A reader asked where is/was Vine Street. His great great grandfather J.C. Quinn worked at St. Louis Saw Works at 116 and 118 Vine Street in the 1860s and 70s. His son W.D. Quinn started a saw shop in 1903 which is still in business today located in north St. Louis County. This advertisement is from 1867. The image is from the Northern Illinois University website which says the owning institution is the St. louis Mercantile Library.
When you search for Vine Street on Google Maps it doesn’t come up. You get Vine Ave which is near Gravois Rd in St. Louis County. Several streets were renamed over the years for various reasons in St. Louis, but this wasn’t one of them.
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With clues like the age of the ad and the low number of the address, it must be near the riverfront. A place to look is Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis from 1876 (A handy Google-maps-esque stitching of the map). And there it is. Vine Street ran for four blocks from the riverfront to 4th street one block south of Washington Ave.
The St. louis Saw Works would have been about where #21 is marked on the south side of Vine west of Main (1st) Street.
Vine Street is long gone. It was destroyed along with the buildings for the clearance of the riverfront for something to be determined in a Depression-Era make-work project funded through a bond issue passed in a sham election in order to reduce the real estate supply. The area sat as a parking lot until the Arch and environs were built in the 1960s.
So the answer to the question, “Where is Vine Street?” It’s lost to the sands of time.
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