Brick by brick

S E RV I N G T H E P U B L I C S I N C E 1 878 • W I N N E R O F 1 8 P U L I TZ E R P R I Z E S

SUNDAY • 10.21.2018 • $4.00 • FINAL EDITION

TIPPING POINT

BROKEN BUILDINGS

ROBERT COHEN • rcohen@post-dispatch.com

De’Eris Bell stands inside a moat of bricks built for speedy cleaning and stacking while he works in July at 5521 Louisiana Avenue in south St. Louis. For each pallet of 520 bricks, Bell is paid $30. Bell’s stepfather, Correy Greene, taught him the technique. Salvaged St. Louis bricks cost about twice as much as modern manufactured ones.

BRICK BY BRICK HOME IS RAZED, BUT MEMORIES LINGER ON AN EMPTY LOT

The bungalow on Louisiana Avenue stood for 93 years but couldn’t escape ‘march of time’ ‘TIPPING POINT’ IS A SERIES OF SPECIAL REPORTS THAT EXAMINES CRITICAL CHALLENGES FACING ST. LOUIS See earlier stories in the series at stltoday.com/TippingPoint

Joseph and Hilda Laury bought this Louisiana Avenue bungalow in 1948, raising their four children there.

The children (clockwise from left), Peggy, Patrick, Linda and Mary, attended St. Cecilia Catholic School nearby.

BY JESSE BOGAN • St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I

ST. LOUIS

t’s a little before noon, on the second day of demolition at 5521 Louisiana Avenue this summer, and the scrappy crew had already dwindled from three to two. They had torn the roof off.

Now they needed to crash the walls to salvage precious red bricks.

Debris dangled overhead from the condemned bungalow, and the men took turns wearing a helmet and swinging a sledgehammer. They bashed a crease along the bottom row of bricks, like cutting a wedge to aim a falling tree.

“There you go,” said Correy Greene, 48, of JDW Contracting and Trucking, as his stepson, De’Eris Bell, 24, pounded along the line, weakening the heavy wall with each blow. “If I say, ‘run,’ run. Don’t look. Just run.”

While city government pledges to bring down more abandoned, broken buildings, if this home in south St. Louis is any indication, not only are the artifacts of multiple families destroyed with each demolition but also it’s a business of close calls,

COURTESY OF THE LAURY FAMILY

See BRICKS • Page A6

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A6 • ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

M 2 • Sunday • 10.21.2018

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH • A7

ABOVE • Peeling pink paint reveals a blue layer in a bedroom of a Louisiana Avenue home where five families have lived over the course of 93 years. In another area, a glass divider door blocks off the living and dining rooms from the rest of the house. One family used to cover the glass with brown paper at Christmas, so the children couldn’t see their gifts on the other side.

De’Eris Bell, 24, takes a smoke break in July while helping his stepfather demolish a bungalow at 5521 Louisiana Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Wood and bricks were salvaged and sold as the building slowly came down. When the home was built in 1925, the population of St. Louis was about 800,000, and industry was booming. The first owner paid $9,000 for the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house.

TIPPING POINT

LEFT • Unable to find a hammer to clean mortar from salvaged brick, homeless teenager Antonio Moore uses a piece of a discarded radiator as a tool while stacking bricks in south St. Louis in July. Demolition foreman Correy Greene offered the teen summer work after Antonio asked him for money. He was paid $30 for stacking a pallet of bricks. Greene used to rehab houses before switching to demolition during the Great Recession.

BROKEN BUILDINGS

HOME SPENT NEARLY FIVE DECADES IN SAME FAMILY

See BRICKS • Page A8

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The brick bungalow at 5521 Louisiana was an exciting fresh start for Sarajane Alverson and her partner. They had each owned homes before and liked that they didn’t have to do much work to get this one going. Just for fun, they added two concrete lions to the front porch and painted the door bright orange.

ABOVE • Carl Moore unloads brick pallets from the demolished Louisiana Avenue home, arriving at Century Used Brick on Aug. 3.

Owner Barbara Buck estimates 85 percent of her brick is shipped out of town.

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‘HIT OR MISS’

PHOTOS BY ROBERT COHEN • rcohen@post-dispatch.com

In July, Correy Greene (right) and his stepson De’Eris Bell of JDW Contracting and Trucking push down a three-layer brick wall of a Louisiana Avenue bungalow built in 1925. To bring down the wall, the men first “cut a line,” a method of chipping away the first row of exterior brick near the foundation, making the wall unstable.

Co lo

When the home went on the market again, it was advertised in the newspaper as a brick bungalow with updated kitchen and bath. The price was $59,000. The house languished on the market for nearly two years until it sold in 1996 for $35,000.

