Who Owns the Lunger Building? Disease,Property,and the Limits of Accountability in Tenement Reform in St. Louis,1832-1917

The Birth of the Rentier System in DeSoto-Carr: From Merchant to Landed Capital

The DeSoto-Carr tenement district had been nearly a century in the making. Its historical evolution from a retreat for the St. Louis elite, to a “respectable” neighborhood for the German American middle class to a tenement district for low-wage industrial workers tracked closely with St. Louis’ growth from an agrarian merchant outpost to a Gilded Age center of industry. In fact, the neighborhood dated as far back as the 1830s, when the “First Families” of DeSoto-Carr—as one 1930s reformer called them—built an urban land market on what had been rural, agricultural land just outside the city limits of St. Louis. The families whose names now mark DeSoto-Carr’s streets—Carr, Mullanphy, Biddle—transformed merchant capital acquired through investment in slaves, goods (particularly fur), steamships, infrastructure and later, railroads, into landed property and rental revenue that continued to provide income for their families until well into the twentieth century. These early landowners both shaped—and were shaped by—the transformation of St. Louis from a small frontier village to an urban center.

The death of Judge William C. Carr (1783-1851) is a particularly important moment in the birth of the rentier system in DeSoto-Carr because he left his family with a large amount of unimproved land—at least 23 acres—that he hoped would provide for them.

The land was particularly profitable for Carr because of the system of leaseholding he modeled after real estate investors in Eastern cities. Under his system, he was able to defray costs by leasing out the land and permitting leaseholders to build their own homes on the properties. As he wrote in his 1852 will, he had “commenced [a] system of leasing, instead of selling, lots in [his] several Additions to the City of St. Louis.” The leaseholding also proved profitable because, at least according to later documents in the Carr family inventory, the lessees were deemed responsible for paying property taxes as well as annual rents on the lots and improvements. ⁸ Upon his death, his landholdings produced enough revenue to comfortably provide for his wife and children. He directed his executors to continue the leasehold system to provide for his heirs. ⁹ An inventory of his net worth upon his death listed 378 urban lots acquired by Carr that had yet to be even be appraised. This left his wife, Dorcas Carr, in a position to not only maintain her husband’s leases but to continue to invest in land after her husband’s death. In 1859, she subdivided a plot of land east of Carr Square between Broadway and the river into lots, streets, and alleys and circulated advertisements offering the lots for sale at public auction. ¹⁰ Like her husband, Dorcas Carr also continued the buying and selling of slaves, growing the family fortune through human capital. ¹¹

The Carr family became immensely wealthy through shrewd investment of merchant capital in land. Indeed, Carr himself left his wife with an appraised fortune—not including his un-appraised real estate assets—of $124,254.24. This included $44,865 worth of property on blocks fronting Carr, Wash, 18th and Franklin Streets in 25X155’ lots. ¹² Yet they were not the only ones. While land records are sparse prior to the 1870s, many of the descendants of the big families who named the streets—Biddle, Carr, and Mullanphy—subdivided, sold off, or leased their inherited estates to aspiring immigrant homeowners in the mid-nineteenth century.

The system was profitable, in part, because it coincided with the first major wave of immigration to hit St. Louis, Germans. Most of the DeSoto-Carr lots appear to have been leased or sold to German families, who came to St. Louis in large numbers during the mid-nineteenth century. Six thousand Germans lived in St. Louis by the 1830s, a number which only expanded in the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe. By 1850, 43 percent of St. Louis’ population were first-generation German or Irish immigrants (22,534 Germans and 9,719 Irish) and most lived in the emerging neighborhoods immediately North and South of downtown. ¹³ German immigrants made a clear mark on DeSoto-Carr from the mid-nineteenth century onward (Figure 2). It was they who established the neighborhood housing stock more or less as it was until its demolition in St. Louis’ first slum clearance project in 1940. They built the first schools and churches in the area: Jefferson School (1848) at Ninth and Wash and the Carr School (1855) at 16th and Carr Streets. On lots that had once been farmland, they built two-to-three story single-family homes of sturdy brick construction, with those fronting Carr Square itself donning granite fronts. According to a WPA inventory, the vast majority of the area’s housing stock at the time of its demolition in 1940 dated from the period just prior to and immediately after the Civil War, a period when DeSoto-Carr was among the city’s fastest growing new neighborhoods. An 1875 aerial view of DeSoto-Carr shows prosperous-looking Greek revival style granite-faced row houses neatly arranged around the cultivated space of Carr Square. The spires of German churches—the First Methodist Church (1840) and the First German Baptist Church (1863)—tower above the scene. ¹⁴ The system continued to pay off for the widows and descendants of the “First Families,” in part because as the industrial economy matured, wage labor—and subsequent demand for rental housing—expanded. The lots provided a consistent income through leaseholds. Yet, in time, leasing gave way to sale and even speculation.

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Figure 2.

This detail from an 1875 pictorial map of the DeSoto-Carr area portrays a neighborhood of single homes for German immigrants, along with German churches adjacent to Carr Square Park (center). By 1940 most of the area’s residents were African Americans, many of whom had migrated from the South. [Richard 1. Compton and Camille N. Dry, Pictorial St. Louis: The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley, 1875].

Dorcas Carrs’ death in 1888 led to a widespread sale of her property, largely to the new class of German immigrants who had once leased the lands held by her family. Her estate sold nearly $100,000 worth of property—all lots on Wash, Biddle, Carr, Franklin and 14th-18th streets—off in the wake of her death. In doing so, she followed a trend of most of the “founding families” divesting from DeSoto-Carr. ¹⁵

The framework established by the “first families” of DeSoto-Carr adapted to the new demands of a low-wage, labor-intensive industrial economy. Due to its proximity to the railroads and to industrial jobs, DeSoto-Carr in particular gained a growing reputation as a “tenement district” for low-wage workers and a good investment for rental housing. Historian Neal Primm describes an “intrusion” of first “high-toned” and then “shabby” boarding houses into Carr Square during the 1890s. ¹⁶ Real estate and building transactions in DeSoto-Carr clearly demonstrate the growth of rental housing. The majority of transactions during the 1870s and 1980s were for the purchase or construction of one of two story single family brick houses. A one-story brick home at 22nd and Biddle Streets, for instance, was erected for $1600 in 1876. ¹⁷ From the 1890s onward, however, ads and real estate transactions recorded in the paper emphasized the area as a prime location for investment in rental housing. A typical listing of a neighborhood property in the 1890s often described a property as an “investment” and included the annual rental revenue in addition to the cost and features of the lots and buildings sold. In 1893, for instance, four two-story tenements located on the Northwest Corner of Nineteenth and Wash Streets were sold for $10,000 to John C. McCoy and Edwin Catlin, who hoped to rent them out for $1,000 a year. ¹⁸

