MICHAEL ALLEN with CHRIS KALLMYER

“It’s one of the only major building materials that you can hold in your hands. You can carry a brick home. You can build your own house with brick, theoretically. It’s hard to do that with most other building materials.” – Michael Allen

MA
The architecture of St. Louis is epitomized by the red brick. In some ways, the red brick also is a cultural icon. A brick reflects the city’s way of life, and some even call the city the “red brick mama.” The fact that the city has red brick, however, is not a matter of selection. The color of our brick is the color of our clay, and that color was unknown to the city founders back in 1764. Their fortuitous choice of a site would put St. Louis in a rare league of cities that have red clay. We stand with Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and New York. We stand apart from Chicago, which has to rely on ruddy yellow brick from Indiana, or Detroit, which has little of its own clay.

The source of the city’s clay fortune was actually a Pennsylvanian formation, so it’s a formation that goes from here to the east coast. The short story is that a lot of it was eroded by glacial flows so most of the formation above ground, near the surface, is eroded and gone, which is why what’s here is under the soil. There’s not red clay in Indiana or Illinois anymore because it’s up here. We hid ours and tucked it in, to survive the flow. The primary geologic source of clay is something called the Cheltenham Syncline.

The Cheltenham Syncline starts basically at Kings Highway. The biggest, thickest part of it runs underneath Dogtown and the Hill, and goes about to the city limits. In that area, there is a fold, a deep underground fold. The syncline is a structural formation and in the center is the oldest material. In this case, that would be coal and the red clay that makes the red bricks. The newer material is on the surface, and that’s the type of clay that maybe we don’t talk enough about – that’s the fire clay. This clay allowed us to make oodles of architectural terra cotta, giving our buildings ornament, shadow lines, and reliefs unparalleled in the mid-west. The clay area in that part of the city led to over two dozen mines at various points. You can go actually to The Hill and there are houses that have settled on top of these mines, both underground tunnel mines and pit mines- pit mines that were filled in inappropriately. There was a church, St Aloysius Gonzaga where their tower was sinking into an old clay mine that closed in the 20’s. The church went up right after it closed and the mine was backfilled incorrectly. So we are still living with that landscape.

Over in Dogtown there were little frame houses that were built by miners that came from England to work specifically on the top of the mines to dig and extract fire clay would dig and extract the fireclay for terra cotta. The terra cotta tradition really comes out of England, and our rich deposits attracted English miners and English capitalists, including Joseph Winkle, who founded the largest terra cotta works in the world, right here in St Louis.

Whereas the English worked with the highest and easiest materials on the surface, the Irish and Italian immigrants would go down in the pits to work difficult to reach clay. The brick industry really was built on the backs of these working class immigrants. It’s no coincidence that The Hill is an Italian neighborhood. The Italians came to work the clay mines. The Irish that settled Dogtown came for the same purpose.

Before the big mines, brick making was a little more rudimentary. There would be open pits dug on each block where major construction was happening. Developers literally were pulling clay out of the earth, and making brick on site in kilns set up just to build 10 or 20 houses, and then taking that final brick-making site, and building a house on it at the very end.

Obviously, that method didn’t really allow for rapid urbanization and St Louis was growing really fast in the middle of the 19th century. The population increased by almost 400% between 1840 and 1850, and the need to grow and build quickly was apparent. So more standardization happened, and also an invention that first came from England in the 1850s, was patented in the United States in the 1860s in Cincinnati: the hydraulic press. If anyone has seen a brick that says “HYDRAULIC” on it, we have a company here in St Louis that bought the patent, the Hydraulic Press Brick Company. If anyone has read the Wasteland, or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock, you’ll be enjoying the fruits of that company’s success. Henry Elliot, T.S. Elliot’s father, was company president. Brick money allowed T.S. to have one of the greatest educations he could afford.

Yeah, there are a lot of dimensions to this.

The hydraulic press allowed for standardized brick. Before that bricks were. . . well we can be nostalgic about it . . . because the earlier hand crafted bricks are so irregular. There are buildings in old north Soulard that were made with hand brick. You’ll notice on the bricks the marks of chisels and even finger lines. Because they would lay out the clay in wood boxes you can see on the top sometimes the marks of chickens that had walked across them. The standardized brick has much less variety. But even with the standardized brick, if you go downtown to a building like the Missouri Athletic Club or walk out on Washington Blvd across the street, you’ll find that no two bricks are alike. The shadows and the sun fall differently on that each brick. Clay is organic matter. It is not perfectible. Each of these imperfections are carried into every brick. So called imperfections.

The Hydraulic Press really allowed St Louis to build itself up fast. But our rate of growth tanked by the early 20th century. Between1900-1910, we only grew by 97%, so we were eclipsed by other cities. But those other cities didn’t have red brick necessarily. Chicago didn’t have it, Omaha didn’t have it, Kansas City didn’t really have it, so they all turned to Hydraulic press in St Louis, and Hydraulic press sent branches to each of these cities, exported trainloads of brick. So if you go to Chicago and see a red brick front, it’s probably from the Cheltenham Syncline – that clay originated here in the southwest part of the city. You can go all over the country and see St Louis.

Hydraulic sold in Cleveland, going all the way to Los Angeles. Clay is an indelible part of our own identity, but it’s an identity that joins us to a lot of other cities and a lot of other places. We have this wonderful natural resource, and there is still more of it there. The mines just closed up eventually because the city stopped growing fast enough. Building laws changed. After the 1849 fire, laws were passed preventing new wooden buildings and this led to brick. In the 1940’s the lumber industry pressed and got the city building code changed to allow for wood frame houses. In 1961 curtain walls and glass walls were allowed in office buildings, and our dependency on brick fell. So there is only one brick maker left in St. Louis. It’s over in Edwardsville – the Richards Brick Company. Their clay, though, is mostly not coming from local sources. It’s imported clay from Indiana and Ohio and other areas because the mines in southwest city are closed, but not fully extracted, so someone could resume operations if they wished.

CK
So we resumed operations based on the fact that whe the Saint Louis Art Museum dug their parking garage, they dumped all that clay on a property near the MLK bridge on the river.

Really all of this rich clay was just on the surface, but it was from deep down in Forest Park where the Museum is. I get the sense, because it came out this deep red color-this really beautiful burnished red, that it might be part of this Cheltenham Syncline. Is that true? In that area on the far side east side of Forest Park?

MA
Yeah the deposit would extend into the park. Once the park was laid down in the 1870s, mining when through up there, but that’s the same soil. Just south of the park. That’s one of the reasons Dogtown is so patchy in terms of architecture. There’s ranch house next to old Victorians. That’s because a lot of those sites were mining interests and mining operations.

COMMONFIELD CLAY WORKSHOP INTERVIEWS
I. The Land & The Brick
II. The Theft of The Brick
III. The People & The Brick