The man who bought it couldn’t be reached for comment. He later filed for bankruptcy protection and moved to Hobbs, N.M. Neil Manning bought the home from him in 2003. It had been updated some. He paid $80,000. It was the first home for him and his new wife, Megan. Both in their 20s, he was moving from Columbia, Ill.; she from Fenton.

“That house was a labor of love,” said Megan, a teacher.

“We put a lot into it.”

They installed new carpet, painted the kitchen cabinets and stripped layers of paint from the baseboards to reveal original wood, which they thought was beautiful.

Outside, they planted a garden and hung a swing from the enormous tree in the backyard.

Still, friends and relatives asked why they lived there.

“We liked that we were in a downtown hub and not far from anywhere,” Megan said.

And their twins came home from the hospital to 5521 Louisiana Avenue. They took many pictures of the boys pressing their faces against the glass windows in the divider door that separated one side of the house from the other.

But as they stayed longer, they stopped walking to Chimichanga’s Mexican Restaurant and Walgreens, both nearby on South Grand Boulevard. Their block was on the evening news a few times. Their vehicles and home were broken into. They noticed more renters moving into the neighborhood.

Then, in 2008, the Mannings went from one extreme to the other by moving to a home in Lincoln County that sat on 3.5 acres.

“It was a lot more laid-back,” she said.

They thought they had a good buyer lined up for the bungalow, but financing fell through. While the house sat dormant, somebody broke in and stole copper piping from the basement. The Mannings ended up installing central air to help sell the home. It finally sold in 2009 for $84,500, after 18 months of paying two mortgages.

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When the bungalow was built in 1925, the surrounding Carondelet neighborhood was full of working-class residents thick with Germanic heritage and others who were meticulous about the masonry being destroyed today.

Even though brick homes were built block after block, each one seemed to have splashes of character around the windows, above doorways.

And there were plenty of families to fill them.

The population in St. Louis was about 800,000 then.

The growing city was having second thoughts about the “Great Divorce” — its split in 1876 from St. Louis County — because it held the city back from being viewed as one of the largest in the country. Industry was still booming — railroads, shoes, beer, bricks — and soot filled the air.

There were two professional baseball teams, renowned architecture and a business district that had been moving west from the riverfront for years.

Joseph Mueller, the first owner of the 1,100-square-foot home on Louisiana, was a plumber. He paid $9,000, a handsome amount for the time. Apart from load-bearing brick, it had a kitchen, living and dining room, two bedrooms, fullwidth front porch, asbestos shingle roof, limestone foundation, a coal-burning furnace and one bathroom.

After the Great Depression hit, like many St. Louis residents, Mueller was unemployed, according to census records. His daughter, Loretta, worked as a stenographer; his sister-in-law, Margaret, was a bookbinder who also trained show dogs. His son, Edwin, was a clerk at a shoe factory before joining the Army in 1941.

As a crewman in an artillery company, Edwin fought across France and Germany. His father died before he came home in 1945.

The postwar era marked the first major push to the suburbs. Houses were crammed. Cars were the rage.

But Joseph and Hilda Laury wanted to live in south St. Louis to be close to lots of family.

They bought the bungalow from the Mueller family in 1948. Joseph’s parents, who owned a grocery store, gave them a loan to help pay for it. The Laurys, and their descendants, owned it for nearly the next 50 years.

‘LABOR OF LOVE’

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THRIVING NEIGHBORHOOD

Joseph Laury was a meat cutter. Hilda kept the house running. The living and dining rooms were off limits to their four children unless there was company.

“It didn’t seem little at all growing up,” said Mary Foerstel, the youngest, now 61.

Hilda hosted Block Rosary, in which neighbors gathered in the front room to pray. Joseph hosted card games in the basement with his pals. As a couple, they liked to pack friends and relatives into the backyard for parties.

There was no air conditioning, but a big tree provided abundant shade.

The center of their universe was right around the corner at St. Cecilia Catholic Church. The family worshiped there, and the children were part of the school when enrollment peaked in 1961 at 587. Neighborhood parents helped run the cafeteria. Nuns made sure nothing was wasted. Patrick Laury, the only son, got good at reciting poetry, which was punishment for poor behavior. He later earned a doctorate in education.

He recalled that his family didn’t go to restaurants and took only one vacation when he was growing up.

Christmas was big, though. Instead of wrapping presents, Joseph and Hilda used brown paper bags to cover the glass windows in a divider door that blocked off the living and dining rooms from the rest of the house. Gifts for each child were left on a chair or the sofa.

“We would look under the door to see if we could make out anything in the living room,” said Patrick Laury, now 74.

After his father died in 1980, his mother stayed put.

Even into the 1990s, after white flight had significantly changed the neighborhood and the city’s population had fallen to 400,000, half of what it was when the bungalow was built.

It was her home, and she had a network of people who looked after her. In fact, she had her own little security system. She let neighbors know she was OK each morning by opening the blinds in the front room.

