Episode 8: Polo and Davis

[Music] polo drive and davis drive areas were the main part of ralph clayton's farm he gave a hundred acres near the north end of the farm to create the new county seat in 1878 and like many people he mistakenly thought that the city was going to boom so he mortgaged his farm because he was going to build new streets on the part that he had retained for himself and he was foreclosed on and as a very old man he lost his farm here so this property was bought by samuel davis who was a member of a family that owned a large dry goods company downtown originally the st louis country club was founded right here and davis sold a very odd-shaped piece of land to the country club for them to build their clubhouse another thing that was influential about the country club locating here was that the 0-4 streetcar was specifically built to serve the country club and that's why wydown boulevard was laid out it was originally just a streetcar line not a road almost immediately they were able to sell that odd shaped piece of land the layout was a little odd because the shape of the ground that it was designed on was very odd those houses that loop of polo drive would have been sitting there in the middle of a field for the next 10 years but in 1924 the rest of the davis property then was subdivided as davis place the developer that the davises hired was also named davis which is very confusing his name was everett davis and he was one of the great characters in st louis real estate history an example of his grandiose ideas is this parkway that we're standing on right here this was originally intended to be an extension of central avenue in downtown clayton and it would have been a grand entrance to the county courthouse you would have been able to enter this part of central from clayton road and go the whole way up to where the courthouse was located at the corner foresight unfortunately neither end of it was ever completed the way they intended so now we have this beautiful wide parkway that goes nowhere and it also has one of the great institutions of clayton central presbyterian church the central part of it of the name does not refer to central avenue it refers to the original location of the church in downtown st louis but to move to clayton they merged with the clayton presbyterian church which had been founded in the 19th century in the central part of downtown clayton and today it's one of the largest and most influential presbyterian congregations in the entire country in the mostly single-family central part of davis place there are some two family houses and uh that's fairly unusual in this st louis area usually in st louis if there's a two family house there's a whole street of them but here they're integrated into the single family houses but they were foresighted in the planning of this neighborhood in providing for multi-family properties on the hanley avenue side and on the brentwood boulevard side but that became a very fashionable place to live if you wanted apartment living during that period and those are still pretty good examples of mid-century architecture also the monumental gates are all on the brentwood side rather than on the on the hanley avenue side they're set back one building from the apartment row that faces brentwood davis place and polo drive are separate subdivisions still today and actually there's no connection between them there's no street that that links the two of them together although their history is one history of the country

Channel: Clayton Community Foundation

Views: 169

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 3kGCJQClY8M

Length: 4min 39sec (279 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021