Photo project reveals streets of St. Louis

St. LOUIS -- The photographs are of old homes, children playing in snow and adults gabbing at an outdoor reunion. The setting is Lewis Place, a private street with a big place in the story of fair housing for black St. Louisans.

The photos are the result of a neighborhood-study project at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, which gave Lewis Place residents still cameras and told them to chronicle their lives.

"We had a workshop, got the cameras and were told to click away," said Pam Talley, interim president of the street's improvement association. "We're trying to save the neighborhood and honor the struggle that was waged for people to live here."

Lewis Place, with its yellow-brick archway facing Taylor Avenue, just north of the Central West End, was developed as a private street in the 1890s.

A black family first bought a home on Lewis Place in 1943. After a court battle and rapid turnover, blacks owned almost all of the houses within four years.

Today, the 75 properties over three blocks range from well-maintained homes to a few that are boarded up. Many are bungalows that were built shortly before World War I, but a few are stately three-story homes with stone fronts.

Because Lewis Place is a private street, homeowners have to share the cost of maintaining the street and sidewalks.

The photographs of the area, mixed with a few old snapshots of the street's first black residents, are on display through July 28 at UMSL's Social Science & Business Building and at Stevens Middle School, three blocks east of Lewis.

UMSL's Public Policy Research Center has done similar photo projects in other neighborhoods. In 2005, the center prepared a history of Lewis Place. That year, one of its graduate students, Elizabeth Pickard, wrote an extensive piece for the magazine of the Missouri Historical Society, where she now works.

The first black families to buy homes on Lewis ran into property-deed covenants that prohibited owners from selling to blacks. Eight years later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned those covenants in a landmark case known as Shelley v. Kraemer, which involved a home at 4600 Labadie Avenue, less than a mile north of Lewis.

George L. Vaughn, the lawyer who handled the Shelley case, also represented families on Lewis.

Pickard said the restrictive covenants were used to keep black families bottled up in neighborhoods north and east of Lewis. White homeowners on Lewis at first opposed the sales to blacks, but soon agreed to drop the legal challenges.

"This was an important part of breaking the Taylor Avenue barrier," Pickard said, referring to a black-white line that once was on the eastern entrance of Lewis. "It was an effort by inadequately housed people to break out of the boundaries they had been put within."

LeMon Robbins of Northwoods was in the military with his two brothers when their parents, Clifford and Carrie Robbins, became the first black couple to buy a home on Lewis in April 1943.

But a white family moved into the home first through an arrangement by a real estate company that, the family believes, didn't want black residents to move in. The Robbins family filed suit and won, but they weren't able to evict the other family for about two years, LeMon Robbins said.

One of his brothers, Clifford Robbins Jr., still lives with his wife, Genevieve, next door to the original family home on Lewis. LeMon Robbins, 83, said their father was a chef on the executive rail car for the president of the old Frisco Railroad, and their mother was a domestic for a wealthy white family. The Robbins family lived in the basement of a home on Evans Avenue, a few blocks away from Lewis Place, when they bought the home.

"She saw what the white people had, and she made up her mind, 'This is what I want for us,"' he said. "Our parents were determined."