This picture from 1896:

http://genealogyinstlouis.accessgenealo ... tyhall.jpg

Here's 1908:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~usgen ... /ctyhl.jpg

Obviously looks different than it does today.



Any idea what happened to the cupola (sp?)/ tower thing? You can see some other minor changes, like the smaller cupolas that are still there seem to be less pointy.



Live Maps Birds Eye doesn't show any sign that the cupola thing was ever there.



This picture shows City Hall as it looks today, not sure when it was taken.

http://www.66postcards.com/images/mo17.jpg



Any help would be appreciated. Just wondering.

From St. Louis Historic Preservation:

The clock above the main entrance on Tucker was installed in 1906 and renovated in 2001. The lantern-like central tower, about 80 feet tall, above the Tucker Boulevard entrance and the two smaller spires, each about 19 feet in height, on either side of the tower, were removed in 1936. In the process of reroofing, the structural steel frame of the towers was found to be so corroded that the tower had to be taken down with great care, piece by piece. The public was outraged that the tower was demolished and Mayor Bernard Dickman promised to build a new tower when the city had the money. The replacement cost at the time was estimated to be $10,000. A campaign was started in 1946 to replace the tower and a study was done. It was found to be too expensive and the project was dropped.

The next paragraph continues:

The words "City Hall" were engraved in the stone above the doors on the Market, Tucker, and Clark Street entrances. This was done only after the City Art Commission refused to allow Mayor Dickmann to put a neon "City Hall" sign in red, white, and blue above the door.

Mill204 wrote:

The words "City Hall" were engraved in the stone above the doors on the Market, Tucker, and Clark Street entrances. This was done only after the City Art Commission refused to allow Mayor Dickmann to put a neon "City Hall" sign in red, white, and blue above the door.

I think they went the wrong route, it would have made it more modern!

Any explanation for why the two smaller 19 ft. "towers" were also removed? From the photos, they don't appear to be real towers but more like large cupalos.

^

In the process of reroofing, the structural steel frame of the towers was found to be so corroded that the tower had to be taken down with great care, piece by piece.

i suppose the city has more pressing concerns, but it would be great if these towers could be added back to City Hall once again.

City Hall got some new lights tonight’s

Since moving to St Louis about a year ago, I walk past City Hall every day heading to work and have been struck how generally unkept to grounds are but tempered my judgement due to the "Park Closed for Restoration" signs posted on the metal barricades surrounding all of the green spaces surrounding the campus. I've recently found that these signs have been up since October 2023 when the city cleared an encampment.

After reading this NextStl post about the state of usability inside city hall, I captured what I saw on my daily walk around the block and thought; How can the symbolic and administrative heart of the city in it's prominent location downtown be allowed to appear abandoned and unmaintained? I understand budgets are tight and city workers are stretched thin, but is basic maintenance, landscaping, and cleaning too much to ask for the seat of city leadership and services?

Are there plans to actually restore the park space or are those signs just an indefinite placeholder? Will dented metal barricades, traffic cones, and trash just continually build up along the edges of sidewalks and parking areas? As a newcomer or visitor to the city, these are pretty glaring things to see around such a beautiful building, and certainly not how you'd expect it to look beneath the windows of an incumbent administration weeks before an election.

It's called homelessness. The area around city hall is a hot spot for homeless people to hang out around because the city isn't going to necessarily treat them the way a private building might.

A few years ago, it got particularly bad so they did forcibly remove lots of them and to keep them away, they installed the fences. As for the littering, that's unfortunately just a side effect of having homeless people around. Doesn't help that Enterprise is right next door and people love to just throw their crap on the ground on their walk back to their car.

More can and should be done to clean it up, but that costs money and takes manpower.

The root cause is homelessness, which itself has numerous causes of its own, and none of which is prioritized by pretty much any level of government, and certainly not in Missouri.

I am very cognizant and sympathetic to the realities homelessness brings, but can the unhoused really be to blame for trash cans not emptied for weeks, rusted metal barricades piled up against an abandoned parking lot entrance, landscaping that hasn't been touched in years, a large public building abandoned and open to the elements for decades, faded temporary signs from 2003, car bumpers sitting on the sidewalks for weeks, mangled historic fencing, etc? Like I said, obviously things cost money to fix and manpower to clean but there's a cost to this imagery as well.

It looked nice when VP Harris was in town.

It definitely comes off as a lack of pride. A lack of even trying.

Here in U City, and in many other nearby cities, high profile governmental buildings are kept relatively neat, and are treated with some care and respect. The exteriors are maintained and the landscaping is well-manicured. U City's forestry/horticulture staff, with volunteers from the "U City in Bloom" group, do an amazing job planting and maintaining beautiful plantings around the city every year, including at many of our public spaces.

I wish I saw the same from St. Louis City. It makes such a HUGE difference perception-wise.

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

It definitely comes off as a lack of pride. A lack of even trying.

