Our June Virginia Exit Cleanup!

Click here for proposed
"Grand Bates Historic District Draft Narrative"

Click here to open the April 2007 Clean Up Photo's!

Click here to open the January 2007 Clean Up Virtual Tour!
 

Woodward Now - Neighbors on Watch
proudly present these "Virtual Tours" of the Carondelet Neighborhood!

The Architectural Slideshow displays an eclectic mix of the unique architecture
of our neighborhood & includes buildings from before the Civil War,
the mid 1870's and the 1890's and, of course, from more recent years. 
If your using dialup please be patient for slides to load!

Click here to open the Architectural Virtual Tour!
 

Saturday November 5th, Our Neighborhood Watch Group held a Clean Up Walk.
A crew of about 25 residents started at Grand & Bates and picked up litter down to
Interstate 55, crossed back over to Fassen and returned towards Bates!
It was a beautiful Fall Morning evident by the trees displaying their golden colors.
I just could not resist adding a number of the trees in their beautiful fall "coats"
 A good time was had by all and the Pride we all shared cleaning up our
neighborhood was well worth our time and effort.
We look forward to our next Clean up event and hope you will join us!

Click here to open the Clean Up Virtual Tour!

I just had to add a couple more trees here!
 

A little more History!

In 1767, three years after Pierre Laclede founded the trading post along the Mississippi River he called St. Louis, Clement Delor de Treget, another Frenchman, came up the river from Ste. Genevieve and built a stone house for himself and his family in a small valley along the river. Eventually, other Frenchmen and Creoles settled nearby.

Although he was French by birth, Delor was somehow connected with the Spanish government which controlled the area at the time. He may have been a representative of the Spanish government because he assigned town lots to settlers, established common fields and jointly owned and farmed lands. In the French tradition, Delor set aside a space in his settlement for a church and a cemetery but it was not in the usual French design with the church facing a public square in the center of town. Instead, the spot he chose for the church overlooked the valley.

Before long, the settlement was an agricultural outpost that supplied St. Louis. Locals called the small settlement "Delor's Village," but in 1794, Delor officially named his village Carondelet after Baron Francois Louis Hector de Carondelet, the French-born Governor General of New Orleans and the highest authority of the Spanish administration in the Louisiana Territory.

By the official Spanish census of 1796, a total of 181 people lived in Carondelet but by the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, Carondelet had some 250 residents living in 50 houses.

Carondelet was chartered as a city in 1851. When the Civil War broke out 10 years later, Carondelet residents joined the ranks on both sides.

In 1870, the city of St. Louis annexed Carondelet, and the St. Louis Board of Education became in charge of the area's schools. To house the children of Carondelet, Carondelet School was built in 1871 and Des Peres School was built in 1873. Both were designed by German-American architect Frederick Raeder. For many years, Carondelet was nicknamed "Vide Poche" or "Empty Pocket." The source of the nickname is obscure. Some say it was because Carondelet inhabitants were not very ambitious, others say it was coined by more affluent St. Louisans who looked down on residents of the settlement to their south and at least one historian says it is derived from the fact that the Creoles of Carondelet were so skilled at gambling, they sent visiting St. Louisan home with "empty pockets."

Des Peres School originally had only four rooms-two upstairs and two downstairs-but by the mid-1890's the area's population was growing rapidly and four more rooms were added to the building.

When the school opened in 1873, Susan Blow, a local woman who had studied with Friedrich Froebel who had started the kindergarten movement in Germany, offered to conduct a kindergarten class on the site. Blow conducted St. Louis' first public kindergarten there and later trained teachers who took the program to other schools in the St. Louis system. Some of those teachers went on to establish kindergarten programs in cities across the country.

The Board of Education continued to operate the school until 1935 when it was closed. The building remained closed until the late 1947 when the Board of Education sold the building to Roy Tarter who operated it as a meeting hall and a restaurant he called the "Kindergarten Grill."

The building was later sold to the Cook Family, owners of Cook's Market, who used the building for office and storage space. A market was later added to the site. In 1980, when the Cooks retired and closed the building, the Family Care Center of Carondelet bought it and operated a clinic there for a short time. In 1981, the center sold the Des Peres School building to the Carondelet Historical Society and Susan Blow Foundation. The Society and the Foundation have been restoring the building ever since, preserving the memory of Blow's contributions and adding to the museum it created to preserve the history of Carondelet.
 

Local Historian / Author
Nini Harris
History of Carondelet
 

NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSE HISTORIES
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