The dilapidated Clemens Mansion just north of downtown looks like a horror movie set…. Nightmare on Cass Street. With its faded antebellum columns, collapsing porches and lean-to construction, it seems likely to fall over (or fall in) at any minute.

It’s hard to believe that this decrepit old house is set to become a centerpiece — a “legacy” property — of the $8.1 billion north side redevelopment plan proposed by developer Paul McKee.

Central West End developer and rehabber Bob Wood is partnering with McKee on the project, which will turn the 150-year-old mansion and adjoining chapel into senior apartments and community center.

“We’re talking to the Missouri History Museum housing a museum honoring the heritage of the surrounding neighborhood,” said Dan Holak, who is heading up the project for Wood. “They would occupy part of the chapel building and we’re also talking to the Missouri Botanical Garden about doing some landscaping and putting in an urban garden.”

For years, McKee secretly bought more than 850 properties on the city’s near north side in a two-square-mile area. He announced last year the redevelopment plan and is negotiating nearly $400 million in tax increment financing with the city of St. Louis. He said he plans to turn the mostly vacant properties into 10,000 new homes and millions of square feet of office, warehouse and retail space to the area over 15 years. At the end of last year, the Missouri Department of Economic Development awarded McKee $20 million in tax credits for the project. McKee bought the Clemens mansion in 2005.

Wood is also hoping to finance the $13 million Clemens project through historic and low income tax credits. A model for the development is Wood’s work on the Franklin School at 814 N. 19th Street. A former St. Louis public school, designed by famed school architect William Ittner and opened in 1911, Franklin was closed in 1995. Wood renovated it into 75 senior apartments and reopened it in the growing neighborhood now known as Downtown West in 2007.

“The condition of Franklin School when we started there was pretty nasty,” Holak said. “With funding, we’re confident we can make the Clemens mansion work.”

I met with Holak and architect David Lorentz at the Clemens mansion on a cold December afternoon.

At first, I was content to just walk around the outside of the property, which includes the 55,000-square-foot mansion, an addition on the back of the house, and an adjoining 3,000 square foot chapel building. Wood’s plan, Lorentz said, is to convert the main house into 49 senior apartments. The first floor of the chapel would be residential, and the second floor would be the public museum space.

Holak and Lorentz then pulled out their flashlights and invited me inside the mansion. We stopped first on the front porch and Holak pointed out the distinctive columns. With everything else falling down around, how do they stay up?

“They’re cast iron,” Holak said, and sure enough, I knocked on the two-story high columns and they “clanged” like an old kettle. Maybe this house, built in 1860 and listed as one of the city’s most “endangered” landmarks, might hold up after all.

But then we went inside.

I’ve been inside a lot of old and deteriorated properties, but this one was, well, the creepiest I’d ever seen. We walked a bit down the main hallway and glanced inside dark rooms filled with trash, crumbling walls and exposed wires. I’m not a haunted-house guy, but even this one seemed ripe for a ghost or two as a cold wind rattled through the old walls.

Holak and Lorentz were unfazed. They calmly pointed out the distinctive hardwood floors — “we can save that” — and some of the mouldings and architectural detail that were dirtied but salvageable. Lorentz flashed his light on an elevator shaft that he said would work. Holak said that conditions at Franklin School were just as bad, or worse, and talked about the rehab like any other home improvement project. He added that if financing gets approved, his company would start construction this spring or summer and it would be completed the summer of 2011. As he talked, I could almost imagine a warm and bright historic home filled with “active” seniors. Almost.

Ten minutes was about all I could handle in that place. After we shook hands, I walked to my car and glanced back at the building. I thought about all the people who had lived there — from the Clemens family to Roman Catholic nuns to Buddhist monks. But did Mark Twain? I don’t know, but it would have made a good story.

(Part II: History of the mansion’s inhabitants and the Mark Twain connection.)

Lindell Boulevard is one of the city’s best-known streets; it began around 1800 as a small path in the prairie leading to a spring near what is now Maryland and Euclid avenues. French colonials and others made their way from downtown to the spring to drink, gossip, quarrel and relax, according to CWE historian Mary Bartley in her book, St. Louis Lost. The street was named for Peter Lindell, a 19th century merchant who made his fortune in trade along the Ohio River and later as a holder of extensive real estate in the area.

