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In
the battle between preservation and development, Esley Hamilton (1963), who works
for the St. Louis County
Parks Department, is the ultimate bureaucratic
wheel-greaser for preservationists.
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Esley
Hamilton, the preservation historian for St. Louis County, wore his over-big
glasses and tweed jacket
to a recent meeting between local preservationists and officials from the
Missouri Department of Transportation.
The
mild-mannered Clark Kent outfit and job title disguises Hamilton's power. He has
been known to change
the course of highways - bending steel, if you will - by the force of his
historical documentation.
Participants met that day to discuss which houses in the impending path of
rebuilt U.S. Highway 40 (Interstate
64) were eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Making the list
does not assure that a building will
be spared, but it helps.
At risk
were three homes on Bennett Avenue, a street of unpretentious ranch houses on
the north side of Highway
40 near Laclede Station Road. The neighborhood had already been rejected by the
state preservation offices as
insufficiently historic to qualify for the register.
Esley
to the rescue. Hamilton's students in a landscape architecture class he was
teaching at Washington
University traced every title of every property on Bennett Avenue, uncovering a
dramatic story of African-American
settlement in the county. Hamilton presented his facts straightforwardly,
letting them speak for themselves.
He said that in the years after Shelley vs. Kramer (the Supreme Court case that
resulted in open housing) when
African-Americans were able to move into St. Louis County, they mostly moved
into existing homes. But a new
development of mostly brick ranch houses was planned for Bennett with the
prospect that blacks would be moving
in.
The
city of Richmond Heights did everything possible to keep the homes from being
built, including attempting to
pass a bond issue to purchase the area for a park. So while the homes aren't
very old - just 50 years or so - they
are part of civil rights history, Hamilton said.
The
panel of Transportation Department archaeologists and engineers all nodded
gravely, acknowledging the merit
of the account. They had heard it before, in newspaper stories that Hamilton
alerted reporters to. Someone
announced that the department designers had been able to "tweak the design" for
the new road.
Lesley
Hoffarth, project manager for the new highway, stood up, declaring, "I did the
tweaking; I'll show where
we tweaked."
Net result: Three old homes will remain standing, for whatever future blessing they may bestow.
Threshold to the past
Old
houses make you want to know who lived there. Lose the house, you lose the frame
for contemplation of the
past. You lose the physical threshold to another dimension.
Founded
in 1957, the St. Louis County Historic Buildings Commission, an advisory body to
the St. Louis County
Council, began a cursory survey of local landmarks in 1959.
In
1977, Esley Hamilton became a consultant to the commission, and in 1980, he
accepted a salaried position
within the Parks Department as the county historian and preservationist.
Immediately, the commission authorized him to do an area-by-area in-depth
inventory of the county's treasures.
And who would have known there were so many?
Hamilton excavated historical foundations that no one had been aware existed. He
provided provenances and the
glitter of heritage to more than 200 properties, many of which would have been
dismissed - including an outhouse
on Henry Avenue in Manchester which recently was accepted to the National
Register as part of the Henry
Avenue Historic District.
And he
gave preservationists a crucial weapon - facts to replace spotty memories and
vague intuitions of a
building's worth.
Largely
completed by 1988, the county's inventory of historic buildings now is quoted
like Scriptures by
preservationists, as is Hamilton himself. "Esley said" shores up a building's
historical merit the same way that a
beam shores up the building itself.
In a
public hearing to consider razing a historic structure, "Esley said" resounds
like the opening shot in a war.
And if Esley doesn't say, the outlook for a building is grim.
"I
wanted to save my father's house," University City resident Kay Drey recalled.
"I called Esley for an evaluation.
Esley said it wasn't historical; it was just old, so they tore it down."
In the
battles to readjust the balance between preservation and development, Hamilton
is the ultimate
bureaucratic wheel-greaser for the preservationists: the advance man, the
go-between, the behind-the-scenes man
who won't give up the seemingly lost cause.
Hamilton worked for eight years to save Hazelwood's Utz Tesson house, built in
1782. It sat marooned on Utz
Road in the middle of Tesson Park Estates. Developer Charles Karam wanted to
build on the lots where the
house sat. What really worried him was that he couldn't get liability insurance
on the empty building, so it sat
there like an accident waiting to happen.