By 1910, the neighborhood was largely in the hands of newer immigrant landowners and manufacturing concerns. Dr. William G. Swekosky, a dentist and amateur photographer and historian, documented this change in the built environment, tracking, through photos, how homes became businesses, factories, and tenements over time—and as their owners moved from Anglo to German to Eastern European-sounding names. Swekosky, coming into the neighborhood on the eve of its destruction, took pictures of the row houses built by German immigrants and the remains of the mansions built by the neighborhood’s founding families. The Dyer Mansion, built by Dorcas Carr’s daughter Cornelia and her husband Thomas Dyer, at 1011 N. 18th Street, became a bathhouse. Another row house on Carr Street became a chair manufacturing facility and then a Hebrew Free School. Others evolved into bakeries, shoe manufacturers, stores, and machine shops. ¹⁹

At least formally, the land tenure system remained largely the same structure as the neighborhood economy shifted toward low wage, unskilled jobs. Indeed, Charlotte Rumbold described it in detail in her pioneering 1907 survey of housing conditions in DeSoto-Carr, in which she tracked how small-time immigrant families were able to essentially enter the middle class by channeling their income into rental property. They could make up to 15 percent returns in rent per year through the leasehold system by passing on expenses for improvements, property taxes, sewer connections, and repairs to their lessees (who more often than not would, in turn, rent out the home on the lot to tenants). Many of the homeowners in the system had little incentive to hold on to their properties for long enough to make even the simplest repairs. Immigrant families could take out a large mortgage on a house with very little cash down and subsequently sell the house quickly for a small advance. As Rumbold, wrote, “some houses change hands three times in a year” and “no owner, of course, is willing to make repairs, except, perhaps, to add another layer of paper to some of the room walls.” ²⁰

The German families who followed in the footsteps of DeSoto-Carr’s “founding families” were able to climb to the middle class—and for some, even to the elite—by taking advantage of exactly the same system. German immigrants built community institutions and laid a claim to political power through land ownership. In 1900, when Carr Square was still majority German, St. Louis had a far higher rate of property ownership among immigrant families than natives or African Americans. Although they only made up 19.29 percent of the St. Louis population—110,966 out of a total 575,238 residents—in 1900, foreign-born homeowners nonetheless outnumbered native-born white homeowners in raw numbers (15,314 to 11,061). European immigrants, one surveyor found, were nearly twice as likely to own their own home as native-born whites and over six times more likely to own their home than black St. Louisans. About 31.04 percent of immigrant St. Louisans lived in a home either bought outright or mortgaged in 1900 compared with 17.53 percent of native whites and just 4.91 percent of African Americans. ²¹

Early German immigrants to the neighborhood clearly followed this pattern of high levels of property ownership. German immigrants channeled the capital they gained from property investment on the North Side into social and political capital. From the 1870s onward, Carr Square was home to an interconnected network of German institutions built, to a large extent, on revenue from real estate investment. Following the exchange of these lots demonstrates how German immigrants to St. Louis were able to build wealth and power. For instance, in 1886 six homes in the heart of DeSoto-Carr were bought for $18,000 as part of a package investment deal of North Side properties by real estate agent Benjamin von Phul. ²² von Phul’s investment in the property shows how German St. Louisans were able to grow inherited wealth through real estate investment. Benjamin von Phul was the son of Henry von Phul (1784-1874), one of nineteenth-century St. Louis’ most prominent merchants, Indian traders and investors. Henry was born into a German immigrant community in Pennsylvania and made a career for himself as a grocer and trader in Lexington, Kentucky, in the employ of Henry Clay’s son-in-law. Upon his arrival in St. Louis in 1811, von Phul established a general store of his own and grew a merchant empire through the river trade in slaves and merchant goods to the South. By the 1830s, von Phul had become St. Louis’ first millionaire and owned an interest in nearly every steamship that docked in the city. Through his wealth, von Phul became a prominent civic booster and a key means of attracting business and capital to St. Louis. He was one of the 24 merchants who founded the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce in 1836. Upon his death in 1874, he left his son Benjamin, one of nine children, a sizeable inheritance, which Ben, a Confederate veteran and frequent notable in the society pages, channeled into the real estate industry. ²³

von Phul, as a well-established merchant heir, was something of an exception in the neighborhood. August Hoffman, an enterprising young hardware store clerk and the son of a post-1848 Prussian immigrant, who purchased the six townhomes from von Phul in 1885, offers a particularly telling example of the ways in which property ownership helped German St. Louisans build cultural and political power and ascend to the middle and upper classes. Over the course of 25 years in the hardware business, Hoffman made frequent investments in North Side property just at the very moment it was growing in value as an immigrant housing district.

More than simply a merchant, Hoffman was considered a leader of the “real estate interests” on the North Side and his economic power clearly gave him considerable influence as a civic and political leader. He was a key stakeholder in Northwestern Bank, founded by German immigrants in 1873. He was also actively involved in the middle class-dominated cultural institutions of German St. Louis, such as the Turnverian society—St. Louis’ foremost German social society. He channeled his cultural and economic influence on the North Side into political power within the German-dominated, reformist St. Louis’ Republican Party. He was elected to a seat on the St. Louis City Council in 1898. ²⁴

His ascent to the top of the St. Louis business and political world also meant membership in groups like the Civic League. Indeed, in 1909, as a member of the Board of Freeholders and the St. Louis’ Civic League, he was a key driver in an effort pushed by St. Louis’ reformist elite to revise the city charter and eliminate the “corrupt” and “fragmented” influence of ward politics. He joined a host of other successful German St. Louisans in reform organizations. As social worker Lillian Brandt stated in 1905, “There is no German problem, though the Germans form a large part of our population, because they are already in line with American ideals before they come over, and quickly assimilated.” DeSoto-Carr’s change in landownership from older wealth like that of von Phul to newer wealth like that of Hoffman demonstrates the economic transactions behind the neighborhood change that contemporary observers saw only as demographic transition.

Tuberculosis and the Reform of the Rentier System

When the work of progressive reformers like Charlotte Rumbold exposed conditions in tenement districts like DeSoto-Carr, it was filtered through an elite reform community largely controlled by civic boosters and real estate men like August Hoffman; in other words, often the very same people who profited from the rentier system. Still, the advent of a large manufacturing sector in downtown St. Louis brought St. Louisans to recognize, for the first time, the possibility that the city might suffer from a “tenement problem” of its own. The rentier system needed to be remade. Tenement regulations were the first ambitious attempt to remake the private housing market for public health ends. Yet, by focusing on the housing market, and more specifically on one particular class of property owner—the immigrant landlord—tenement regulation largely served to uphold the needs of the civic elite.

