Tomorrow, on Valentine's Day, Saturday, February 15th at 12:00pm noon, urbanists, architecture buffs, and plain common-sense folks will come together at Lindell & Taylor to celebrate St. Louis's MidCentury heritage by showing the love for the former DeVille Motor Hotel.
The St. Louis archdiocese plans to demolish the building and replace it with a surface parking lot. The group hopes to promote a preservation and reuse plan, which could benefit both the church and the neighborhood.
Read more at www.NoParkingLotOnLindell.com.
2 comments:
In the summer of 1960, I lived in the 4400 block of Maryland Ave. Before the DeVille and before the Archdiocesan Chancery, the north side of Lindell, west of the Cathedral to Taylor Ave. was graced by a number of lovely mansions. They were all torn down that summer to make way for the hotel and the Chancery. (The mansions, which stood abandoned for many months, made wonderful play houses for us neighborhood kids.) Historic preservation was largely unknown in that era. Graceful Victorian homes were unprized while anything modern-looking (like the DeVille) was considered so very au courant.
So, it's truly ironic to see folks pushing for the preservation of a structure that we CWE residents of a half century ago viewed as a vulgar and ugly destroyer of our heritage.
Well, what're ya gonna do. Just because we made a mistake once doesn't mean we should make the same mistake again! Just the opposite, in fact.
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