99% Invisible - 283- Dollhouses of St. Louis

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was prosperous. Black-owned businesses thrived and the neighborhood was filled with the lovely, ornate brick homes the city has become famous for. But driving around The Ville today, the neighborhood looks very different. Some buildings are simply rundown or abandoned, but others are missing large chunks entirely. Walls have disappeared. The bricks are gone. "We call them dollhouses," says local Alderman Samuel Moore, "because you can look inside of them." People have been stealing the bricks. Dollhouses of St. Louis Support Radiotopia

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the early 1950s, Sam Moore and his family left rural Arkansas looking to start a new life. They planned on moving to Chicago. We were on our way to Chicago with all our worldly possession and our dog's spot. And we started off in my granddad, his 53-dynofBewitt and got the St. Louis and ran out of gas. And instead of continuing on to Illinois, Moore's family just decided to stay. They settled in a middle-class area called theville. Back then St. Louis was segregated and theville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city.

But residents of theville made the best of it. That's reporter Zach Dyer. Black owned businesses thrived and the neighborhood became one of theville made the best of it. That's reporter Zach Dyer. Black owned businesses thrived, and the neighborhood became one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the country. Do you mind if we just roll the windows up just for the recording? Okay, I turn the air on. Sam Moore's dad got a job as a brick layer, and helped build some of the beautiful, stately brick homes in this area. He was a great brick layer. He did quite a few jobs around this town. I still see some of the beautiful, stately brick homes in this area. He was a great bricklay. He did quite a few jobs around this town.

I still see some of my dads work. Oh wow, really. Mm-hmm. It was a beautiful homes, triple brick, three story, two story buildings. It will cost a million dollars to duplicate. The driving around the village today, where Moore has lived for almost his entire life and is now the alderman, the neighborhood looks very different.

We pull up in front of a couple of old houses. One on one second. Look at these two buildings. Look at that building. You can see clean through it. From the street, the building's facade looks normal. It's a two-story brick home sitting on a white limestone base. Rounded brick arches frame the first four windows,

but head just around the corner and you can see that the entire side wall is missing. The bricks are just gone. You can see straight into the rooms, each with a different wallpaper. We call them die houses because you can look inside of them and see what's going on. Remember when the little girls play with the die houses, you put the furniture in, you can see it and you put your hand in the wall. In the past 50 years, the city of St. Louis has lost more than half its population. Vacancy has skyrocketed in the village and other neighborhoods on the north side. Entire neighborhoods here are just green pasture, punctuated by the occasional dilapidated building

that slowly surrendering to the landscape around it. When Moore became an alderman back in 2007, he started to get calls from his constituents complaining about these collapsing buildings. So he set out to discover why they were falling down. He figured it was probably just because they were so old. But then he noticed that something was strange about these so-called doll houses. They were surrounded by piles of broken bricks and debris, but something was missing.

I often wondered why. I never saw whole bricks. If the buildings were falling down into piles, but there weren't any whole bricks in those piles, more knew it meant someone was taking them. Salvatge bricks are valuable. There's a market for them, just like there's a market for the copper that gets stripped out of old homes. A pickup truck full of old bricks could be worth upwards of $300.

But these bricks weren't being salvaged legally. There was a not legal demolition projects that were theft. It was brick theft. And this theft was happening on a massive scale in Mord's district. Well, I have 1242 empty buildings and 1700 vacant lots. So out of the 1700 vacant lots, I guarantee you that 1200 of them will stolen. And despite these being vacant houses, all of this brick theft is a problem. When a building's bricks get stolen, the house usually can't be resold. It also takes money out of the pockets of legal demolition workers.

And it stalls redevelopment because you can't sell a building when you can't guarantee that it'll be there next week. But there's also something intangible that's lost with Brick theft. The villa's been home to famous African-Americans like Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, and the opera singer Grace Bumbry. I remember the Grace Bumbry house. That house was stolen. And they just called them old raggedy buildings,

but a lot of our history was taken away in stone as well. Brick theft has been going on all across St. Louis since at least the 1970s. Whole buildings, whole blocks, whole parts of neighborhoods being stolen, carted off illegally, and sold. How and where in the United States can somebody steal a whole building and not get caught? St. Louis's history with bricks starts back in 1849 when a boat fire on the riverfront jumped into the city. Hundreds of wooden buildings along the river burned the ground.

