Downtown Foundations

I haven't worked on the house much lately -- it's been too cold outside to do much out there, and inside, I've done a lot of unremarkable, miscellaneous odds and ends.

But I did get to see an old foundation while I was downtown last weekend, which I always kind of nerd out over. 

I was downtown last Saturday to run in the annual St. Patrick's Day 5-mile run, which one of my brothers and I have participated in for quite a few years. He cooked me this year (I got him last year), but for an old guy like myself, I did OK -- 5th out of 84 in my age group. 

After the run, which was a complete struggle, and a couple post-run drinks, which were not a complete struggle, I walked back to my truck, which I'd parked over by 10th and Olive. While walking past the Wainwright Building, I noticed a bunch of holes in the sidewalk. 

Let's put that thought on hold and go back to 2002. That summer, I had an internship with the city's Planning and Urban Design Agency, which was located at 1015 Locust. Interns didn't get any kind of parking privileges, so we all had to park wherever we could. 

Parking downtown isn't free, and for an intern, it certainly wasn't cheap. I wound up parking in a surface lot around 14th and Washington every day, which cost me $3.75/wk.

I didn't mind the walk or the scenery, or having to leave my truck in a surface lot every day. And, parking there allowed me to walk through the first phase of very active loft construction along Washington Avenue. 

At that time, the mostly vacant buildings in what was once known as the garment district were undergoing a conversion to residential lofts. As part of the construction, the streets had to be torn up to rework utilities to those buildings. In several spots, this offered an opportunity to see the street cross section and all the layers of street that had come before the modern asphalt, including the brick and cobblestone streets, as well as old street car tracks. 

So now, anytime I'm downtown and there's a hole in the ground, I check it out to see if there's anything interesting buried under the surface. 

It's hard to say what this old foundation was a part of. The 1876 map shows a small, 2-story building in the area of the foundation in question:

This building was replaced in the 1890s by the DeMinel Building, which was built shortly after construction of it's famous neighbor, the Wainwright Building. Here's the DeMinel Building, front and center (Wainwright is just behind it, to the left):

The foundation I saw was, approximately, here, just north of the alley between the two buildings:

The DeMinel Building was torn down in 1976 and replaced by some low-rise garbage. 

It's hard to say which building that foundation may have been a part of, but in either case, I got to see something that probably hasn't been seen too many times since the 19th century. It's just some old limestone and mortar, but still a pretty neat find for a civil engineer that has a strong fascination with St. Louis history.