Here in U City, and in many other nearby cities, high profile governmental buildings are kept relatively neat, and are treated with some care and respect. The exteriors are maintained and the landscaping is well-manicured. U City's forestry/horticulture staff, with volunteers from the "U City in Bloom" group, do an amazing job planting and maintaining beautiful plantings around the city every year, including at many of our public spaces.

I wish I saw the same from St. Louis City. It makes such a HUGE difference perception-wise.

When U City becomes the regional homeless capital, maybe STL City will be able to do better.

It is exhausting and obvious that the regional municipalities send unhoused individuals downtown.

City Hall and Municipal Courts frontyards
have been an issue for a while. Poelker Park was just completely taken over for a while.

I know the Larry Price property is for sale now. St. Patrick’s have decent leadership, but it still spills out into downtown. The north riverfront has pretty much been burnt down by unhoused individuals. The parks along the Greenway on the riverfront are constantly trashed by unhoused individuals too.

Adding amenities into the Gateway Mall would help too (as Lucas Gardens showed). I think it is worth a discussion on relocating a place like St. Patrick’s to somewhere not downtown. The municipal courts building redevelopment should help.

There’s obviously much work to do across the country on solutions.

As far as city hall, I do think we should step it up in cleanup around the area, the landscaping. I like the patina, but most people comment to me it looks dirty, so I would be curious of the facade with a powerwash.

I am hoping Alterra wins the Muni RFP and they work with City Hall on an idea like the outdoor literary market, sprucing up the landscaping and the front yard called Washington Square Park, and developing the parking lots south of the two buildings. I know there’s a Gateway Mall group working on adding amenities to the parks and the Brickline Greenway will run through here. so I hope those things beautify the area and inspire some pride.

Here's City Hall item on the capital needs list.

Landscaping & trash removal should be basic. We can't tout that the city has a budget surplus and also complain that we don't have money for caring for basic services on public rights of way on government property. Landscaping in winter will always look less than its best but it mulch beds can at least be kept clean.

the metal barricades were never for restoration, they were an inelegant temporary solution to a very serious problem. Like the jersey barriers in downtown streets during COVID to prevent street racing they served a purpose (the problem, ostensibly, was not that homeless people exist but the drugs and violent crimes that occurred in homeless encampments on city property) but should not be relied on as a permanent fixture. I've yet to hear any plans to remove them or replace them with any other form of homeless management/control at City Hall or the downtown parks. And of course that glosses over the very serious issues related to humane treatment of the unhoused - downtown St Louis shouldn't be essentially the sole location for homeless resources for the entire St. Louis MSA, but that's not entirely in the control of the city government. 

Re: the power washing of the building - my recollection is that it's cleaning the outside of City Hall is difficult if not impossible because of the type of sandstone used to make up the exterior building. Essentially the dirty look is because soot and grime has been absorbed into the stone over the years. A number of attempts to clean the stone have been made, but to the best of my knowledge nothing has been found to work that didn't also damage the stone.

But there's something to be said about kg2024's point. City Hall can do much better, and I'd support spending funds on both maintaining clean and accessible public rights of way as well as beatification of the property, including crash damage to fences.

-RBB

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

It definitely comes off as a lack of pride. A lack of even trying.

Here in U City, and in many other nearby cities, high profile governmental buildings are kept relatively neat, and are treated with some care and respect. The exteriors are maintained and the landscaping is well-manicured. U City's forestry/horticulture staff, with volunteers from the "U City in Bloom" group, do an amazing job planting and maintaining beautiful plantings around the city every year, including at many of our public spaces.

I wish I saw the same from St. Louis City. It makes such a HUGE difference perception-wise.

When U City becomes the regional homeless capital, maybe STL City will be able to do better.

I would be ashamed to be the mayor and have my city's HQ, and my office, look like this. How can someone willfully ignore the mess every time they show up for work? While there are a thousand different priorities, this one would smack you in the face every time you showed up for work.  How could this be so willfully ignored by those in power, those with the ability to actually do something, who work in this building every day? I would be embarrassed. 

You can't blame this all on homelessness. You can have unhoused people nearby and also not let your city hall look like sh*t.

How timely!

ADA Improvements - City Hall Wayfinding Signage

https://www.sldcplanroom.com/projects/6 ... ng-signage

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

It definitely comes off as a lack of pride. A lack of even trying.

Here in U City, and in many other nearby cities, high profile governmental buildings are kept relatively neat, and are treated with some care and respect. The exteriors are maintained and the landscaping is well-manicured. U City's forestry/horticulture staff, with volunteers from the "U City in Bloom" group, do an amazing job planting and maintaining beautiful plantings around the city every year, including at many of our public spaces.

I wish I saw the same from St. Louis City. It makes such a HUGE difference perception-wise.

When U City becomes the regional homeless capital, maybe STL City will be able to do better.

