Welcome To Compton Heights

8/2/2024

On Instagram, I do this #52weeksofhome thing, which is participated in by mostly owners and rehabbers of old houses, where each week there's a new "theme" and everybody is supposed to post pics per said theme. This week's theme is "take a walk", meaning "show us your neighborhood (or street, or city, etc.)".

As somebody whose first professional career stop was the city planning field, I nerd out on this kind of stuff. But Instagram only limits posts to 10 pics, so what I could share was a little bit limited. Luckily...I've got this blog thing where I can kinda do whatever the hell I want; here are some more pics (I'll try, and probably fail, to keep the words to a minimum).

Let's start back in 1876, when what's now Compton Heights was still considered "the country". The current neighborhood boundary is represented, more or less, by the yellow line but until Interstate 44 came through, the neighborhood extended all the way to Lafayette Avenue in the upper righthand corner of the pic below.

Compton & Dry Map, 1876 (present neighborhood boundary shown in yellow)

Almost none of the structures shown in the above image still stand today. My house, built in 1878, juuuuust missed inclusion in the map.

Moving ahead to 1883, due to rapid expansion of St. Louis, the area had been platted and made ready for conventional urban development. If you know where to look, you can see my little house in the map below.

Atlas of the City of St. Louis, Missouri, 1883

Back then, the central business district (aka "downtown") was a pretty dirty place, as were all urban cores of that era. There weren't a whole lot of rules regarding any kind of waste, pollution, or land use; in the densely populated city centers, this created a lot of situations people - of means, usually - wanted to get away from.

Enter Julius Pitzman, a surveyor and city planner known, historically, for the development of private, gated neighborhoods and streets in St. Louis. He saw an opportunity to improve upon his previous upscale developments, many of which still exist today, and he dreamt up the development - "Compton Heights" - shown below.

Plan of Compton Heights, 1893

Today, in zoning terms, we'd call something like this "large-lot single-family residential". Pitzman's development was ahead of its time and called for a variety of things, such as large lots, setbacks (a specified minimum distance between a lot line and where a structure can be built), and curved streets. Ultimately, Pitzman's idea was to create an environment where residential structures and nature coexisted; typical urban development prior to this amounted to building things on top of things on top of things on top of every square inch of available land, with no thought - aside from parks - given to green space.

The planned residential development (my house is outside the castle walls, as my neighbor and I like to say) was loaded with deed restrictions, called out in the images below.

Today, that development is largely intact and consists primarily of very large, very ornate homes. Here are a few images of the structures in the planned development:

Compton Heights entrance gate on Grand Avenue, 1962

View northeast, from just east/inside the Grand Avenue entrance gate, around 1950

House on Longfellow, around 1950

House on Longfellow, around 1900

Same house as above and my favorite of all the Compton Heights mansions, 2024

House on Hawthorne, 2024

There are only a couple mansions that could use a fair amount of maintenance attention. The pic doesn't really show it, but the house below is one of them, and another one I really like.

House on Hawthorne, 2024

Alleys in the planned development section of the neighborhood are few and far between but where there is an alley, there are some big carriage houses. They're tough to photograph because the structures are large and the alleys don't provide a lot of room to work from, but these are a couple I was able to get halfway OK pics of.

Hawthorne carriage house, 2024

Carriage door in the carriage house pictured above, 2024

The alley immediately between my property and the planned residential development has been paved, but to the east and west, it hasn't.

Alley pavers, 2024

Outside the planned residential development but still within the neighborhood boundaries, there are plenty of other large homes and architectural gems.

Compton Heights house, 2024

Compton Heights house, 1 of only 2 that I believe are older than mine, 2024

Compton Heights row houses, 2024

Rare Compton Heights multi-family building, 2024

And of course there's the Magic Chef Mansion, built for Charles Stockstrom, a founder of the stove company that eventually be known as "Magic Chef", just across the street from Reservoir Park.

Magic Chef Mansion, 2024

Speaking of Reservoir Park, that's the area that surrounds the Compton Hill Water Reservoir. A million years ago I lived in an apartment across Grand Avenue from the park and would take Roscoe over there just about every day.

Now, it's Freckles' and Farley's stompin' grounds. The reservoir hasn't been used as a means of delivering water to St. Louis residents in who knows how long, but when it was in service, it held 28 million gallons of water. Architecturally, it isn't much to look at -- just a big water-holding bowl on top of a big hill (it's got walls and a roof now, but way back when...it did not).

Compton Hill Water Reservoir, 1898

But in the early days of indoor plumbing, before everybody had all the kinks worked out, it became necessary to have big standpipes to help regulate surges in water pressure due to the pumps that were used in water delivery. As was the case with most construction back then, it wasn't acceptable to just have a gigantic pipe sticking way up out of the ground; it had to have a fancy cover. That's what the Compton Hill Water Tower is: a very large, very ornate pipe cover.

Water tower construction, 1899

Compton Hill Water Tower on the left, reservoir up on the hill to the right, 2024

The park is kind of a hidden gem, albeit one in plain sight. It's bounded to the north by Interstate 44 and to the west by Grand Avenue, two psychological, if not physical, barriers to accessing the park on foot. The park's southern and eastern borders front the Compton Heights Neighborhood exclusively, which sort of makes it our own little place.

Reservoir Park, looking northeast across Interstate 44, 2024

As for that pesky highway that tore up the neighborhood, it was a necessary evil. The reservoir itself was spared from any sort of demolition but the northern section of the Compton Heights Neighborhood was not.

Interstate 44, looking east; Compton Heights is on the right, The Gate District is on the left, 2024

In the strip of green space between the highway and Compton Heights to the south, we have a little community garden; lemonade from lemons, I suppose.

Compton Heights Community Garden, 2024

That's my take on my neighborhood, Compton Heights. Big, fancy houses, a unique set of curved streets, a tower, a park, and plenty of stuff preserved from 100+ years ago. Now, I gotta stop writing and get back to work on this little thing...

My house, a work in progress (probably forever), 2024

Welcome To Compton Heights

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