One morning in 1993, when the blinds didn’t open, the bugle call sounded. Somebody called a relative, who soon found Hilda had died in her sleep.

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some yelling and pure hustle.

“If you don’t do nothin’, you don’t get nothin’,” Greene likes to say.

Greene built up a lot of experience since the Great Recession. He couldn’t get a job rehabbing houses anymore, so he decided to move in reverse.

He doesn’t miss finish work much. He’s a natural at ripping things apart and relishes the element of discovery — the gamble of what personal things might be left behind in a home that had been occupied so long, then left to the elements of nature and society.

Crews find anything from ceramic light fixtures and cast iron skillets to old mayonnaise jars full of coins. Once somebody reportedly found $190,000 cash, perhaps stashed by a drug dealer who got killed or imprisoned.

Another time, the bomb squad was called for a cache of dynamite that turned up in an abandoned home on Adkins Avenue that had caught fire.

But there weren’t any suitcases to check in the brick bungalow on Louisiana Avenue. Other than a photo album and dishes, it was pretty cleaned out. A buyer of reclaimed lumber barely justified his trip for joists; they weren’t old enough.

Only the solid red bricks — 5-pound pieces of St. Louis’ identity — were left for this demo crew to make much money on. Untold tons of them used to be made here and now are prized far away as antiques and status symbols.

Still, they needed to be harvested from the walls, scraped together a few times to knock off old mortar, then stacked 520 to a pallet for shipment.

Unlike his stepfather, Bell was still learning the laborintensive, risky trade. His arms and hands throbbed as he smacked the bottom row of bricks on the wall with the sledgehammer to set up the desired fall.

He was apprehensive about facing the corner, which acts as the linchpin.

“Nice swing, boy!” Greene yelled, amused that Bell missed.

But then Bell connected, and Greene encouraged him with each direct hit. Stopping to catch his breath, Bell looked overhead at the looming one-story wall built three bricks thick.

“It ain’t going nowhere,” Greene said.

Brick walls usually let you know when they are going to fall, he assured. There’s a noise. A distinctive creak.

Greene, short and stocky, took over the sledgehammer.

He pounded the iron head of the tool into the brick corner with ferocious blows. A pocket of black mortar kicked back in his sweaty face.

“Ooh,” he said, not letting up, “that tastes good.”

That tastes like money.

A SECURITY NETWORK

Gr an

BRICKS • FROM A1

Post-Dispatch

A watercolor painting of her childhood home on Louisiana Avenue in Carondelet hangs in the hallway of Mary Foerstel’s home in Lakeshire last month.

The Carondelet house was recently demolished after sitting vacant for more than a year.

A8 • ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

M 2 • SUNDAY • 10.21.2018

TIPPING POINT

BROKEN BUILDINGS

FALLEN TREE WAS FINAL BLOW TO HOME BRICKS • FROM A6

“At the time, the neighborhood looked cute, and the house itself I would describe as cute,” said Alverson, 40, an actress who has performed in several plays in St. Louis. “It didn’t give us any bad vibes.”

That changed when almost everybody they met when they moved in moved out. They were victims of some property crimes. Their front windshields were smashed and the porch light was broken out. Somebody tore up the backyard fence and stole the air conditioner.

“A lot of St. Louis city seems to be hit or miss like that,” Alverson said. “It just depends on who lives around there.”

They regularly called police.

“The joke in the city is, was it gunshots or fireworks?” she said.

A few years in, they were ready to move. But it was “tree-pocalypse” that forced them to after a storm on July 13, 2016. The giant tree in the backyard that had provided so much shade fell onto the home, just after Alverson’s partner ran toward the basement with the dogs, for safety.

When Alverson pulled up soon after, she didn’t immediately see the damage in back.

She went through the front room and pushed opened the divider door. Her brain couldn’t immediately comprehend what was on the other side: A massive tree trunk lay across the kitchen, and it was raining inside.

The home was unfit to live in. They were relocated by their insurance company to a house in south St. Louis County that rents for $1,700 a month.

“It feels a bit homogenized, as far as community and restaurants,” Alverson said. “But we do have a lot more space. We do feel safer.”

Historical preservationists eyed the bungalow for a potential rehab. But after getting the insurance claim — minus $15,000 to remove the fallen tree — a neighbor bought it for the last time in 2017. He paid $3,000.

For months, it sat empty and exposed, unnerving nearby residents and some of those who used to live there.

PHOTOS BY ROBERT COHEN • Post-Dispatch

Laborer Jay Lopez wheels brick salvaged from a Louisiana Avenue bungalow built in 1925 to masons building a pool house and outdoor kitchen in Schriever, La., on Oct. 12. The house itself is built with 50,000 old St. Louis bricks.

SAYING GOODBYE In town for a wedding in 2017, the four grown Laury children were ready for their pilgrimage to see their beloved childhood home.

