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Dividing the City: Race-Restrictive Covenants in St. Louis and St. Louis County

About the Map

For the City of St. Louis, we worked from a detailed register of St. Louis restrictions, recorded over the last century by one of the City’s major title and abstract firms. Between 1850 and 1950, this register catalogues 1941 restrictive covenants, 840 of which (43 percent) including restrictions on racial occupancy. The register lists restrictive agreements by the Recorder’s book and page number and the date recorded, and indicates the presence of a racial restriction, a reversionary clause, or an expiration date. Because the “Yes/No” recording of racial restrictions was incomplete, we examined every deed record in which that field was marked “Yes” or left blank. Of the full catalogue 414 were originally coded as racial restrictions, and 426 of the 584 restrictions in which this field was blank, were found to have racial restrictions. Of the 840 racial restrictions identified in the original register, 72 were duplicates (or filings which merely added signatories to existing restrictions) and 5 rescinded standing agreements—leaving a total of 763 unique restrictive covenants or agreements, covering about 30,000 residential parcels..

For the County, we worked from the full catalogue of plat maps (52 volumes spanning 1890-1950), as many of the restrictions were either included (or referred to) on the original plat. We then cross-checked a master list of subdivisions (n=3,358) platted between 1890 and 1950 against the County Recorders' own card file of restrictions. The card file gave us deed book and page references, allowing us to document the nature of the restriction. Not counting duplicate restrictions or renewals, we found 1,041 unique restrictive agreements (all but a handful subdivisions). covering about 75,000 residential parcels.

We copied and examined each deed record and catalogued its key elements—including the date, the type of agreement, the expiration term and date, the language of the racial restriction, the presence of other restrictions, and (when relevant) the number of signatories to the agreement. We then matched the spatial information in each record (usually a legal description, a subdivision, or city block reference) to the City of St. Louis (2003) and St. Louis County (2010) parcel data and mapped each restricted parcel (using the current GIS shapefiles as a base) by date and type of restriction.

We mapped five types of restrictions:

Petition restrictions were assembled by collecting signatures door-to-door in older and transitional neighborhoods. All but one of these were assembled in the City, and most of those were used to "hem in" the African neighborhood of "the Ville." Of the 513 petition-based restrictions, fully 90 percent were drafted and sponsored by the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange.
Subdivision restrictions, imposed at development, often ran many pages and typically included a wide range of use and building restrictions--of which racial occupancy was one. In St. Louis, 72 subdivision restrictions recorded between 1890 and 1950 account for only 9.4 percent of all restrictive agreements but—due to their scale—fully 42.6 percent of all restricted parcels. Virtually all of the restrictions in the County were subdivision-based.
Parcel restrictions were included in both transfers of individual parcels and in sales of blocks or partial blocks from landowners to small-scale developers. These lot-by-lot restrictions, covering only about 2,000 parcels by 1950, accounted for a small share of all restricted parcels and many were later absorbed by or included in larger scale subdivision or neighborhood restrictions
We also mapped the development private streets, an early form of exclusion in the Coty of St. Louis in which the racial restrictions were largely implicit.
Only two of the City’s private streets, West Cabanne Place (1905) and Thornby Place (1908) included explicit racial restrictions in their founding documents; some, such as Vandeventer Place added them later (1943).

The restrictions are mapped cumulatively from 1870 to 1950. We have not mapped the expiration of restrictions, or the extensive renewals of expiring petition restrictions surrounding the Ville in the 1940s..

The data was collected and coded by Colin Gordon in 2019-22, with assistance from staff and interns with the Metro St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, and Harvard's Commonwealth Project.. In kind and financial support was provided by the St. Louis City Recorders Office, St. Louis County Recorders Office, and St. Louis REALTORS.

The local demographics (black share of population) for 1900-1930 are mapped using census enumeration district data set developed by Alison Shertzer and colleagues. See Shertzer, Allison, Randall Walsh, and John Logan. 2016. “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930,” Historical Methods 49:4.

The interactive map was designed by Jay Bowen of the University of Iowa Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio. It was written primarily in MapLibre GL JS, an open source version of Mapbox GL JS, and uses vector tiles derived from geojson files to present the parcel data. By shedding unseen data and simplifying polygons at smaller map scales, vector tiles allowed for larger geojson data sources to be used without crashing the map.

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