Benton Street Row

This row of houses in St. Louis Place is one of the larger examples of a fully intact Row in North St. Louis. The houses were built in 1880 in the Italianate style, and featured the crescent shaped limestone lintels above the windows, which were characteristic of many buildings built in North St. Louis after the Civil War. The area was historically a mixture of Irish and German residents who began to settle in the area in the 1850s, as the urban core of the city began to expand further north. In 1856, St. Liborius Parish was founded in the neighborhood as an extension of the rapidly growing Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Hyde Park. By the 1880s, the area had been nearly completely filled in with housing and factories, where many of the working class residents in the area would live and work. The area became a target for urban renewal in the mid 20th century, and it was laid out as a slum in the 1947 comprehensive plan. The construction and failure of Pruitt Igoe between 1954 and 1972 lowered the property values in the neighborhood to the point that many houses were abandoned or demolished by the 1980s. These Row houses were in a severe state of disrepair at the time, but unlike many of their neighbors, they were spared from demolition, and were eventually restored. Today, the row houses are used as apartments, similar to the purpose they held originally at the time they were built.

Benton Street Row in the early 1980s