Tuberculosis proved to be the first wedge in pushing for state action, because of its high prevalence in poor neighborhoods, the disease’s central place as part of national rallying cry for reform and most importantly, its association with the immigrant and black poor. In the spring of 1908, just months after Charlotte Rumbold published her major report uncovering the poor health conditions of St. Louis’ rising tenement districts, the St. Louis Municipal Assembly established the city’s first Municipal Commission on Tuberculosis. The Commission, consisting of nine members appointed from the medical and philanthropic communities, was tasked with addressing “the large mortality from pulmonary tuberculosis in St. Louis [which] demands that action be taken by the Municipal Assembly for the limitation of this disease.” Commissioners investigated the prevalence of the disease—tracking “active” cases as well as morbidity and mortality—and presented measures for the limitation of the disease. They found 6,825 reported deaths from tuberculosis in St. Louis between April 1, 1903, to April 1, 1908, accounting for 12.9 percent of all deaths in a five-year period. Over half of all deaths from the disease occurred within the area “east of Jefferson and from Arsenal to Palm streets” due, in their words, to “bad housing conditions, the large number of cheap lodging houses and the large negro population.” ²⁵

While most of their recommendations were related to the care of patients and the education of the public, ²⁶ the Commission also served as a springboard to farther reform of St. Louis’ housing conditions. The key to health, commissioners argued, was in the remaking of the social environment fostered by housing. In an introductory section laying out the broad outlines of their understanding of the disease, commissioners embraced the growing “soil-and-seed” consensus for the disease. They held that tuberculosis “is not an inherited disease . . . it is acquired, just as every other germ disease is acquired, by taking the bacilli into the system” but that “other conditions may favor it, such as poor living.” The most important task of the commission was to trace each death from pulmonary tuberculosis to an address within one of the city’s twelve sanitary districts, to determine the prevalence of disease in each neighborhood and create a list of “infected” residences (Figure 3). The three districts with the highest rates—the second, third and fourth districts—shared similar characteristics: a large number of rental rooming and boarding houses, a high population of foreigners and “negroes,” and a transient labor market. ²⁷

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Figure 3.

“King of the Ghetto,” Editorial Cartoon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 12, 1910. This cartoon, which accompanied an editorial urging a recalcitrant city Health Division to “clean house” and condemn unhealthy tenements, depicts tuberculosis as death itself reaping its “harvest” of souls from the tenement district. Cartoons like these reflected the belief of doctors and housing reformers that tuberculosis was not merely spread from one person to another but was a “house disease” or infection that could live outside the body in dark, damp places like the tenement house. “House infection” theory largely, although not exclusively, located the disease within ethnic “ghettos.”

This was hardly a new refrain. The commission itself grew out of earlier efforts to study the disease by the St. Louis Civic League and the St. Louis Society for the Prevention and Relief of Tuberculosis, a group made up of middle and upper class reformers devoted to pushing the city to invest in tuberculosis control. “Respectable” St. Louisans recoiled in horror at the idea that the city could have conditions that even came close to New York, Boston, or Chicago. Gradually, that denial gave way to qualified acceptance. Dr. Max Starkloff, St. Louis Commissioner of Health, summed up the approach most of St. Louis’ authorities took to tenement reform, when he wrote in that year’s annual report that “St. Louis will never, in all probability, become a victim to the tenement house evil to such an extent as other cities with less available and desirable space for building purposes.” Still, he advocated a tenement inspection ordinance modeled on New York’s 1901 law, noting the preponderance of old homes and factories being subdivided to create rentable space for wage earners, remarking that the very existence of unsanitary tenements is a “disgrace to the municipality.” ²⁸

At the heart of the tenement district was DeSoto-Carr. For municipal housing reformers, the neighborhood’s distance from the emerging ideal of a community of prosperous, single family homes explained much of its unhealthy environment. Indeed, the reformers essentially internalized the story of the neighborhood as one of a steady decline in the value, ownership, and use of property. In the most common framing of DeSoto-Carr’s “decline,” the changing character of landowners took as much blame as its shifting tenancy. Both poor health and racial demographics were priced into the properties.

The decline in the neighborhood’s perceived status—and the laying of the blame for decline on the shoulders of newer immigrants—coincided with the divestment of original property owners like the Carrs. While newer immigrants made money and built communities through investment in DeSoto-Carr, observers were far more prone to take note of its demographic shift and markedly changed their perceptions of the neighborhood as a result. Already, by 1887, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the neighborhood as “decadent.” Even then, its decline was heavily associated with the changing “racial” composition of the area. The land Judge William C Carr had first subdivided and platted in the early nineteenth century as “a fashionable center” was “succumbing” to the “growth of the Kerry Patch,” the Irish neighborhood established on land subdivided by the Mullanphy family to the North. Carr’s town house and the residences of other St. Louis socialites, “one by one were abandoned, until the residence of Gen. D.M. Frost is to-day the only relic of departed grandeur.” As one social worker reflected in 1940, the neighborhood’s residents changed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “from some of the wealthiest and most noted of St. Louis families through middle class tradesmen and businessmen to the poorest economic group of laborers, factory workers and families on relief,” a shift that, she added, accompanied a change in “nationality” “from German to Irish to Jewish to Italian to Negro.” ²⁹

In response to the changing nature of the neighborhood, St. Louis housing reform organizations like the Civic League pushed for regulations on the private housing market by exposing the most egregious offenders and agitating for government action. For outside observers, DeSoto-Carr was represented first and foremost as the “Ghetto,” a reference to its Eastern European (and largely Jewish) population. Both housing reformers and public health professionals agreed on the broad consensus that much of the city’s housing and social problem stemmed from a need to “elevate” the slum population “in cleanliness as well as in morals and politics.” Yet, in 1910, when the Health Commissioner refused to condemn old tenements in the “Ghetto” on the grounds that “it’s useless to try to change conditions in the slums without changing the ideas of people concerning cleanliness,” the Post-Dispatch vehemently dissented. The Post-Dispatch’s editors argued that the “essential work of education” does not “relieve society from the duty of protecting the ignorant and ill-trained from squalid and unhealthful conditions.” ³⁰

Some were condemned and demolished, if only to make a public example. R.J. Newton, the chair of the city’s Tuberculosis Commission and the head of the St. Louis Tuberculosis Society, conducted a concerted public campaign to place pressure on the Health Division and owners of “Lunger Buildings” across the city (Figure 4). The Tuberculosis Commission believed the buildings had been responsible for spreading the disease across town. Newton hoped to use selective demolition as an example to landowners across the city, particularly those who owned property in the crowded low-wage Central Sanitary District, which included the DeSoto-Carr “Lung Block.” Indeed, as the paper was quick to note, the commission and sanitary officers had identified a host of other “Lunger” buildings across the city. ³¹

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Figure 4.

