Compton Heights, in South St. Louis, was laid out in the 1880s and '90s as one of the city's earliest planned residential communities. Arthur Compton — for whom the neighborhood is named, though not the physicist Arthur Holly Compton who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 and grew up in Wooster, Ohio — established Compton Heights as a subdivision of large homes on curving streets, a deliberate contrast to the grid pattern of most of St. Louis. The neighborhood's showpiece is Compton Hill Reservoir Park, whose 179-foot water tower, completed in 1898, is one of only seven round water towers remaining in the United States and one of the finest examples of Romanesque Revival industrial architecture in the country.
The tower was designed to maintain water pressure throughout the system; today it's a landmark that can be climbed by the public on designated days. The neighborhood surrounding it is a remarkably intact collection of late Victorian homes — Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival, Colonial Revival — built for the merchant class of Gilded Age St. Louis. Many St. Louis neighborhoods follow this pattern: large, beautiful homes built in the 1880s and '90s, decline in the mid-20th century, and gradual reinvestment and rehabilitation by later generations who recognize what's here.