Lafayette Square gathers around a four-acre park set aside in the 1836 city plan, one of St. Louis's oldest and most beautiful residential neighborhoods. The neighborhood's elegant Victorian townhouses and mansions were built primarily between 1850 and 1890, when Lafayette Square was home to some of the city's wealthiest families. Then came the tornado of 1896, which devastated the neighborhood and accelerated the departure of wealthy residents to the new suburbs along Lindell Boulevard and in the western suburbs.
Like so many St. Louis neighborhoods, Lafayette Square spent much of the 20th century in decline. The park itself deteriorated, the mansions were subdivided into rooming houses, and the neighborhood's grand architecture crumbled. The turnaround began in the 1970s, when a group of urban pioneers — the term used at the time — began purchasing and rehabilitating the historic houses.
Block by block, decade by decade, Lafayette Square rebuilt itself. Today it is one of the most sought-after addresses in the city, its restored Italianate and Second Empire mansions meticulously maintained, its park hosting farmers markets and concerts. It is proof that a city can recover from decades of disinvestment if the bones are there — and in Lafayette Square, the bones were magnificent.