“Every time we would go to St. Louis, we’d go by the old house, almost to say goodbye,” said Patrick Laury, who now lives in Arkansas.

So they piled into two vehicles for the trip down memory lane. Mary Foerstel and the other sisters and sisters-in-law drove in front.

Patrick and the other guys followed.

Getting close, they went down Bates Street, then turned onto Louisiana. Surprised by what she saw, Foerstel immediately ran toward the approaching vehicle to deliver the news.

You aren’t going to believe this! You aren’t going to believe this!

A big red and white condemnation notice hung near the front door, which their parents would have never painted orange. Debris littered the backyard. The front steps, which they had to scrub every Saturday morning, were dirty.

Foerstel, not willing to let go, walked up and yanked the address plaque — 5521 — off the home. Her father had made it a long time ago.

“It had significance to me,” said Foerstel, of south St. Louis County. “And it sure didn’t have significance to somebody else who was going to have this house demolished.”

MARCH OF TIME The landowner eventually obtained a permit to have the home demolished for $8,000. In July, the wrecking crew showed up, looking for treasure to salvage from the destruction they were getting paid to complete.

After turnover and other delays, it took three weeks to clear the lot. They gleaned about 10,000 red bricks from the debris, or 19 pallets’ worth, which wasn’t much compared with

ABOVE • Brick mason Manuel Lopez builds a wall Oct. 12 in Schriever, La., from bricks salvaged from a Louisiana Avenue home in St. Louis.

The city’s bricks — even the rough ones with char marks and spray paint — are sought after for their character.

LA.

New Orleans

Houma

what old four-family flats produce.

Two of the pallets were sent to Joplin, Mo., to help restore a historic mansion. The rest went to the New Orleans area, partly with the help of Mississippi trucker Robert Foster, who often hauls lumber north, then goes back to the South with used brick from St. Louis.

“It just kills me to see the old houses torn down,” said Foster, 43.

He got his truck loaded in early August at Century Used Brick in Soulard.

“It makes me sad to see beautiful old buildings go, but what makes it bearable is knowing that those bricks are going to build new homes for new families,” said Barbara Buck, 64, owner of Century, which has customers coast to coast. “Environmentally, it’s the responsible thing to do.”

She said it was also part of the “march of time.”

“When that house on Louisiana was built, there was probably somebody standing there saying, ‘That used to be my log cabin,’” she said.

After a 700-mile journey, Foster delivered eight of the Louisiana Avenue pallets to Antique Brick in Houma, La., a city of about 30,000 people that serves as a hub for offshore oil and gas fields. St. Louis bricks — even the rough ones with char marks and spray paint — are sought after for their character.

They cost about twice as much as modern manufactured bricks.

“It’s almost like a status symbol, like, ‘Hey, I have old St. Louis on my house,’” said Matt Chatagnier, 40, the brick merchandiser who bought the load.

This month, a crew started laying the bricks from Louisiana Avenue as a veneer finish on a new pool house and outdoor kitchen. Owners Christian and Colette Lapeyre intend to use it to grill fresh red fish, host crawfish boils and entice their 10- and 15-year-old sons to play at home a little more before they grow up.

“We are looking forward to it being completed,” said Christian, 48, vice president of an insurance company.

Delayed by a lot of rain this summer, the 1,000-square-foot project will match their 4,500-square-foot home, which was built a few years ago in a subdivision carved out of a former sugarcane plantation. Six white pillars adorn the front of the house, which has 50,000 old St. Louis bricks on the walls, archways, porches and fireplaces.

“I didn’t think they had any more of these bricks left,” said James Thomas, 34, a laborer on site. “A lot of these have been used.”

He used a wheelbarrow to supply Latino immigrant masons with fresh mortar, as they laid down the first line of bricks that would cover the pool house wall.

“It has to be level because everything goes up from there,” said Jose Morales, 30, a foreman, who played Mexican ballads on his cellphone.

He was proud of his brickwork but itched to go home. He hasn’t seen his family in a year and a half.

The crew’s boss, Gerardo Nava, 56, came to the area from Texas after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. No longer in roofing, he now specializes in masonry. Weather permitting, they work from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., including some weekends.

“The guys working offshore are making good money,” he said. “That’s why nobody wants to do this job.”

Back where he grew up in rural Mexico, he said, there aren’t choices and officials aren’t trustworthy. He rarely returns.

“If you don’t work, you ain’t nothing,” he said, echoing the demolition crew, as he built something new with what had been torn down.

Jesse Bogan • 314-340-8255 @jessebogan on Twitter jbogan@post-dispatch.com

Framed by massive oak trees, bricks from a demolished St. Louis bungalow on Louisiana Avenue are laid on Oct. 12 to build a pool house and outdoor kitchen behind a home in Schriever, La., about an hour west of New Orleans.