“Exterior and Interior of Lunger Building: Where Tenants Paid Rent with Their Lives,” in “House in Which Scores Died of Plague, Razed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 9, 1910. “Lunger Buildings” were the clearest and most potent example of the “Lung Block” and often served as political rallying cries for reformers. This particular building was believed to be responsible for countless deaths. Reformers found that many of these buildings were owned by large corporations that had ceased to make repairs on or collect rent from tenants. This building—which housed 69 black adult workers—was owned by the John Deere corporation.

“Lunger Buildings” were the most vivid public representation of the wider public problem of the Lung Block. Their heavy concentration in neighborhoods just North of Downtown, like DeSoto-Carr, only made them all the more threatening as plague spots. Dr. B.S. Warren, superintendent of the U.S. Marine Hospital, consulted with the Tuberculosis Commission in 1910 and declared an area between Carr and Wash Streets and Eighth and Ninth, in the heart of DeSoto-Carr, to be the “Worst Spot on Earth.” The district had claimed a deadly harvest of “1240 deaths from consumption.” The homes were considered unfixable. “Many of the rooms in those rickety old buildings have not seen the light of day since they were built,” Dr. Warren told the Post-Dispatch reporter, “These dark rooms, under filthy conditions, are the best breeding places for tuberculosis germs imaginable.” Building and health regulations alone were not enough, as “they cannot be healthful habitations if they contain rooms which do not open into the light.” ³²

New York’s tenement law, however, provided the model for a way forward. Prior to 1912, St. Louis had no tenement laws. As one observer put it, “there is no effort made by the Building Department to govern the Old Tenements of the city unless they become so dangerous that it is necessary to condemn them as nuisances.” Nothing guided tenement owners beyond the basic demands of the profit margin. St. Louis’ 1912 tenement law put New York–style regulations in place on St. Louis housing for the first time. The relatively modest law required running water on every floor of every tenement, lighted and clean hallways free of garbage and banned fruits, vegetables, rags, and junk from being stored in a tenement house, an attempt to cut down on piece work and unregulated bakeries in the tenement district. It also banned cellar flats and required 500 cubic feet of airspace for every adult and 350 cubic feet for every child, in order to reduce the number of lodgers and prevent “overcrowding and immorality.” ³³

To be sure, landlords—particularly the small-time landlords most frequently targeted by housing legislation—resisted strenuously. Due in part to their outsize influence in St. Louis’ archaic ward system of government, property owners consistently exercised effective veto power over most housing regulation. ³⁴ In 1909, aldermen brought forward a series of bills designed to eliminate privy vaults, require the lighting of hallways, establish minimum air space per tenant, limit the maximum number of non-family lodgers allowed per room and ensure running water and bathing facilities in tenement houses. Property owners expressed fierce resistance almost immediately. In November 1909, a literal “mob” of twenty owners—blamed by reformers on the Real Estate Exchange—descended upon a hearing on a bill to require elimination of all privy vaults in sewered districts within five years, a long-term goal of Health Commissioner Max Starkloff. The paper described “a howl of protest” as landlords “crowded around the committee table yelling and shaking their fists.” The scene grew so chaotic that the Chairman of the Sanitary Committee was forced to turn out the lights and leave, prompting the crowd to storm the mayor’s office. The situation was only defused when the police were called. ³⁵

While they may have failed to win the battle of public opinion, landlords exerted an outsized influence in the capacity and the decisions of the Health Division itself, up to and including going so far as getting the Board of Alderman to defund the tenement inspection laws, making them effectively toothless. Often, they redirected rage over sanitary conditions on to tenants themselves. They found a health department all too willing to cooperate with them. In a 1910 article, owners of a group of DeSoto-Carr tenements declared to be a “harvest” ground for tuberculosis and fundamentally incapable of “healthful habitation” under any circumstances, declared that the buildings were “in good condition and sanitary.” Dr. A.G. Jordan, the assistant health commissioner, agreed with the owners of the building and laid blame on the tenants “for a large part of the uncleanliness.” The tenants, he argued, needed to be “compelled to observe sanitary rules by prosecution in the police court” as “the conditions cannot be changed without changing entirely the ideas of the tenants regarding cleanliness.” ³⁶ Even after the 1912 Tenement Law came into effect, the Board of Alderman effectively undermined the bill by consistently underfunding the tenement inspection unit, granting them only enough funds to hire a single inspector. A bill to make up for the lack of revenue by charging a one dollar licensing fee to proprietors of lodging houses and owners of tenements failed to gain any traction. ³⁷

Even when required by law, landlords also frequently opposed making meaningful capital investment in their properties and were not afraid to go to court to fight them. In 1913, for instance, a portion of the tenement house law requiring running water on every floor was struck down by a municipal judge on the grounds that it placed an undue burden on property owners. ³⁸ Sewer assessments proved to be a particularly strong source of opposition, as the 1909 law calling for the elimination of privy vaults was unusually robust. Sewer connections were often listed as selling points in housing ads, adding value and offering justification to raise the rent. For some landlords, however, paying the fee could mean pricing their renters out of the property. ³⁹ The National Housing Association reported in 1914 that St. Louis had 20,000 privy vaults remaining, in spite of all the Health Division’s efforts to eliminate them. Eighty percent of the vaults existed on streets with access to sewers, meaning landlords refused to pay hookup fees. North St. Louis, where Charlotte Rumbold had found few flush toilets outside of saloons, had a particularly high concentration of unsewered properties. ⁴⁰ By far the highest number of cases brought to the municipal courts by the Health Division dealt with the Privy vault ordinance passed in 1909 and hamstrung, much to the consternation of Commissioner Starkloff, by the Board of Alderman. ⁴¹ It took two court cases to finally uphold the privy vault abatement ordinance, City of St. Louis vs. Nash in 1924 and City of St. Louis vs. Hoevel Real Estate Company in 1933. In a 1921 article, “Why We Have Slums,” Commissioner Starkloff lamented the “impossible task” of “enforcing the health laws in relation to housing with but one inspector.” He noted that court cases for eliminating privy vaults typically turned into ordeals lasting up to six months. One, over a three story privy vault, required the Health Division to appeal, at great cost, to the Missouri Supreme Court. ⁴²

