I forgot how amazing the Samuel Cupples House is; perhaps because it’s now on a pedestrian mall in SLU (admittedly justifiable due to the poor treatment of pedestrians in America), it’s just not a place I would accidentally drive by with out-of-town visitors. Perhaps what is most interesting of course is that it was once on a section of Pine Street lined with other houses, though admittedly not nearly as grand.
It’s interesting actually; there were plenty of private streets where Cupples could have built, but instead he chose a upper-class, but certainly not the most opulent street in late Nineteenth Century St. Louis to build his mansion. Note the Sanborn map above; originally, he owned a large property across the street with what are support buildings for his house; the boiler was there, so I presume there was a steam pipe leading across the street to the house.
Perhaps one of the best examples of Romanesque Revival architecture in the city, if not the country, we are fortunate that it has survived, when so many other mansions have fallen in Grand Center.
Cupples made his fortune in a city that promised great wealth to anyone with a good idea and business acumen, and the Cupples Station warehouses were his brainchild.
Read the National Register For Historic Places nomination form here.