The first St. Louisans began using what is now the Shaw Neighborhood as agricultural common fields in 1769. At the time they designated the area as the Prairie des Noyers or Meadow of the Walnut Trees. When the fields fell into disuse, other owners lay claim to them. The resulting disputes over ownership did not clear the federal courts until the 1830s. Until then, no one could safely take up ownership and begin to develop land in the Shaw area.

More than any other person, hardware merchant Henry Shaw shaped the course of the Shaw Neighborhood. Arriving in St. Louis in 1819, Shaw accumulated a fortune before he was forty and decided to spend the remainder of his life developing a botanical garden in his adopted city. By the mid-1850s, Shaw had acquired several large tracts of land in the area that now bears his name. In 1858, he began the construction of what became the Missouri Botanical Garden adjacent to his country home (named "Tower Grove"). The state of Missouri accepted the gift of Tower Grove Park in 1867.

Shaw's Garden and the new park became an important St. Louis attraction during the decade after the Civil War, and two of the city's horsecar lines extended tracks into the area. The opening of the Pacific Railroad (now the Missouri Pacific) along the northern edge of the area in the mid-1850s also inspired development. In spite of these developments, the Shaw area still seemed too far away from the city for a large number of St. Louisans to call it home.

After the extension of the city's boundaries from Grand Avenue to west of Forest Park in 1876, real estate developers paid more attention to the Shaw area. In the 1880s alone, more than 60 percent of all the house lots in the community were offered for sale. Some close-knit urban development began to occur, but most of the area awaited the arrival of electric powered transit (at first cable and then the trolley car) which doubled and tripled the speed of travel between Shaw and the central business district.

After electric-powered transit arrived in the late 1880s, Shaw experienced a real estate boom. By the mid-1920s, almost all of Shaw was built up, with the majority of the dwellings being two- and four-flat buildings. Although a few wealthy families occupied single family homes in the Shaw area, most families were headed by white-collar workers who labored in the central business district and merchants of service employees from the shops and institutions along Grand Boulevard.

In 1930 Shaw had residents from nearly all of St. Louis racial and ethnic nationality groups, many of whom were sons and daughters of city residents who purchased or rented their first home in the community. Through the Great Depression, most Shaw residents kept their jobs, but those who owned the residential structures made minimal repairs through hard economic times and the World War II.

After the War, Shaw building owners found it difficult to obtain loans on their structures, and in the prosperous decades after the war, the number of rental properties in Shaw increased as many of those who could do so moved to newer housing. Generally those who moved away were replaced by those with lower incomes.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, community residents and area institutions began to organize to regain some of the Shaw area's faded elegance. The Missouri Botanical Garden, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis and the St. Louis University Medical Center made efforts to stabilize the community areas around them. These efforts were matched by grass-roots community efforts like the Shaw Neighborhood Association, the Tiffany Community Association, and the DeSales Housing Corporation.

In the mid-1980s, the Shaw neighborhood showed signs of vitality, with the coming of new residents, significant rehabilitation, new residential construction and active community organization, all contributing to the strengthening of the Shaw community.

-excerpted from St. Louis Neighborhoods brochure put out by the Missouri Historical Society in the mid 1980s

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This Page Last Modified: Monday, 19-Nov-2007 16:43:04 CST