While papers and surveys focused on newer immigrant landowners who made up an increasing proportion of landlords in DeSoto-Carr, some of St. Louis most powerful civic leaders continued to reap profits from investment in the neighborhood. There was considerable truth to housing reformer Lawrence Veiller’s assertion that much of St. Louis’ housing woes came from the fact that many landlords were “conservative citizens” who did not “live under the stench” arising from privy vaults, but instead lived in the well-kept homes of the West End. On his visit to St. Louis in 1915, he warned of an organized body of wealthy landlords making a “plea that they cannot afford to destroy the vaults and equip their tenements with sanitary, indoor plumbing.” ⁴³

Many of St. Louis’ civic leaders profited from investments in tenement housing. Nicholas M. Bell, a power player in St. Louis Democratic politics and a prominent civic booster, was found to be the owner of some of the absolute worst tenements during an investigation in 1910. Bell was a tobacco merchant. He managed the prosperous Peper Tobacco Warehouse Co. on behalf of his father in law, famed St. Louis Tobacco merchant Christian Peper. He channeled his business acumen into politics, culminating in a tenure as the city excise commissioner and as a member of the city’s 1904 World’s Fair Committee. ⁴⁴ In spite of his reputation as “a man of remarkable presence, of high moral character, and of the best social position,” ⁴⁵ the block of tenements he collected rent on at 1104-1106 N. 10th Street was described by one doctor as “almost past belief.” Yet Bell insisted to the paper that, “his tenements were renovated every spring and kept in a sanitary condition at all times” and that “22 children had been raised to adulthood in those tenements, as healthy as any in St. Louis.” No doubt in part due to his political influence, he escaped additional scrutiny. ⁴⁶

Effectively, then, tenement regulation laws passed with the approval of St. Louis’ most powerful landowners and businessmen. The St. Louis business community joined closely with the St. Louis Civic League and the Health Division in enforcing tenement regulations and housing ordinances. No law made it through the Municipal Assembly without the support of vital groups like the Real Estate Exchange. Landlords exerted their most long-lasting and profound influence on the laws themselves, all of which were crafted as a compromise between the St. Louis Civic League and the Real Estate Exchange. In spite of the passage of the 1909 bill to eliminate all privy vaults within sewered districts, the Board of Alderman stalled in passing meaningful tenement regulation for over five years following Charlotte Rumbold’s landmark 1907 housing survey. When it finally did in 1912, it was only through close cooperation with the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, which reached an agreement with the St. Louis Civic League on the language of a bill only after public pressure had become too great to avoid passing the bill. ⁴⁷

Labor, Migration, and the Decline of the Rentier System

By identifying the source of poor health in housing alone, tenement reform appealed to the business elite in part because it offered a technical fix to a broad social problem. More importantly housing reform overlooked the critical role of employers in shaping the environment of DeSoto-Carr. St. Louis Health Commissioner Max Starkloff himself seemed eager to avoid the discussion when he submitted a preliminary tenement house inspection ordinance to the municipal assembly in 1906, writing that the question of whether tenement dwellers lived in unhealthy environments “by choice or by necessity” was irrelevant. The “tenement house population” he wrote,

are with us now, and will always be here, and it is necessary, not only for their welfare but for the protection of the people at large that the dwelling places they occupy . . . be subject to wise and stringent sanity regulations. ⁴⁸

Migration and underemployment were facts of life in the tenement district. Tenement reform, however, assumed that the industrial wage labor population maintained a constant residence in a property with an owner who could be easily identified and held accountable. In the fluctuating and often seasonal economy of St. Louis’ industries, many workers resorted to other means of housing. The laws had only indirectly confronted the health and housing difficulties associated with transient labor. In 1910, the Municipal Tuberculosis Commission blamed much of the high tuberculosis rate on a fluctuating population of “hobos” and unskilled labor drawn to St. Louis in search of seasonal employment. The seasonal and transient labor market in St. Louis brought large numbers of workers into the city, particularly during the winter months when jobs in industries like railway construction were slack. Social worker Ruth Crawford wrote of “a transient army of single men” of all nationalities hired by local iron and steel foundries for short-term labor and of the annual in-migration of Albanian, Romanian, Polish, and Italian agricultural workers into the city during the winter off-season. Few jobs, she stressed, offered year-round, stable employment. ⁴⁹

A lurid article published in the June of 1910 decried “THE MENACE OF THE LODGING HOUSE!” The article, a special report published in collaboration with the Municipal Tuberculosis Commission, warned that St. Louis had a “greater non-descript transient population than any other American city” consisting of “hobos, countless foreigners, mostly from the South of Europe and a vast number of vagrant men who are divided in class between the common tramp, the beggar and the petty thief.” All mixed within the fetid walls of the Lodging House, “spreading through the city the germs of the Great White Plague.” ⁵⁰

By 1910, as North St. Louis became a valued location for railroad and shipping companies, neighborhoods like DeSoto-Carr gained a reputation for flophouses and cheap lodging houses. While the flophouse had always been a feature of lurid and scandalous accounts of St. Louis’ underworld dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, the sheer number of these buildings—and the floating population they served—expanded exponentially in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. Dr. George Mangold, a Washington University social worker, examined no fewer than 100 boarding and lodging houses in central and North St. Louis in 1910. Collectively, they housed as many as 6,478 people for between a nickel and a quarter a night. He found inadequate ventilation, shared beds and severe crowding; in 60 percent of lodging houses each resident had less than 300 cubic feet of airspace. Nearly all, like the buildings of Carr Square, were converted out of older homes. His solutions were not dissimilar from the tenement regulation bill. He called for a licensing system, fumigation, and stricter requirements for fire safety, sewage, and linens. ⁵¹

Even more damning than the lodging house, however, were the many forms of informal housing occupied by unskilled workers. These were not merely a function of economic emergencies—like St. Louis infamous Hooverville along the river during the Great Depression—but a permanent fixture of the urban landscape. The lack of an accountable owner rendered them essentially invisible to the new tenement laws. Charlotte Rumbold found more than a few examples of “shanty” housing in her 1907 survey. Many of the houses she surveyed were abandoned and occupied by squatters, including more than a few sheds where workers lodged together. Rumbold found an abundance of property held by mercantile associations, corporations, and various estates either leased away or left open to squatters as owners awaited the opportunity to sell the land to manufacturing concerns or railroads. ⁵² As the infamous “Lunger Building” owned by the John Deere Company and singled out by the Tuberculosis Commission in 1910 shows, many of the buildings once owned by major manufacturers were taken over by squatters once they had ceased to be economically useful to their owners.

