Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis

A group of sharply dressed older women are being led on a tour through Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis, an exhibition of architectural artifacts at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. The group stops in a gallery containing Sgraffito panels salvaged from the Rivoli Theater, demolished in 1983. “Sgraffito is an Italian Renaissance technique that involves using colored plaster and carving it back to reveal the color underneath,” a tour guide explains. “There was only one other building in St. Louis where Sgraffito was used.” A woman towards the front of the room speaks up: “Excuse me, was the theater on 6th Street?” she asks. “My father used to own that theater.” The room lets out a collective gasp. “My father made more money on candy than movie tickets.” The group laughs, and the tour continues.

An array of forty-eight objects salvaged from St. Louis buildings—both significant and ordinary— and spanning over a hundred years, have been curated from the collection of the National Building Arts Center (NBAC) and displayed across five galleries at the Pulitzer. Urban Archaeology is the most popular exhibit the Pulitzer Arts Foundation has ever shown. “We’ve had a lot of those moments in the show,” says Michael Allen, Executive Director of the National Building Arts Center and curator of Urban Archaeology, when told of the visitor’s Rivoli Theatre connection. “Other people have said, ‘Oh I worked in that building,’ or, ‘I watched that building be demolished,’” continues Allen. “It’s a show that they can see themselves in.”

Closing February 4, 2024, Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis tells a story of St. Louis through material forms as evidence of memory and human influence on both the built environment and the land that it has inhabited. While the term “lost buildings” is present in the title of the exhibit, the architectural artifacts are assembled and curated to express the greater cultural, social, and economic forces that contributed to urban renewal, disinvestment, and the commodification of the built environment. Cast iron lintels and column capitals dissociate from formal architectural significance and are given new associations with broader concepts and movements in urban planning and historic preservation. “The origins of salvage are really commercial,” continues Allen. “Historically, salvage was the service and recovery of objects of monetary value. It has also served to venerate concentrations of power. We claim it as an oppositional practice at the NBAC, and in the exhibit at the Pulitzer, which kind of places us within the avant garde.”

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is a free admission art museum founded in 2001 to house Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer Jr.’s private collection of art—one that includes works by Ellsworth Kelly, Pablo Picasso, and Richard Serra. The foundation is housed in a building designed by Tadao Ando with a series of galleries tucked within a container of smoothly cast concrete. While it may be convenient to consider the NBAC artifacts as art, like the Kellys, or architecture, like the building, they are neither. The five galleries displaying salvaged materials are organized by concept, with one focusing on a specific neighborhood, Grand Center, the home of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The collection items are presented without the wall text or explanations present at a traditional art museum, opting instead for cases that house photos and ephemera, and a card of information with text at the entrance to each gallery. Architectural ornament at this scale was designed to be mounted high up on buildings, multiple stories above a viewer, and intended to be appreciated from the ground. Working from that perspective, designers of ornament created bold forms that could be interpreted by the eye from many stories below. Views close up were reserved for the designers of the ornament, the makers that crafted it, or the builders that installed it. The eye level mounts, or the placement of a column capital on the floor, provide a rare opportunity to see architectural ornament at its superhuman scale, but also see the work of human hands. A triptych of terracotta panels, shown outside of a gallery expressing a narrative of both material and labor, are displayed with a third panel turned around to show fingerprints pressed into the clay—an anonymous maker's mark and a reminder of the crucial role that laborers played in the “building arts” in NBAC’s name. This democratization of ornament is further emphasized in the way the collection items are displayed—on blocks of wood, wheeled dollies, and on crates and pallets—similar to the way they are stored at the NBAC.

In a gallery dedicated to how salvage and preservation can be utilized to preserve knowledge is a time-traveling terracotta lion. The lion was salvaged from a late nineteenth-century commercial building once located across the street from the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, a complex of federally funded modernist high-rises with a history that called attention to both the design of public housing, and the responsibility to care and maintain it. Pruitt-Igoe was completed in 1955 and demolished by 1976, all under the vigilant eye of the lion serving as a witness to a cycle of demolition, construction, disinvestment, and then another round of demolition, before it too became subject to that cycle. The building that it was mounted on was razed in the 1980s. It is easy to see the beauty in the way the lion’s mane is rendered, or its wise expression, but the circumstances under which it existed, and its continued persistence within a larger context are more impactful than its beauty alone.

Salvage and curation may provide a path forward for contested monuments as well as parts of the built environment that represent oppressive histories. The exhibit contains cast iron columns from the Clemens House. Built in 1860, the Clemens House likely represented the largest use of cast iron on any home in the US. It was built for James Clemens, Jr., a relative of Mark Twain and a pro-Confederacy enslaver. In 2009, developer Paul McKee, Jr., purchased two square miles worth of buildings on St. Louis’s north side, including the Clemens House, to redevelop as a part of the Northside Regeneration Project. Instead of rehabilitation, hundreds of buildings were left to decay, and were the subject of vandalism, brick theft, and later, demolition. With the condition of the Clemens House deteriorating, the cast iron columns were moved to the NBAC until the house could be restored. In 2017, the house was consumed by a fire and demolished. One of the Clemens House columns is presented on the floor at the center of a gallery like a felled tree, its structural power stripped along with the cultural power of the oppressor that built it. “There is a responsiveness of salvage to respond to social justice,” says Allen. “Salvage allows for a new disposition of those objects. They can be recontextualized and that process can be therapeutic and healing to see these symbols lose their veneration, but remain physical objects that can teach us.”