Lindell Boulevard was the main street platted in the subdivision of the Lindell farm west of Grand Avenue. The subdivision of their farm into straight wide streets with large blocks was unique at a time when most additions were still conforming to the same old irregularities.

Later, in the early 20th century, city planner and architect George Kessler envisioned Lindell as one in a series of grand city boulevards that would connect parks, residential and business areas. In part, this plan was realized. During the World’s Fair of 1904, Lindell was an important route from the city to the fair; it’s westernmost section, from Kingshighway to Skinker, hosted an amusement park called the “Pike.” The grand mansions, institutions and apartment buildings that lined the street boasted some of the nation’s finest architects.

Fast-forward a hundred years. “Lindell seems schizophrenic,” said Carolyn Toft, former director of Landmarks Association. While some blocks retain their Victorian glory, many historic buildings are gone, including the Castleman-Mackay mansion at Spring and Lindell, now a parking lot for the next-door Masonic Temple.

The blocks east of Vandeventer to Sarah have been especially prone to change. A series of commercial buildings have been built and torn down from the old Windsor Hotel to the recent demolition of the San Luis apartments. Strip malls have been built and bland 1960s-style office buildings still stand.

Remember the Cinerama? This was a popular movie theater that I attended as a child. Built in 1962, it was billed as having one of the largest indoor screens in the world; 100 feet wide on a curve. I’ll never forget George C. Scott yelling and World War II army tanks marching across the screen during “Patton.” It’s at the site where the Walgreens now stands.

I do remember — but never visited, I promise — the old Playboy Club on Lindell near Vandeventer. It was Hugh Hefner’s fourth club, at 3914 Lindell. Also, the Windsor Hotel, built in the 1920s but torn down in 1993, occupied what is now the American Cancer Center Hope Lodge.

These blocks of jumbled urban architecture have been slowly upgraded with newer buildings which employ brick facades and architectural character lacking in the older ones. The Hope Lodge, the Walgreens, and yes, even the new McDonalds may not win awards, but they do blend better into the streetscape.

One new building which did win an award is the 3949 Lindell apartment building which opened this year. It’s a four-story, 200 unit structure which caters to students, staff and employees of nearby St. Louis University, Washington University and the Grand Center entertainment district. On Oct. 9, Mayor Francis Slay recognized the apartment complex as the city’s “Best Economic Project.

There’s still a long way to go to reduce the street’s “schizophrenia,” but perhaps someday Lindell will return to the grand urban boulevard that would make Peter Lindell proud.

I can be incredibly annoying when I’m driving around town with passengers in the car.

By virtue of publishing books on St. Louis history for nearly 20 years, I’ve slowly accumulated tiny bits of St. Louis historical trivia. Occasionally, I can impress an out-of-town visitor, but mostly it’s my kids who bear the brunt of my utterances.

Also, now that I’ve been on the planet for 50 years, and in St. Louis for 41 of those, historical facts are now mixing with my own past into one big grab-bag of entirely useless bits of information — that is, useless until there’s a St. Louis category at a trivia night I’m attending.

Years ago my older kids started calling me “Mr. History.” I thought it was out of respect, but I noticed that they’d always giggle after they called me that. One of them finally told me they watched a cartoon where one of the villains was, you guessed it, Mr. History.  He would show up and start spouting random historical facts, and punishing the other characters by “boring them to bits.”

Thanks, kids.

But I don’t take the history thing too seriously. It’s not that I even LIKED history that much in high school and college. For myself, it was just another class requirement to complete, easier than math and less memorization than French. But in my career as a journalist, editor, PR guy and publisher, I’ve had to master quickly whatever subject area I was writing about. Believe it or not, I spent five years learning to be an “expert” on the U. S. space program when I worked at Boeing.

So becoming a publisher of local history books has helped me to master a lot of PR-worthy historical blurbs, although I’d never profess to be an expert. I’ll leave that to the wonderful authors I’ve had a chance to publish. But I have come to love the rich tapestry of history that permeates our river city.

I was on a recent interview with John Carney of KMOX, promoting my own book called “Counting Chickens.” John threw me a curveball when he asked me to name three surprising things about St.. Louis history. I was stumped to come up with anything quickly; luckily he went to a break and gave me a few minutes.  I forget now which three I came up with except for the nickname of the 04 Wydown streetcar line: the “dinky.”