These spaces, outside and apart from the formal market relationships tenement reformers hoped to impose upon their inhabitants, were nonetheless a vital part of the evolving political economy—and landscape—of industrial capitalism. ⁵³ On the one hand, by harboring large numbers of workers at no cost, they served as a haven for underpaid workers unable to pay a steady rent. Most squatters were stuck in a pattern of underemployment, serving as a ready pool of unskilled labor to be hired and fired at will or, in some cases, even as a rural population of agricultural workers which decamped regularly to St. Louis to spend the winter. ⁵⁴

The transience and unstable employment conditions faced by immigrants were even more prevalent among black migrants. Even in the years leading up to the major migration of black workers to St. Louis in the 1910s and 1920s, black workers were far more likely to be relegated to lodging houses, shanties and other forms of transient, informal housing due to lower wages and less job security. Until well into the twentieth century, St. Louis followed the demographic patterns typical of Southern cities. A marked increase in segregation did occur in last decades of the nineteenth century, as the white population began to move westward. In 1890, 39 percent of the black population lived in five wards extending from Union Station to the Mississippi River, an area which contained just 15 percent of the white population. By 1900, 49 percent of the black population lived in the same area, six wards containing just 14 percent of the white population. In 1900, the black population, hovering around six percent of the total population at the turn of the century, lived in relatively close proximity to whites compared with later years. The district with the highest concentration—Ward 14, the heart of Mill Creek Valley just South of DeSoto-Carr—topped out at just 22.70 percent black. While almost the entire DeSoto-Carr area was inhabited by German, Irish and a few Eastern European immigrants in 1900, about 21 percent of the population was black and Sanborn maps of the neighborhood marked some wooden tenements—interspersed with the sturdy brick homes that made up most of the block—as “negro tenements.” ⁵⁵

“Informal” housing provided a refuge for black workers squeezed by low wages and a racialized labor market and eager to create autonomous communities of their own. Many of the “lunger” buildings tracked by the Tuberculosis Society were home to black workers, whom reformers often depicted as a “floating” population moving from rookery to rookery as police evicted them. Ninety-five percent of black St. Louisans were engaged in unskilled labor or domestic service in 1897 and most were excluded entirely from the skilled trades. As early as the 1890s, black tenements and “hotels” gained a notorious reputation for their poor conditions and the air of danger surrounding them. Black workers were generally concentrated in the “worst houses of the worst sections, wherever the natural lie of the land or unpleasant accessories of civilization, such as railroads and factories, make residence undesirable.” ⁵⁶ Often, as Social Worker Lillian Brandt noted, they were squeezed from both sides, as the transition of a tenement to a “Negro Tenement” meant a marked increase in rents to make up for a perceived decrease in property values. Many of the markings of the “lung block”—the taking of lodgers, “overcrowding” and piecework, squatting in abandoned buildings—were consequently necessary economic practices for black tenants, as were other forms of social organization often frowned upon like insurance and workers compensation societies. Family units, reformers noted with disapproval, were unconventional by necessity. An agent of the Provident Association even found 14 people living in one room in one such tenement in 1900, a consequence of “their willingness to take in any friend who finds himself without a home.” ⁵⁷

More than just a subsidy to employers who did not pay a living wage, however, “lunger buildings,” shanties, and other “informal” spaces could also serve as spaces of autonomy and resistance, in spite of reformers’ attempt to pathologize them. This was especially the case for black St. Louisans eager to claim spaces of their own within the city, away from the prying eyes of white employers. Residents of a riverside “Negro Village” profiled by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1888 celebrated their ability to govern themselves and had created a number of elected office and communal buildings—including a church—separate and apart from white society (Figure 5). ⁵⁸ Often it was that very autonomy and freedom that proved most threatening to reformers. The North side was the setting of numerous court and police battles between property owners and black tenants between the 1880s and the 1930s. The police, with the encouragement of reformers eager to regulate spaces they deemed dangerous and pathological, launched frequent raids on “squatter” communities, often dramatically destroying self-built homes right before their owners’ eyes. Although tenants frequently asserted their rights to property, often testifying to the “improvements” they had made to the land, courts and police typically sided against them. In a “pathetic spectacle” one cold November night in 1904, the city surveyor watched as nine families—protesting and refusing to leave their homes until police started physically tearing them down—dragged their household effects and “tearfully watched the destruction of their homes.” ⁵⁹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

“A Negro Village,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1888. Residents of a riverside “Negro Village” profiled by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1888 celebrated their ability to govern themselves. They created a number of elected offices and communal buildings—including a church—separate and apart from white society. Self-built, informal housing was particularly common along St. Louis’ riverfront, which hosted many such communities between the 1880s and 1930s. Shantytowns were frequently targeted for police raids encouraged by reformers and property owners eager to gain control over the urban landscape.

The conditions faced by migrant and transient workers were in part a result of the collapse of the rentier system itself. By the late 1910s and especially by the 1920s, it had become clear that property owners in DeSoto-Carr were seeing declining returns on their investments and facing the threat of falling land values. High smoke levels, newer properties on St. Louis’ edges, and a growing class of economically unstable migrant renters all threatened to hit the bottom line of Carr Square property owners. The alarm had been raised by the City Plan Commission in its earliest reports. In a 1918 pamphlet advocating for zoning in St. Louis, city planner Harland Bartholomew pointed out the urgency of stabilizing unstable and declining property values in the urban core, writing that regulating land use was necessary for continued growth because, “there is a limit to the intensive use of land beyond which values must decline” and St. Louis was paying the price for unrestricted land use not just economically but in the “prisons, hospitals and asylums [that] are filled with people who are largely the victims of a wholly unfortunate but preventable environment.” ⁶⁰

Newer generations of Carr Square property owners and lessees—largely Russian Jewish—were in a much more economically tenuous position than the German immigrants who preceded them, making them, perhaps, a much easier target for reformers. Much like their own tenants, who often took roomers, these landlords turned to property ownership or running boarding houses as a means of supplementing low and often unreliable wages. Many even entered into clandestine relationships with labor contractors, directing their tenants to exploitative employers or opened fraudulent, unlicensed “employment agencies” to graft money from unsuspecting immigrants. Social worker Ruth Crawford uncovered a vast network of exploitation based in lodging houses and saloons—often run by the same person—whereby a boarding house or saloon keeper would direct a newly arrived immigrant to a job at a factory in exchange for money. The factory foreman, in on the con and the take, would hire the immigrant for a short period of time and then fire him unexpectedly, starting the process over again on another mark. ⁶¹

The problem of labor exploitation was intrinsically linked to the increasingly unskilled and low-wage status of North St. Louis immigrants. Crawford connected the fate of immigrant landowners to a labor market that was founded as much in racial hierarchy as the emerging property market. She noted that the shifting demographic makeup of immigrant neighborhoods reflected the ethnic hiring practices of St. Louis’ industrialists. This was true across St. Louis’ famously diversified industries. Steel and iron foundry workers, for instance, were continually displaced by successive waves of immigrants and then by black Southern migrants, whom employers used as “a club over dissatisfied workers” because they could be hired for low wages. She also describes a racial hierarchy of jobs—even among unskilled laborers—in St. Louis’ large brickmaking industry. “White labor,” particularly Southern Europeans, staffed the brickmaking machines, to the exclusion of black workers. The head of one brickmaking firm defended his hiring practices by pointing to the racial characteristics that make different racial groups suited to different tasks,

It is our experience that the Huns and the Poles are more efficient for heavy work than the other nationalities; the Jew is best fitted for keeping stock, or in any work with merchandising tendencies; the Italian . . . where quickness is essential; the Germans and the English are most efficient when accuracy is called for, as in delicate tool work.