On an opposite wall is a set of 1840s cast iron lintels that once topped a building that was destroyed to build the Gateway Arch National Park, one of nearly five hundred buildings razed within one of St. Louis’s oldest, and Blackest, commercial areas. Plans for the Gateway Arch National Park included a national museum of American architecture that was also intended to display architectural artifacts salvaged from the demolition. While the museum was never created, it inspired the founder of the National Building Arts Center, Larry Giles, to begin salvaging and collecting, with the goal of creating a museum.

The lion outside of Pruitt-Igoe, the columns from the Clemens House, and the lintels from the site of the Gateway Arch National Park aren’t items of architectural salvage that cause a viewer to shame and mourn the destruction of beautiful buildings, they chronicle the systems that occur, historically and contemporarily, that our built environment is constantly subject to. It is this larger context that the NBAC, as the nation’s largest repository of architectural artifacts, seeks to share. Understanding that motivation requires a trip across the Mississippi River and to the NBAC’s home, a former steel casting foundry in Sauget, Illinois.

The NBAC is a sprawling campus nestled between manufacturing and chemical plants. Views of the Gateway Arch from the NBAC are complicated by a skyline of industrial buildings—seemingly a world away from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The NBAC is the product of nearly fifty prolific years of acquiring and collecting that began with founder Larry Giles. In 1973, Giles began to amass a collection of architectural artifacts from St. Louis and other US cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia. As that collection grew, so did an archive and library of design, labor and manufacturing, urban studies, and patenting—nearly every topic associated with the built environment. Michael Allen has been involved in the NBAC since 2004. After seeing items from Giles’s collection in an exhibit on brick production in St. Louis, he reached out. “Larry put me to work ironing linen drawings and putting them into a flat file,” says Allen, who brought his own iron from home to complete the task.

Developing a museum was a core interest of Giles, who passed away in 2021. After his death, Allen stepped in as Executive Director on a volunteer basis, but it became a “fourth job” for Allen, who also teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on modernist mass housing in the US, and has run a historic preservation practice that has completed projects in fourteen US states. Allen was hired at half-time, and now works three-quarter time at the NBAC. He has been instrumental in developing new ways for the NBAC to collaborate with like-minded organizations like the Pulitzer, yet he acknowledges that the NBAC is “still in the prologue. We aren’t at chapter one yet.”

The NBAC contains numerous buildings full of artifacts in crates, on pallets, and in groups of similar objects, with the foundry’s buildings serving as an artifact of their own. The NBAC owns more than 23,000 dry press bricks, 80,000 pieces of terracotta, 202 cast iron storefronts, and complete facades of entire buildings, like the Rivoli Theatre. There are hand-powered freight elevators and a complete Otis open cage elevator car. A multi-level artifact warehouse contains neon signs, interior millwork, glass block, windows and doors, and floors upon floors of stair risers—some salvaged from America’s most historic buildings during restoration projects. Yet the NBAC also houses materials that reference how those artifacts were designed, fabricated, and even extracted from buildings themselves. Not only can you see a fragment of terracotta, but you can also see that item in a catalog as a new design, along with a photo of that terracotta fragment being removed.

Yet, it is the comprehensive nature of the research library that is the most captivating aspect of the NBAC. “We don’t just want to be a museum warehouse. That doesn’t have longevity,” says Allen. The goal is to continue to catalog the research libraries’ nearly 300,000 single titles, periodicals, primary documents, trade catalogs, and archival materials, and to determine better ways for researchers and the public to access the NBAC’s collections, such as developing finding aids and ensuring that scholars and researchers are aware of the scope of the holdings. Says Allen of the research library, “We have one of the greatest libraries on the built environment, but at the moment, you need to see it to know that.” A former shower room for workers houses the bulk of the publicly accessible section of the research library, which is assembled along with ephemera and objects associated with the building arts. Archives and Collections Manager Emery Cox began as a volunteer at the NBAC in 2016. Cox was hired as a paid part-time worker the year after and became NBAC’s only full-time employee in 2021. Yet the items in the archive and the artifacts themselves are so large in numbers, Allen estimates, that only 1% of the research library has been properly cataloged.

Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis proposes one way in which a selection of the holdings of the NBAC can reach wider audiences and grow its capacity as an institution. Allen sees the exhibition at the Pulitzer, which has made the NBAC more visible, and brought more people to the foundry in Sauget, as one that could travel to other institutions, enriching the dialogue around the practice of salvage and the context it creates, and its ability to tell stories that are deeper and have contemporary relevance. Yet Allen sees a broader role for the NBAC that could utilize the center’s collections as tools to build knowledge, both tangible and technical. “We have thousands of pieces of terracotta. They could be used to teach how to clean and repair materials. But we also know how to research a building. This is expertise that I want the NBAC to export out.”

Back at the Pulitzer, Allen provides a compelling example of the deep relationship between architectural salvage and social history. By 1983, the Rivoli Theatre wasn’t just making more money from candy than films—it was showing adult films and had developed a reputation for gay cruising. Amidst a growing public fear around the AIDS epidemic, a lack of government support for sick and dying gay men, and limited progress on finding a cause for AIDS, the sgraffito was salvaged, and the Rivoli was demolished. While this anecdote never made it to the Pulitzer, it demonstrates the ability for salvage to embody embedded or obfuscated stories, to tell stories of communities being torn apart, or coming together, and to serve as material evidence beyond the material itself.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michael Allen, Executive Director of the National Building Arts Center.