Sunday, February 4, 2007

39-40xx Washington - Part 2

Just to the west of 4060 was this beautiful but abandoned federal revival style home at 4064 rendered in a golden colored roman brick with horizontal reveals framed by continuous limestone sill courses below the windows at each floor. This was the appearance of the home at the time I photographed the collapsing burn victim to the east.

Once 4060 was demolished, I returned that summer to photograph again.
Although abandoned for some time, the home was still a prime candidate for rehab at this point.
In spring 1994 I drove down Washington and my heart sank as I saw that the home had recently burned and was reduced to a shell. Even as a shell though, this type of brick construction would cost a fortune to re-create today.
The masonry was largely in sound structural condition, and possible to salvage with new construction inside. Many homes in the CWE, Soulard, and now Old North Stl. have been re-built with less than this intact.
By the following winter though, the beautiful masonry structure had been deemed worthless by someone and plowed into the ground, leaving only the two trees which once framed the view of home. A few years later, I happened to be find the exact same home model at #7 Windemere Place, which is located off Union a few blocks north of Delmar. City records indicate that this house was built in 1902.
The house next door (4068) at the west end of the block had a small amount of fire damage to the roof from the blaze at 4064, yet it managed to survive ten more years until it disappeared in January 2004.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

These make me so sad to see! But I'm glad you took photos, and thanks for posting them.

Robert Powers said...

This may be the most depressing blog ever! But it is good that you're doing it -- losses like these should be well-documented.

Any chance you've got photos of the two private streets in Midtown that were demolished for the Cardinal-Ritter Prep campus about 5-6 years back?

Vanishing STL said...

I did not get any shots of Carpenter Place or the other small street next to it, but I did photograph several of the homes along Delmar and one on Washington that will be the subject of a future post.

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