The
city of Hazelwood had no money to move the home. For years, the threat of
demolition hung over the house,
sometimes like a distant cloud, sometimes like an imminent sword.
Hamilton circulated fliers seeking a buyer at preservation conventions. He ran
ads in national publications. He put
the building at the top of a list he drew up of the county's most endangered
sites. Then he made sure the list got
to the newspapers.
The
years of consciousness-raising by him and Hazelwood's small band of
preservationists paid off. Karam had
agreed to give the city the house if only someone would get it off his land.
Three weeks ago, Mills Corp.,
developers of a mall in Hazelwood, put up $50,000 to move the old house to
safety in Hazelwood's Brookes Park
as a goodwill gesture to the city.
Hamilton prizes accuracy, of course. He writes helpful letters to the editor to
set the record straight on matters
such as the proper pronunciation of Fauquier Avenue (Fawkeer, the anglicanized
version, is correct because the
name is descended from Francis Fauquier, who was an English-born colonial
governor of Virginia, unenamoured
with things French.)
Hamilton also has written letters on the danger of cleaning statues by
power-spraying them and on the number of
times the United States has had six presidents alive at once.
The
letter writing is done in between his teaching of landscape architecture at
Washington University, his leading
of tours of historic sites for the Missouri Historical Society, his singing
tenor in his church choir, his book writing
(he's working on a book about postwar county subdivisions) and his endless
meetings in behalf of preservation.
Last
Christmas season, he had on his schedule six Christmas parties with various
preservation societies. He has
never owned a television; he regards it as a time waster. He has never had a
wife, one suspects for the same
reason. He lives in University City.
Came here in 1969
Intimate as he is with the city, Hamilton regards himself as "an outsider."
"I'm
getting to know a lot of people, for being an outsider," he commented once
approvingly. "In fact, people are
asking me to sit on boards now. But you're supposed to have money if you sit on
a board, and I don't have any
money."
Hamilton, 58, was born in Pennsylvania, the only child of a second-grade school
teacher and an estimator for an
airplane manufacturer. They surrounded the little boy with erudition. Ada, his
mother, who was 42 when he was
born, died two years ago. He and his father, Joseph, who now lives in a
retirement center in Washington, D.C.,
communicate every Saturday morning, punctually at 8:30.
Esley
Hamilton arrived in the St. Louis area in 1969. He worked in East St. Louis for
six years as a planner for
Model Cities, the federally funded program to resuscitate America's downtowns.
Jamie
Cannon, who was director of planning in East St. Louis at the time, recalls that
Hamilton's digs were in a
rooming house at the corner of Missouri Avenue and 15th Street, an area so
dangerous that whenever Cannon
gave Esley a lift home, "I just slowed down enough so he could get to the curb;
I never stopped completely. But
Esley himself walked everywhere unscathed. Something about him made people look
after him and feel protective
toward him."
That
purity of purpose that emanates from Hamilton strikes people as being at odds
with his cultural
sophistication and his savvy about getting a building nomination through the
bureaucratic thickets. Trying to
describe him, his admirers join contradictory adjectives: "knowledgeable" and
"innocent," "sophisticated" and
"guileless."
"He
wants absolutely nothing for himself," says Christy Love, who teamed up with
Hamilton to keep development
from overtaking the Charbonier bluffs in north St. Louis County.
"If you asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he'd probably tell you a stronger historic preservation ordinance."
Normally, Hamilton has the zest for battle of someone who believes he’s in
service to a great cause, but he gets
downhearted over the proliferation of toothless preservation ordinances in
municipalities around the county,
ordinances that let the owner of a historic home choose whether he wants to
participate in the city’s historic
preservation program.
“It’s
not the homeowners who volunteer to cooperate that are the problem; it’s the
ones who don’t,” Hamilton
snapped after the Chesterfield City Council passed just such a softie. He looked
perplexed and disappointed.
People who should know better were making it easier to squander something that
seemed to him infinitely
precious.
He said, “There’s always
someone in every meeting who stands up and talks how a preservation ordinance is
unfair because a city shouldn’t be able to tell a homeowner what to do with his
property. Well, the city tells the
homeowner when to cut his grass and whether he can have a fence or not and how
to design his garage. What’s
different about telling him he has a historic home and he can’t demolish it
without a long enough delay to give
people a chance to save it?”
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