United States · Missouri · St. Louis
Lewis Place, St. Louis — Area Guide & Where to Stay
A stone gate on North Taylor Avenue guards the one way into Lewis Place, the St. Louis private street that voted down its own racial covenant.
About Lewis Place
Where to stay in Lewis Place
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No hotel stands inside the gate. Beds for a stay here sit south across Delmar Boulevard in the Central West End, where the hotels gather near North Kingshighway Boulevard and Lindell Boulevard about a kilometre and a half from the Lewis Place parkway. MetroLink's Red and Blue lines both call at Central West End station, roughly two kilometres south, so the trip up works without a car.
Drivers come north on North Taylor Avenue. If you want the parkway houses and the gate, one morning on foot covers the whole street.
About Lewis Place
What are the main landmarks in Lewis Place?
The gate is the landmark here. Its classical stonework, borrowed from Roman triumphal arches, marks the east end of Lewis Place at North Taylor Avenue, and behind it a planted parkway runs down the middle of the street between two rows of houses raised between 1890 and 1928. Barnett, Haynes & Barnett drew several.
Ranken Technical College holds the blocks east of the gate at 4431 Finney Avenue, while Beckett Park keeps a playground and basketball courts further north along the same avenue. The Saint Louis Chess Club and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts both stand outside the four boundary streets, south-west in the Central West End and south-east in Grand Center.
What is the history of Lewis Place?
Julius Pitzman laid the street out in 1890 on Lewis family land, one of the private places he planned across St. Louis after Benton Place. Houses filled it by 1928. A racial covenant then bound the deeds, and in the 1940s the attorney Robert Witherspoon and Fredda Witherspoon, who led the Missouri Conference of the NAACP, arranged purchases by fair-skinned Black buyers who voted the restriction down once they held enough of the street.
Shelley v. Kraemer settled the wider question in 1948, in a suit over a house on Labadie Avenue. The Hodiamont streetcar crossed the south of the neighbourhood on its own right-of-way until the last St. Louis line quit in 1966. The National Register of Historic Places took in the Lewis Place Historic District on September 15, 1980.
Where is Lewis Place?
Dr. Martin Luther King Drive closes the north of Lewis Place, Delmar Boulevard the south, Newstead Avenue the east and Walton Avenue the west.
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Updated September 2026