The fire's devastation led the city government to order that all new buildings be constructed with fireproof materials. Luckily, the city happened to be sitting on top of a lot of high-quality clay, as well as the coal that would be needed to fire the kilns to turn that clay into brick. Well, I could show you a couple of these different kinds of bricks. One thing that I think is interesting is that Andrew Wiles is the executive director of the landmarks association of St. Louis. Behind his desk, he's got a giant frame pictorial map of the city back in the late 1800s. The landscape is dotted with evidence of the city's once thriving brick industry.

It's covered with mines and smoke stacks. You'll see some smoke stacks and you'll see some sort of derrick set up or winches set up over mines. Some pit mines, you'll also see these beehive kilns, they look like big igloos. The red clay industry was so big that folks were even digging mines in their backyard to get this stuff. And all this new industry attracted others to St. Louis. In the decades

to come, waves of migrants from across Europe and the southern US flocked to the city. It was a boom town. So it's sort of a perfect storm of materials, labor, and industrial innovation that combined to make St. Louis into his brick producing powerhouse. By 1890, St. Louis was home to the world's largest brick manufacturing company. Millions of bricks were exported across the country to build skyscrapers in Chicago and other buildings across the Western and Southern United States. Bricks were cheap and plentiful. And that meant that even modest working-class homes in St. Louis could have one of a kind of brick work. They're not just blank facades.

They have this sort of corbling or extensions or recesses and ornamental bricks built into them, pressed flowers or designs and string courses and things like that. But even as these beautiful brick homes were going up all across the city, the conditions for the city's eventual semi-abandonment were also being put into place. In the early 1900s, St. Louis was forcing its black citizens to live in segregated neighborhoods. When the practice was found unconstitutional, realtors began asking homeowners in St. Louis to sign something called race-restrictive deed covenants. These barred the homeowner and future homeowners from selling the

property to African-Americans and other minority groups. Here's Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa. When Realtors assessed properties for sale in St. Louis, you know, well into the 1960s, one of the standard items on the assessment form was the nearest Negro community, or the degree to which Negroes had invaded or intruded upon a neighborhood. And is invasion a word that was used in these documents? Oh yeah, these were the words that were used. Intrusion, invasion, and the like. Not only were African Americans blocked from certain neighborhoods by these racist deed

covenants, the city was also bulldozing black neighborhoods for massive new projects like the Gateway Arch. This was the age of urban renewal. Increasingly, we are seeing large-scale demolition as the first step in building modern cities. In this jet-age, events move fast, faster indeed than we sometimes realize, and our progress is certain to be steady as we clear away the structures that block progress. In the 1950s, white residents had started to leave the city entirely. The departure was facilitated by the recent development of the highway system and by the GI Bill, which gave white veterans easy access to home loans while largely denying

black veterans the same right. White flight was happening all over the country, and St. Louis was no exception. As whites rushed to the suburbs, the city's population declined and its tax revenues plummeted. By the 1970s, African Americans with the means started moving out of the city too. We lost over a half a million people in this city since 1950, so we have a huge problem with vacancy. Andrew Wile again from the Landmarks Association. And at the same time, the neighborhoods that are vacant were built of incredibly high quality materials, incredibly durable materials. Most of the brick that's being stolen in St. Louis is, you

know, 100 or 120 years old, so it's really at the beginning of its lifespan. Bricks can last for hundreds of years. The fallout from decades of racist housing policies and disinvestment in the North Side has created communities where the bricks themselves are worth more than the homes they support. The only reason these buildings can be stolen is because they are perceived to have no value. So if the building is perceived to have no value and their eyes watching it, you know, it's a perfect opportunity for it to disappear. By the time Sam Moore had become older men in 2007, Brick theft had already been going on for decades, but there hadn't been much of an effort by the city to stop it.