Effectively, the employer laid out a racial hierarchy of labor that reinforced the existing class divide between “old stock” and “new stock” immigrants: Southern and Eastern Europeans in low-skill, heavy labor, and Western and Northern Europeans in higher, more skilled positions. ⁶²

The Kaplo brothers, a pair of Russian Jewish shoemakers, offer an illustrative example of the challenges faced by the second generation of Carr Square landowners and boarding house keepers as the industrial market shifted to a more cyclical, less-skilled labor pool and land values began to decline. Only a few years before he was listed in the Civic League’s 1907 yearbook, Garfield Hall, a German realty company linked to Frederick Hoffman’s bank, sold off the six townhomes on Selby and N. 16th Street to Russian Jewish immigrants. On September 6, 1903, Bernard and Henry Kaplo purchased the six homes on lots five and six of Block 550 from the Garfield Hall Realty Company for 13,500 in cash (notably, significantly less than Hoffman had paid for them). They hoped to rent the properties—by this point subdivided into 18 different flats of eight rooms each—as an investment for $2,160 a year. ⁶³ Plat maps and real estate transaction records show that the Kaplos bought and sold flats and storefronts at nearby 1631-35 Wash Street as well. ⁶⁴ The Kaplo brothers had come to America in 1880. They ran a shoe company together in New York City, although by 1900 Bernard Kaplo, then 37, and his wife Rachel lived in St. Louis, presumably above their shoe store on Franklin Ave, which at the time was the North Side’s biggest commercial district.^65,66 In 1920, no fewer than ten lodging and houses dotted the landscape in blocks immediately surrounding Carr Square, with six more just south of the area in the commercial strip on Franklin Avenue. ⁶⁷

For many of the second wave of immigrant newcomers to DeSoto-Carr property was more a burden than a benefit. This is perhaps evidenced by the quick and frequent turnover of property between and among family members. It was not uncommon for husbands to transfer properties to their wives to shield property from debtors. ⁶⁸ The kinds of capital investments made by earlier property owners were often out of reach or made by tenants themselves. In 1920, a survey of twenty homes conducted by the State Negro Industrial Commission found few tangible amenities in the average tenement between Grand Avenue and Carr Square. Twenty-five percent of buildings lacked gas or electricity, 50 percent had only gas, and 25 percent had both. Only 14 percent had access to hot water and bathing and in 15 percent of homes tenants paid for their own water hookups. In spite of this, 127 people lived within the homes inhabiting just 147 rooms, paying an average rent of $35.47 per family. ⁶⁹

Perhaps the most glaring indication of declining return on property in Carr Square, however, was the substantial drop off in building permits issued in the district and the increase in vacant and condemned housing. This was noticed as early as the late 1910s, when the City Plan Commission, confronted with a post-WWI housing shortage, raised the alarm over the lack of new housing startups east of Grand Avenue. ⁷⁰ While surveyors, social workers, and reformers often commented on individual instances of overcrowding in DeSoto-Carr it was not, in a conventional sense, “overcrowded.” Like much of the core of the city, the population of DeSoto-Carr consistently declined between 1910 and 1940, hitting 14,874 in the wider census tract in the 1940 census. ⁷¹ Nonetheless, it harbored pockets of crowded tenements surrounded by abandoned buildings, and, as one social worker would later note in 1940, many flats were crowded because some of the rooms within them were structurally unsafe. ⁷² Only one new building was constructed in DeSoto-Carr between 1914 and the destruction of the heart of the neighborhood in 1940. Eighty-five percent of buildings were built between 1860 and 1885, the era when the Carr family still owned a substantial portion of the neighborhood. ⁷³ By contrast, a wave of buildings was abandoned as property values fell and owners neglected to pay taxes. Over half of the property owners in DeSoto-Carr were delinquent on taxes in 1934, some for as long as five years. ⁷⁴

Reviving the Rentier System: Progressive Reformers and the Trope of the Immigrant Landlord

By condemning the most egregious examples of unregulated housing, reformers set out to foster an ethic of healthfulness that encompassed owners and landlords as well as tenants. In essence, they sought to manipulate the private market to public ends by reinvigorating the fraying landlord-tenant relationship. Progressives did not so much fail to see the crisis to the urban housing market brought on by low-wage, unskilled labor so much as consciously dismiss it. They acknowledged that little could be done for this class of workers, who were considered beyond the help of the market. The St. Louis Tenement Association conceded in 1907 that its model tenement program was “meant primarily for those a grade above the poorest in the Ghetto.” It was practically impossible to house the poorest of the poor for less than a dollar a week in rent. By helping the semi-skilled laborer in a more permanent job secure housing they believed they could “relieve the congested conditions” in existing housing. ⁷⁵

In practice, this meant a paternalistic approach to reform in which small-time landlords took on much of the blame for a decline in conditions rooted in the labor market. The city needed, as the Civic League put it, to awaken a spirit of “civic consciousness” and of a “rescued home.” “Instead of seeking a way to mold houses cheaply, we need to discover a method of molding good landlords” one speaker stated at a meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections held in St. Louis in 1910. ⁷⁶ Like their counterparts in the professionalizing—and increasingly distinct—field of public health, they believed that regulations and even police court prosecution could play a major role in modeling proper behavior to landlords. The Tuberculosis Commission argued for the “wholesome influence of clean, well-ventilated, lighted and comfortable homes and of pleasant surroundings.” Not only would cleaning up the congested district elevate its inhabitants morally and physically, it would also create “potent educational surroundings” to teach tenant and landlord alike the American standard of living. ⁷⁷

