This Italianate style house in McRee Town was built in about 1870, and is the oldest surviving house in the neighborhood. McRee Town was initially settled along Old Manchester Ave, which is now Vandeventer, in the years following the Civil War, although most of the development came with the arrival of the Liggett and Myers Tobacco factory in the 1890s, which spurred urban development in the neighborhood over the next 25 years. The neighborhood remained stable until the late 1960s, when Highway 44 severed it from the adjacent Shaw neighborhood. After that point, McRee Town began to face serious decline, and it quickly became notorious for the extreme poverty and crime in the neighborhood. By the late 1990s, the crime had begun to negatively impact Shaw, and the Missouri Botanical Gardens became worried that it was hurting their attendance at the garden. In 1998, the garden began an extensive project to revitalize the area, and the main target was McRee Town. Many preservationists and local community leaders advocated for the restoration of many of the abandoned buildings, but the garden deemed it necessary to clear several blocks of the neighborhood in an urban renewal era style demolition project. Between 2004 and 2005, six blocks of McRee Town were wiped clean and redeveloped with suburban style houses, with the exception of the townhouses on Folsom Ave, and the neighborhood was subsequently rebranded as “Botanical Heights”. The strategy was successful from the perspective of the Botanical Gardens, as the Shaw neighborhood saw immediate improvements with safety. However, in the process, dozens of buildings that were around a century old were sacrificed, and many families living in the area were displaced. The surviving blocks of the neighborhood near Vandeventer are a reminder of what the neighborhood once looked like throughout, and the Italianate house featured here is the only remaining development from along Old Manchester that survives in the neighborhood.