So Moore set out to figure out who was stealing bricks and how. To start, he did what any gum shoe would do. He went on some stakeouts. I watched him steal the bricks and followed them to the brick yard where they sold them and wonder why, which is city that an illegal organization like that of a business by brick. These brick thieves have found that abandoned houses represent remarkably easy targets. So easy that sometimes people are coming in from as far away as Las Vegas to steal them. It's not actually hard to tear the buildings down. People

go about it in a few different ways. So the guy get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and get on a bicycle and take a screwdriver and pick him out six or seven bricks out of the wall and then snatch the wall. That's all it takes. Make a hole in the wall, slide a metal pipe in the hole, attach it to a chain, give yourself enough clearance and pull. Instant demolition. The thieves had figured out how to steal bricks even in busy areas. They just take out the back wall of the house, hidden from view. Like this is a busy street, so what they did was, they took the back out of this one.

Look to your right. Oh, I see you. You're right. So literally like the whole building is, the back of the building is gone and there's a tree that's grown up in it. Right. But you're right, the whole building is just the back of the building is gone and there's a tree that's grown up in it. Right. But you're right, the whole building is just, there's nothing there in the back.

There are various ways to steal an entire wall of brick. Some people will run a cable through one window and out another, and attach it to a truck and pull. Or they've used backhows that were contracted for other legal demolition jobs. They would drive them over in the night, knock down an abandoned house, and then return later to steal the bricks. One of the more drastic methods of stealing bricks involves burning the buildings first. The fire destroys the wooden supports holding up the building and weakens the mortar between the bricks.

When the fire department would arrive to put out the fire, their high pressure host is often knocked down the walls and even clean the mortar off the bricks. Michael Allen is a preservationist who used to live in North St. Louis back in 2008 when Brick theft was at its worst and dozens of buildings were being stolen each month. I had personally worked with some neighbors. We boarded up buildings that weren't boarded

because we weren't waiting for the city. We nailed shut the doors to keep people out of them from setting the fires inside and then you know they'd be on fire. It didn't seem real driving home to go get groceries and pass like these buildings and it been stolen seemed otherworldly. Stealing the buildings is back breaking work and it can be dangerous. In a couple of times we have found people upside down in the rubble that they got caught. The bricks caught them and killed them. Eventually Alderman Moore got fed up with sitting in his car and watching all this happen to his neighborhood.

So he started to confront the thieves when he would find them. People have been warning me, man, saying they got gunned. They don't like you. You need to stop running up on people. So I took his advice. I stopped running up on him. More eventually realized his interventions weren't making much of a difference anyway. Brick theft is classified as a nuisance crime, kind of like breaking windows in an old building. It carries a maximum $500 fine

and up to 90 days in jail. And given the amount of money that could be made selling stolen brick, a lot of people figure it's a risk worth taking. To me, what makes used brick so special and desirable is the color. This is Barbara Buck. She owns Century Used Brick.

It's a brick yard in St. Louis. And so when they tear the building down, you'll get like this mix of colors of oranges and reds, and it's really hard. It's been really hard for new brick manufacturers to duplicate that. Buck says her brickyard is scrupulous about only buying legally salvaged brick. They typically buy from just a handful of trusted vendors. Because we're legal, we have to know exactly where our brick comes from. legally salvaged brick. They typically buy from just a handful of trusted vendors. Because we're legal, we have to know exactly where our brick comes from. So if we don't usually have people showing up at our yard with just a palette, you know, trying to sell

a palette. But Buck says there are other brick buyers that aren't as careful as she is. There was a guy in St. Louis that people were, he was buying brick, you know, after hours, one in the morning, you could get a shopping cart, fill a full brick, go get money, and go buy your drugs. And he was doing a huge business. And then the police shut him down. Buck explained to me that the supply of legally salvaged bricks is driven mostly by city-funded demolitions. So when the city runs out of money to tear down old buildings, more brick yards are willing to turn a blind eye to brick acquired illegally. And so that's when it gets, you know, tempting to, for these guys to steal brick and sell

it because they know there's a lot of demand and no supply. Some of the brick, whether it's legally salvaged or not, goes to building or renovating new homes in St. Louis. But most of it heads to another part of the country entirely. I would say most of it goes to Louisiana. And we sell some in Florida, we sell some in Mississippi, we sell in Texas. So there's, you know, southern markets

