Wandering up Louisville Avenue up to Clayton Avenue, we realized we had drastically gone outside the boundaries of Franz Park (and I’ve already looked at that stretch of street before), so we turned down the short stretch of San Jacinto Avenue and found ourselves on Wise Avenue, where there is a row of Queen Anne houses that were obviously built on large lots that were later subdivided, with in-fill homes constructed in between.
One the south side are much later houses, built on land that appears to be former staging area of the Missouri Fire Brick Mine. They are interesting in that they are duplexes but are built perpendicular to the street wall.
We then turned south onto Kraft Avenue, moving along the west side of the old mine property, and we see a mix of housing styles for what was probably workers’ housing.
More in-fill appears, cutting into the original lay of the street grading.
Much of the original housing is multi-family or relatively small.
There are some amazing survivors, such as the wood frame Italianate house below.
There is some nice tract housing, with cast metal cornices, reflecting an early Twentieth Century construction date as planing mills lost their primacy for exterior decoration.
As mentioned before, small wood frame or brick houses predominate this area, and I’m sure they were originally miners’ homes.
Turning onto West Park Avenue, there are more workers’ houses, but also Cape Cods that filled in vacant land that still exited into the mid-Twentieth Century.
Cape Cods predominate, and many are painted bright colors.
Then there’s this unique house, which was Italianate originally but has received a renovation with very small windows!
The street is very narrow through here.
This house is interesting, sitting at the southeast corner with Forest Avenue,
Around the corner we discover there was a storefront in the basement. That’s one thing I notice about this neighborhood; there are not a lot of corner stores, so this surely filled a need.
Moving west, there is more development that is suburban in character, and probably reflects the increased income of the neighborhood as it relied less on clay mining.
