Pine Street YMCA

A four-story brick building on a corner, rising above a raised, stone-trimmed basement in a plain early-twentieth-century institutional manner. Its two street fronts are handled alike: a regular grid of rectangular windows with stone sills climbs to a top floor of round-arched windows with keystones beneath a corbeled brick cornice. Entrances with small hoods open near the canted corner. The walls are otherwise unornamented brick, the emphasis on solidity and the arcaded top rather than applied detail.

The Black community of St. Louis built its own YMCA after the national organization refused Black members. In 1887 John Boyer Vashon, principal of Colored School No. 10 — for whom Vashon High School was later named — founded a YMCA for Black men; it was not accepted into the Metropolitan St. Louis YMCA until 1912. The Pine Street building, at Pine Street and Ewing Avenue in Mill Creek Valley, was dedicated on March 23, 1919, and in the last days of World War I it fed and housed segregated Black troops awaiting deployment. With a swimming pool, gymnasium, dormitory rooms, meeting rooms, and a cafeteria, it became the social center of Black St. Louis and a base for its civil-rights organizing: the local NAACP met there, activists gathered for A. Philip Randolph's 1940s March on Washington Movement, and the Y ran a children's camp, Camp Rivercliff, funded by an annual "Y Circus" that drew performers including Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. After the national YMCA integrated in 1957, the Pine Street branch was razed in 1960 with the rest of Mill Creek Valley.