that really love our brick. I'm 63 years old. I've been doing this since I was 18 and I've seen and heard just about anything you can think of in the brick business. Gary McConnell owns McConnell brick in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and he's been buying salvage brick for decades. When demand was at its highest, he was getting box cars full of used brick from St. Louis. New brick might sell for around $350 per thousand. Old brick, on the other hand, will go for almost two times that. For example, we sell St. Louis brick for 675 thousand. There are a few reasons why there's such a high demand for salvaged bricks in the southern United States, where McConnell's from. For one thing, in the 1960s and 70s, as neighborhoods in St. Louis were starting to hollow out,

a new style of architecture in the South was creating a market for used brick. We had an architect in Louisiana named Ahay's town, and he was the first person that I know of, and I was a kid back then, but he started designing houses using salvage material. Town was influenced by Antibellum Southern architecture. Of course, you know, we're down south, we have plantation homes, all those old, old plantation mansions and stuff, the brick were actually made on site. By enslaved workers living on the plantation. And they would make the brick and put them on these houses.

So when Mr. Town, his reputation and his flier was to replicate some of these old plantation homes. So the only way that you could do that was to use antique brick. Towns' designs called for used brick, not just for the facades of homes, but for the flooring, courtyard patios, and pool decks. Even today, some neighborhoods in Baton Rouge require all new construction to use reclaimed brick. Demand for that weathered look has gotten so high that only the wealthiest homeowners

can afford to have salvage brick. They're expecting to have salvage brick or, you know, old brick floors or pine beams or pine flooring, any kind of antique salvage stuff. They're expecting to see that in those upper-end houses. Aside from this desire for an antique look, there's another reason why so much use brick from St. Louis is headed to the Gulf Coast and out west. It's because not all bricks are created equal. The exterior layer of brick, the face brick, produced in St. Louis, is fired in such a way

that it helps it withstand the freezing winters in the Midwest. Interior brick is softer and can't stand up to the elements. In the 1960s and 70s, St. Louis home builders in the suburbs who started using reclaimed brick from the city got a nasty surprise. The brick facades were crumbling away. If you're going to put used brick on a new home, there has to be someone at the demolition site separating out the face brick from the interior brick That's something demolition companies can't or won't pay for

The easiest thing for them to do is just ship all of the bricks down to warmer climates where even the softer ones can be used on the exteriors of buildings To me, there's something sad about the beautiful old houses on St. Louis being torn down to build beautiful old-looking houses somewhere else. Barbara Buck, who runs the St. Louis Brickyard, agrees. You know, there are just times when I'll go to a building that I know is coming down. And I just feel so sad because I think about the family. You know, I'm very sentimental. I think about the family that lived there.

I think about the family that built that house. I think about the generations that were raised in that house. But she's also practical. Many houses can't and maybe shouldn't be saved. We don't have the population. We don't have the jobs to support those houses. And everything has a lifespan. have the jobs to support those houses and everything has a lifespan. The worst of the brick theft is over today.

Some of the brick yards that had a history of buying stolen bricks were shut down with the help of city workers, local activists, and representatives, like Alderman Sam Moore. Brick yards in St. Louis are now required to photograph whoever sells them brick, along with the demolition permit for that job. Now, the question is how to reinvent what's left behind. I'm doing a brick interview. A brick interview? You know I'm the brick man. Back in the Ville, Moore shows me some of the things they're doing with the vacant lots in the neighborhood. We pull up next to a fence decorated with life-size portraits of old Negro League baseball

players from the 1930s. Behind the fence is one of Moore's projects, an urban farm. This is called the Ville Archity. We've got about 50 fruit trees in it. We're growing tilapia fish. Oh really? And catfish. We've got a hatchery in there, we got chickens,

we got the works. And there's new housing being built in the Ville too. But not the same kind of stately homes that the neighborhood used to be known for. It'd take a million dollars to build a moh houses over again. So we want mixed use in there, I think they look good. Anything that enhanced the neighborhood. Moore shows me some of the new houses. A traditional brick home in this neighborhood would have been made with walls that were three bricks deep. From the street, the new houses look kind of like the old ones, but up close you can see that there's something different. It's not a whole brick. It was a little clip-on gadgets. It's nice, it's a flat surface, it's about three quarters of an inch thick. It's a veneer of

