September 4, 1906 - 108 years-ago today, University City was incorporated. Edward Garner Lewis, the founder & 3-term Mayor of University City, moved to St Louis in the 1890s. Gardner owned two magazines, the Womens Farm Journal & the Womens Magazine. Outgrowing his downtown location, & realizing Forest Park was going to be the site of the upcoming Worlds Fair, Gardner purchased 85 acres near the edge of the park, land that would become the nucleas of University City. In 1903 at the end of Bonhomme, he built the Womens Magazine Building, shown in this postcard. At its top, he installed the worlds largest carbon-arc searchlight, which was first lit on April 30, 1904; the opening night of the Fair. And with the Fair closed on Sundays, and him not,it was like a moth being drawn to a flame. Before the Fair ended that fall, the Womens Magazine had the largest circulation of any magazine in America. When University City was incorporated in 1906, & the name of Bonhomme was changed to Delmar. The Delmar streetcar looped through the corner of the Delmar Gardens Amusement Park & made its return to St Louis, which is why that area is now known as the Delmar Loop. The Womens Magazine Building became the City Hall for University City on November 1, 1930. The searchlight, purchased from GE, weighs 8 tons, measures 80 inches, & projects 1 billion candlepower, and is still lit several times a year. It was once featured in a segment of Living St Louis, & can be viewed on the Channel 9 web site or youtube. Lewis would later face mail fraud charges, which were considered politically motivated. After he was acquitted, Congress admonished the Postmaster, & even suggested Gardner be given $1.5M for his trouble. To his credit, he turned it down. But he was later convicted on other mail fraud charges. After moving to California, Lewis founded another city, Atascadero. It was meant to be a Utopian community, & was partially laid-out by Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New Yorks Central Park. Edward Gardner Lewis, founder & 3-term Mayor of University City, died August 10, 1950 at the age of 82.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 05:02:58 +0000
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