To illustrate my St. Louis historical “bent,” let’s say you’re captive in my car for a ride to St. Louis University, where I’m picking up my niece Aileen to bring her back to our house for dinner (she’s a student there). Below is a list of landmarks I couldn’t help commenting on. Did you know…

• at Kingshighway and Waterman, the Central Reform Congregation is the city’s only active Jewish synagogue? The temple, built in 2001, is at the site of the old Plymouth Hotel, which eventually became run-down, vacant and crime-ridden before being torn down.

• at Kingshighway and Washington is the “holy corners” historical district. In one two-block area you can see three different types of architectural columns in front of various churches: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian.

• at Olive east of Euclid is the site of Bowood Farms Nursery. The building was formerly an auto repair shop. Farther east on Olive was the filming site for the 1993 movie, “King of the Hill.” It was director Steven Soderbergh’s first movie.

• Speaking of movies, nearby on Westminster Place, actress Susan Sarandon rented a house while filming the movie “White Palace” in 1990. Westminster Place is also the street where writer T.S. Eliot grew up.

• At Olive and Taylor is a monument to the old Gaslight Square. Even I was too young to see the entertainment district in its heyday, but Woody Allen, Tina Turner, the Smothers Brothers, Barbra Streisand and many others performed in those bars in the early 1960s.

• at Lindell near Vandeventer is the site of the old Playboy’s Club. It later became a coffee shop and now is vacant. No, I never visited but I heard stories…

• Farther east on Lindell, past Vandeventer, is the Moolah Theatre and Lounge. It once was a meeting place for the “shriners,” the guys who ride around on tiny motorcycles in parades and operate hospitals for disabled children. It’s also where I worked as a janitor while I was a student at St. Louis University. I’d come in early on weekend mornings to clean up from the “meetings” the night before. Let’s put it this way: those guys knew how to party.

• at Spring and Lindell is the renovated Coronado Ballroom. It was once a fashionable hotel, hosting notables such as President Harry Truman, Queen Marie of Romania, film stars Rudolph Valentino and Barbara Stanwick, Charles Lindbergh and jazz singer Mel Torme. More personal history: it also hosted me for a semester in 1980 when it was NOT renovated and I had a middle-Eastern roommate named Said Waked. Some names you never forget.

I’m nearly halfway through my sentimental journey to St. Louis University, and there’s so much more to tell… but I wouldn’t want to bore you to bits.

The San Luis wasn’t unlike many nursing homes I’d visited in my life; drab, dated and undistinguished. But it was clean and the residents seemed happy to see us.
Last week, as I drove on Lindell near the “new” Cathedral Basilica, the street suddenly changed from two lanes to one and a small river of water flowed down the street to the sewer. As I drove farther east, I realized the water was part of the demolition of the San Luis. Driving slowly past, I saw large earth-moving equipment and men with jackhammers. The San Luis was coming down.

What I didn’t know when I visited with my daughter was that the San Luis was originally built as an upscale hotel in the early 1960s called the DeVille. The archdiocese bought it in 1973 and operated it as an apartment complex for low-income residents until 2007.

Last month, the St. Louis Preservation Board voted to allow the Archdiocese to tear down the building to create a 150-space parking lot.

Preservationists had sought to save the building for two reasons. They cite it as an excellent example of mid-20th century architecture that matches some of the other nearby buildings. They also say a surface parking lot would ruin the Lindell streetscape, which features a series of high rise apartment buildings.

Meanwhile, the archdiocese stated they need more parking for events at the Cathedral and for Rosati-Kain high school. The architect for the parking lot said the building is in poor shape. My guess is that the archdiocese, with its own financial struggles, realized the long-term cost of maintaining the building had exceeded the demolition cost. With a poor economy and sluggish real estate market, there was little prospect of someone renovating it.

I had lunch with a preservationist last week and she said the best use of the building would have been “adaptive reuse,” or renovation. But she admitted that the appearance of the building itself did not generate a big public outcry over its demolition. This was not a “turn of the century” grand apartment building with 12-foot ceilings, ornamental terra cotta and “classic lines.” This was an old hotel built in the 1960s that was converted into senior housing and then left vacant. Even 28th Ward Alderman Lyda Krewson, a longtime supporter of Central West End renovation, said she reluctantly supported the parking lot plan.

The building, for many years bustling with hotel guests, senior citizens and even child carolers has now entered into its own “Silent Night.”