a brick. The clip-on brick works just like siding on a house. It's a slice of used or manufactured brick attached to the wooden frame of the building to give it that look of a brick home. factored brick attached to the wooden frame of the building to give it that look of a brick home. These homes with their brick veneer are far cheaper to build and will likely be the new face of the bill. They're not as ornate of the old turn of the century houses that used to define this neighborhood, but their affordability gets more people to move in to lower the vacancy rate, and that's what counts. Better to have a neighborhood full of life, even if the brick is fake and replace those dollhouses, with real houses. A lot of cities were ravaged by fire in the mid-19th century. St. Louis reacted by building

everything with brick, but when St. Francisco burned down, it used brick in another novel way. We have a cool extra story about that after this. So a lot of other cities were also hit by fires in the mid-1800s, just like St. Louis. In 19th century, it was a very dangerous time in St. Francisco, for example, in regards to fire. People came out for the gold rush, lived wherever they could, in wood shacks, and tents, and even on wooden boats in the shallows of the bay. It was a disaster awaiting to happen.

And critical studies here in the studio with me now, to talk about how fire shaped St. Francisco's architecture and infrastructure. In 1849, the same year that St. Louis suffered from a severe fire that ultimately turned them toward fire-proof brick, San Francisco was also hit by the first of a series of seven fires. And two years later, one of these destroyed and estimated 2,000 buildings, amounting to about three-quarters of the city at the time. And just so you know, the reason why there's a phoenix on the flag of San Francisco is

because of all these fires of the 1850s. This is a little fun fact. But one of the things that's very clear is that San Francisco did not go the route of St. Louis. There are not a lot of brick buildings in response to the fires of the 1850s. Right. So brick was expensive out in the bay, and the climate doesn't really require the insulation or benefit from the thermal mass that brick provides. So a lot of the city was actually rebuilt using wood, but they did widen city streets to slow the spread of flames and they funded better equipped firefighting forces. The city even imposed a range of fines for any citizen who stood by and didn't help to put out future fires.

So they basically conscripted regularism to be involuntary firefighters? Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I don't know if that would fly today. No. But, and these fires, they also led to this creation of this underground system around the city, which provided water reserves for firefighters so they could tap the water closer to a blaze,

but the importance of these wouldn't actually be realized until about a half century later. You mean for the big San Francisco earthquake of 1906? Exactly. Water mains broke, rubble prevented fire fighters from reaching parts of the city, the fire ended up burning for days and thousands of lives were lost. And most of the city was destroyed. But in the aftermath, San Francisco set about expanding its auxiliary water supply system with reservoirs, pump stations, fireboats, and more earthquake-proof systems using concrete and steel, all which were designed

to help in emergencies when conventional water systems fail. Those also sound like very good solutions, but it doesn't sound like building with wood was a good idea still. Well, it was, and it wasn't. I mean, masonry is better for fires, but it's not as great in earthquakes. Right. Right. But all that being said, bricks did have a role to play. Walking around the city of today, you can spot where the city's sisterns are because they're marked out on the surface with big circles of bricks on San Francisco streets. So the bricks aren't actually part of the

sistern, but they do indicate where the sistern is. And visitors and new residents always ask about these are a huge mystery. What are those circle outlines that they're almost as big as a city street actually? Yeah, they stretch basically from sidewalk to sidewalk and they hint at something much larger below. Ultimately, they aid visibility in making these systems easier to spot in a crisis. And the middle of these brick circles are these little manhole covers that provide the actual access to the system. And being spread around the city These many reservoirs can function independently if quake damage cuts off one area from another and in total

They're about 170 of these spread around and they have a combined capacity of around 10 million gallons That's amazing Really is And so if you're walking through San Francisco, you should really look for them because they're quite cool And so if you're walking through San Francisco, you should really look for them because they're quite cool. Right, and I actually wrote an article titled The Coding Rings on our website, which talks more about the history,

has images and videos, but most importantly, it has a map so you can actually hunt these down yourself if you want to. Oh, nice. And that website is? 99pi.org. Thanks. 99% invisible with produces weak by Zach Dyer, edited by Delaney Hall, Mix and Tech

Production by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director, rounding out the team to Avery Chauvinman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

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