The city attempted to become a model landlord with its own properties, fully adopting the argument of Progressive reformers that health could be purchased with the right design and for the right price. The city of St. Louis served as a trustee landlord for a series of tenements along O’Fallon Avenue, just north of the Carr Square neighborhood in the heart of the old Irish “Kerry Patch” district. The tenements were run by the city on behalf of the Mullanphy Emigrant Relief Fund, set up by the Mullanphy family to serve as assistance for migrants coming to or through St. Louis and St. Louis’ oldest nonprofit organization. The city served as landlord to some 200 families and collected $40,000 a year from them. The Mullanphy Emigrant Aid Society board mapped out a program to improve the tenements by providing them with electric lighting, bathrooms, concrete paving, steel stairways and porches and bathtubs. The society set out to show that modern conveniences could bring higher rent revenues and to challenge myths that they felt prevented landlords from installing modern fixtures like bathtubs, including the pervasive myth that housewives would use the tubs for coal bins. While they did little to change the conditions of the surrounding district, the city was lauded for modeling what it meant to be a “good” landlord to private investors and for dispelling the excuses many believed landlords used to avoid making investments in property. ⁷⁸

While the Tuberculosis Commission sought to hold landlords and major corporate landowners accountable, the message taken away by the public held out tenants—particularly black and immigrant tenants—as the real threat. It was taken for granted that workers themselves, as a transient population unbound by family, community, or even American identity, posed a threat to the health and safety of the community. This was the case for immigrant workers and black workers alike. As Lillian Brandt wrote, “it is impossible to not sympathize with landlords and residents [who wanted black tenants out of their buildings] when one considers the undesirability of the average Negro as tenant or neighbor.” “Negroes” and the “much inferior class of whites” brought “consumption . . . negligence, ignorance, and poverty,” whether or not it was their fault. ⁷⁹

Housing reformers frequently viewed landlords as essentially part of the one-in-the-same social ill as tenants. It was not the large companies which owned some of DeSoto-Carr’s buildings or employed its large population of transient workers but the small-time landlords and boarding house owners—central to upholding DeSoto-Carr’s transient labor economy—who took much of the blame. The property-focused model of health reform promoted by progressive reformers was racialized from the start. Immigrant landlords were labeled “penurious” and “mean-spirited,” a threat to not just their tenants but to the city at large. ⁸⁰

Instead of refocusing efforts on a shifting economy undermining the social contract between landlord and tenant, reformers made the landlord himself into a potent political symbol. The immigrant landlord in particular—like his counterparts in ward politics—was the primary target of middle and upper class reform organizations like the St. Louis Civic League; he became a clearly recognizable social trope. Perhaps the greatest rallying call for reform in the first two decades of the twentieth century was fear of political and social “ghettoization” among the city’s immigrant class. Although St. Louis had a somewhat lower proportion of foreign-born Americans than most other major American cities by the early twentieth century, it contained a substantial population of Eastern and Southern Europeans, particularly Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Jews, and Italians. ⁸¹ The St. Louis Chamber of Commerce put it bluntly in 1918, linking the problem of Americanizing “foreign colonies” to “education, housing, sanitation and congestion.” The slum, the Chamber insisted, is “not a charity proposition; it is a question of Americanization, in its highest form.” ⁸²

The landlord was often depicted as not simply greedy, but as a dishonest and coercive huckster out to take advantage of his or her fellow countrymen from the minute they arrived in the city. Social worker Ruth Crawford frequently relied upon the trope of the unscrupulous immigrant landlord and the naive, unknowing immigrant. Crawford described one boarding house keeper who “made it a definite policy to keep the men in debt” in an adjoining saloon and grocery store he ran “so that he might have influence when the chance came for directing them into channels of labor.” Indeed, Crawford wrote, the “greed of landlord and the neglect of municipal government” served as not merely a risk to health but a hindrance to the establishment of “American” values by foreign laborers. ⁸³ To get around this persistent problem, the Chamber of Commerce even started a program to enlist young volunteers in a “vigilante” squad to bring violations of sanitary ordinances to the proper city authorities, believing that by doing so they could educate slum-dwelling children in the “rights of citizens” and work around the pressures often placed on tenants by recalcitrant and criminal landlords. ⁸⁴

The decline of the rentier system, however, did not, in practice, mean a decline in the social value and use of property itself. While landlord and tenant served as useful foils for neighborhood conditions, alternative forms of housing and sociality continued to persist outside of the market relationships reformers hoped to regulate and, at times, impose through police power and forced eviction. When Urban League social worker James Parker visited one such “squatter” settlement on the North St. Louis riverfront in 1934, he found a well-established multiracial community of twenty-one families, all living in self-built homes of two-to-four rooms on ground nominally owned by a railroad company—some for as long as twenty years. “Everybody in the vicinity was well and seem to keep well” he noted. Unlike many North St. Louis residents, families in this area had no need for any relief as “the people there are able to have hogs, chickens, ducks, geese . . . some few having a garden where vegetables are raised.” One young man encountered by Parker, when asked, “Why do these people pick such a vicinity to live in? Is it that they can’t do any better?” responded incredulously and rejected the very premise of the question. “Man, whut you talking ‘bout . . . I live here cause I want. I got something heah that you can’t have in town” he replied, pointing out that “everybody out here has an automobile” and was able to provide for his family. ⁸⁵ Only the power of the New Deal state, mobilized to clear the riverfront in 1935 to make way for what would eventually become the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, would ultimately “clear” these communities and achieve the control over the urban landscape that reformers could not.

Conclusion: The Final Failure of Model Landlordship

Through paternalistic model tenement projects, housing regulation, and other property-based efforts to improve health conditions in North St. Louis, Progressive reformers recast a problem fundamentally rooted in St. Louis’ shifting industrial labor market as a problem of housing. Early tenement reformers failed to solve the central problem of how to house low-wage, unskilled laborers factors leading to poor health in neighborhoods like DeSoto-Carr, a problem which accelerated as St. Louis developed a cyclical, transient labor and many St. Louisans turned to informal and temporary cheap housing. The once-powerful “rentier system” they took on was, by as early as 1910, in clear decline. Moreover, by holding up its most public face—the maligned and often caricatured small-time immigrant landlord—as the key driver of the city’s health problems, tenement reformers encouraged a widespread public view that demographic change in itself was the key driver of urban decline rather than shifting land and labor markets. This demographic theory of urban change would, by the late 1910s, be taken up as a central assumption of professional urban planners and one of the most potent justifications for racial segregation. Centering a cyclical, low-wage industrial labor market as a catalyst for urban change in DeSoto-Carr not only offers an important corrective to this viewpoint, but calls attention to the importance of temporary and informal forms of housing to the early-twentieth-century city.