What's Up with Ceilings?

Historic Lafayette Square in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up, has some of the oldest buildings in the city. Just south of downtown, the neighborhood was built by the early merchants that made their fortune from shipping and trade on the Mississippi River. The tiny park that sits in the center of the neighborhood is surrounded by one of the oldest wrought iron fences in the country. The area was in steady decline until the 1980’s when the urban pioneers went homesteading, buying up some of the places for just a dollar and committing to invest enough money to restore them to their former glory.

Inside, the buildings needed a lot of work. Some of them had been sectioned into rooming houses and cheap hotels. Most of them originally had three levels and some twenty or thirty rooms. All of the rooms shared some features in common; most had fireplaces that had been bricked over in favor of large cast iron steam radiators that heated the rooms. Most had dark mahogany or oak woodwork that had been covered with countless layers of lead-based paint. Some of the lattice and plaster walls and ceilings were in sad repair and covered with layers of wallpaper, paint, and then more wallpaper. A lot of the ceilings had been covered with intricately pressed tin that also had been painted over several times throughout the years. The rooms were all large and the ceilings were tall, that was the fashion of the day. Then came the hung, or dropped ceiling with the fluorescent lighting, the look of the fifties and sixties.