Falling in love with old brick streets and the houses that populate them.
Falling in love with old brick streets and the houses that populate them.
Nik's Keyway Terrace
The young mother next door has been Instagramming about the renovation of the century and a half year old mansion she and her husband bought a year or so ago. It’s a monstrous project as the three-story brick had been converted into a half dozen or more apartments and terribly abused over the last few decades. Its former grandeur turned shabby.
I read her most recent Keyway Terrace post about how she fell in love with Abend Street. It struck an immediate chord in me.
My introduction to Abend Street came in 1975. A recent SIUE journalism school graduate, I landed a job at the Belleville, Illinois, News-Democrat. The St. Clair County Courthouse begun in 1859, two years before the Civil War began, had just been torn down to make way for the new courthouse. The fight over tearing down the old courthouse led to an historic preservation movement to protect older buildings in Belleville.
The movement soon focused on Abend Street with its several architecturally significant older homes. As the city beat reporter, I covered the movement. Many in city government dismissed the idea as a bunch of “little old ladies” fighting progress. But they persisted. I interviewed and wrote news stories about several Abend Street residents, including Ed Laux, who worked as a pressman for the News-Democrat, and of course, lived next door to you. I also interviewed the Chapman’s, who lived across the street, in what is now Chandra’s house. They had an antique store in the carriage house behind the main house.
Colonel and Mrs. Chapman were vocal supporters of the Historic District. The News-Democrat editorially endorsed the concept and allowed me to write the editorial in favor of it. I fell in love with the Chapman home and its tastefully decorated Victorian theme. As a poverty-stricken newspaper reporter, my salary wasn’t much more than I’d made eight years earlier working in the Caterpillar Tractor Company factory in Montgomery, Illinois, I didn’t dare dream of ever living on the street.
Luckily, the city editor and I got into a disagreement and the BND fired me. Ten months later I started law school and the rest is history.
Ten years-worth of history. When Annette and I got married, I owned a century-old brick, German street house in Columbia (since torn down) and she owned a modern brick ranch on the west end. Her house was closer to the courthouse and our office so I moved in to her house and eventually sold mine. We knew we wanted an older brick two-story closer to her mother’s house on East D, the one Alex lives in now. So, we started looking. We were looking for a two-story, center hall Colonial, like Fern’s or Amy’s, when 301 came up for sale.
We immediately scheduled an appointment to tour it. I fell in love with the oak wainscoting. We immediately wrote a contract on it, but the owners, who were downsizing to a condo, needed six months to finish building their condo, which we agreed to. For the next six months we drove past it countless times admiring our soon to-be-home.
That November, with Annette pregnant with Alex, we moved in. I, as would happen so many times in the next thirty years, was away with the Army National Guard, while Annette supervised a crew of friends with pickup trucks who got us moved. With the home, came the architectural blueprints from its construction in 1914 and some of the bills for materials. A few years later we acquired the original owners wedding gift china. The Royal Dalton blue willow, with its gold trim sits in the glass-doored butler pantry today. Our home was built as a wedding gift for Herman Wangelin and his bride by his parents, who owned and lived in what is now called the Keyway Terrace home next door.
Fortunately, other than installing wall-to-wall carpeting little had been done to mar the house’s original beauty. After Alex was born, Annette and I set out removing the carpeting. We spent hours on our hands and knees pulling carpet tacks.
In 1990, then Mayor Rich Brauer appointed me to the city Historic Preservation Commission, the same commission that I’d written the editorial in favor of fifteen years earlier. I served on the commission until 2000, as chair or vice-chair eight of the ten years.
We were the “kids on the block” when we moved in. Thirty-five years later, with Fern, who’s lived in the center-hall Colonial across the street since the 1950’s, we’re now the “old hands”. The block has seen good times and some bad times. With the generational turnover and young people’s desire to live in and near city centers, the century old grand dames of Abend Street are now blessed to have a half-dozen young couples with children renovating, renewing and loving the architectural masterpieces from yesteryear.
On the foggy spring nights, the old cobblestones glisten under the wrought iron street lamps and you can almost see Abraham Lincoln striding up to Gustave Koerner’s door to seek political advice from the man who would nominate him for President at the 1860 Republican convention. The river of history waters the spring crocuses of Abend Street.
(c) William L. Enyart 2021
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com