Soulard

The name belongs to Antoine Soulard, a refugee of the French Revolution who arrived in St. Louis in 1794 and became Surveyor of Upper Louisiana under the Spanish. His widow, Julia Cerré Soulard, donated two half-blocks to the city in 1838 on the condition that they operate as a public market in perpetuity — a condition that has outlasted every market building on the site. The first structure went up in the 1840s; the city took title in 1850; the 1896 cyclone gutted it; the current hall dates to 1928, designed by city architect Albert Osburg after Brunelleschi's Foundling Hospital in Florence. The Soulard Farmers Market bills itself as the oldest farmers' market west of the Mississippi, which under the terms of Julia Soulard's gift it may have to remain forever.

The neighborhood filled in around it: French first, then the Germans and Bohemians of the 1848 revolutions — the district was known as Bohemian Hill — and the breweries that made the under-story literal. Natural caves beneath Soulard were ideal lagering cellars; Adam Lemp's Western Brewery and Eberhard Anheuser's Bavarian were among more than fifty operating by mid-century. The industry, the immigration, and the market made the district; the Mardi Gras tradition that still fills it each February made it famous.

The anchor stop on the ghost tour is an empty lot at 2345 South 13th Street — 'the most haunted block in Soulard,' per the Restoration Group. In 1850 Joanna Roberts bought the square block and built a 25-room mansion; she and her son Elbert lived there through the Civil War while the house was leased to the Episcopalians and physicians who founded St. Luke's Hospital. Scores of cholera patients died on the site in the 1860s. The mansion later burned; what remains is a sealed, vine-covered staircase leading up a small hill, and a reported mist that rises from the ground where the house stood.

Another tour stop is the 1870s mansion built by Dr. Franz Artzt, an Austrian physician said to remain in residence in the manner the reports prefer. The rest of the circuit runs through former taverns and row houses whose files are thinner — footsteps, presences, the standard spectral tenancy of a neighborhood where, per Putz's accounting, nearly every door has a death behind it.

The general claims keep to form: figures on the brick streets after dark, and the filed belief that the neighborhood's dead walk the market — an assertion at least as old as the market's second building. The archive rates the whole catalog as neighborhood folklore, while noting the unusual institutional arrangement: in Soulard the lore is curated by the restoration group, delivered by residents, and paid for by ticket sales that go back into the brickwork.

A certified historic district of red brick and beer money, still holding its market, still throwing its Mardi Gras, and now formally owning its dead as a preservation strategy. Julia Soulard's two half-blocks are still a market, per the terms. The 25-room mansion is a staircase. The Austrian doctor, per the report, is still home.