost just north of downtown, as yet another article comes out in local papers about the center of our region suffering from lack of visitors and business. Our leaders tore apart the urban fabric that once provided the historic and urban context for the economic and political center of St. Louis, and it should come as no surprise that the rest of our city now seems so disconnected from it. Next week, I will explore what happened to Carr Square, one hundred years after it first became one of the most culturally and historically rich neighborhoods in St. Louis.

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