I would be ashamed to be the mayor and have my city's HQ, and my office, look like this. How can someone willfully ignore the mess every time they show up for work? While there are a thousand different priorities, this one would smack you in the face every time you showed up for work.  How could this be so willfully ignored by those in power, those with the ability to actually do something, who work in this building every day? I would be embarrassed. 

You can't blame this all on homelessness. You can have unhoused people nearby and also not let your city hall look like sh*t.

Firstly, I'm not a narcissistic a**hole who would put things that impact me over things that impact other people, namely the people I've been elected to serve. So, no, I absolutely would not be embarrassed nor would I put making city hall "look nicer" over something like funding for gun violence prevention or aiding the homeless.

Second, who do you think those trash cans are for? You think there's enough foot traffic through there to monthly to totally overfill trash cans? No, there's not. They're there for homeless people to throw their crap away. In real life, if I, as mayor, spend hundreds of thousands to "clean up" city hall and make it "look nicer", all that effort would be for nothing in a few months when it's all dirty again because I didn't solve the actual problem at hand, which is the homelessness.

All I see is that you are absolutely not cut out for public service.

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 25, 2025

When U City becomes the regional homeless capital, maybe STL City will be able to do better.

I would be ashamed to be the mayor and have my city's HQ, and my office, look like this. How can someone willfully ignore the mess every time they show up for work? While there are a thousand different priorities, this one would smack you in the face every time you showed up for work.  How could this be so willfully ignored by those in power, those with the ability to actually do something, who work in this building every day? I would be embarrassed. 

You can't blame this all on homelessness. You can have unhoused people nearby and also not let your city hall look like sh*t.

Firstly, I'm not a narcissistic a**hole who would put things that impact me over things that impact other people, namely the people I've been elected to serve. So, no, I absolutely would not be embarrassed nor would I put making city hall "look nicer" over something like funding for gun violence prevention or aiding the homeless.

Second, who do you think those trash cans are for? You think there's enough foot traffic through there to monthly to totally overfill trash cans? No, there's not. They're there for homeless people to throw their crap away. In real life, if I, as mayor, spend hundreds of thousands to "clean up" city hall and make it "look nicer", all that effort would be for nothing in a few months when it's all dirty again because I didn't solve the actual problem at hand, which is the homelessness.

All I see is that you are absolutely not cut out for public service.

A little paint, signage, and simple routine maintenance plan with follow through is all that it would take.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is laughable. 

STLAPTS wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Tim wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

I would be ashamed to be the mayor and have my city's HQ, and my office, look like this. How can someone willfully ignore the mess every time they show up for work? While there are a thousand different priorities, this one would smack you in the face every time you showed up for work.  How could this be so willfully ignored by those in power, those with the ability to actually do something, who work in this building every day? I would be embarrassed. 

You can't blame this all on homelessness. You can have unhoused people nearby and also not let your city hall look like sh*t.

Firstly, I'm not a narcissistic a**hole who would put things that impact me over things that impact other people, namely the people I've been elected to serve. So, no, I absolutely would not be embarrassed nor would I put making city hall "look nicer" over something like funding for gun violence prevention or aiding the homeless.

Second, who do you think those trash cans are for? You think there's enough foot traffic through there to monthly to totally overfill trash cans? No, there's not. They're there for homeless people to throw their crap away. In real life, if I, as mayor, spend hundreds of thousands to "clean up" city hall and make it "look nicer", all that effort would be for nothing in a few months when it's all dirty again because I didn't solve the actual problem at hand, which is the homelessness.

All I see is that you are absolutely not cut out for public service.

A little paint, signage, and simple routine maintenance plan with follow through is all that it would take.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is laughable. 

The only thing laughable is you moving the goal posts from everything the OP originally brought up to "a little paint" and "a little signage".

And the root problem- homelessness- still exists. Womp womp.

Auggie wrote: ↑

Mar 01, 2025

STLAPTS wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Auggie wrote: ↑

Feb 28, 2025

Firstly, I'm not a narcissistic a**hole who would put things that impact me over things that impact other people, namely the people I've been elected to serve. So, no, I absolutely would not be embarrassed nor would I put making city hall "look nicer" over something like funding for gun violence prevention or aiding the homeless.

Second, who do you think those trash cans are for? You think there's enough foot traffic through there to monthly to totally overfill trash cans? No, there's not. They're there for homeless people to throw their crap away. In real life, if I, as mayor, spend hundreds of thousands to "clean up" city hall and make it "look nicer", all that effort would be for nothing in a few months when it's all dirty again because I didn't solve the actual problem at hand, which is the homelessness.

All I see is that you are absolutely not cut out for public service.

A little paint, signage, and simple routine maintenance plan with follow through is all that it would take.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is laughable. 

The only thing laughable is you moving the goal posts from everything the OP originally brought up to "a little paint" and "a little signage".

And the root problem- homelessness- still exists. Womp womp.

We will always have Nashville !

You can in fact walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.