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Description
Soulard neighborhood, St Louis Missouri, May 7th, 2022.

The one story section on the right is the solarium (green house). Dr Arzt kept lemon and orange trees there in addition to some colorful parrots.

I've read that somewhere in the house the doctor kept the first goldfish in St. Louis. That kind of blows my mind and reminds me of what a totally different world people lived in back then.

Sometime after the doctors death, the inside of the house was divided up and it became a boarding house. The solarium was torn down and replaced with an addition built of red brick. The current owners have removed that addition and have recreated the original solarium.

Many of the remaining old buildings in the area are (at least to my eyes) are pleasant to look at, and most of them are made of red brick built right up on front of their lot, right close to the street (row houses mostly). So a white marble house built in the center of a lot really stands out.

Dr Arzt had the house built in 1876 and it is apparently an impressive example of Italianate country style house built with Second Empire architecture (whatever that means).

Prominent St. Louis physician. Born in Austria, Dr. Arzt came to the United States in 1867. He practiced for many years in St. Louis where he built a mansion in 1876. The house owed its steel beam construction, the first in a St. Louis home, to Dr. Arzt's adaptive use of old railroad rails. It boasted the city's first residential hot-water heating system as well as its first natural air-conditioning system, made possible by a series of flues with both floor and ceiling vents.

Although underground caves run through the Soulard area of St. Louis, none existed under Arzt's home until he created them himself, complete with stalagmites and stalactites imported from around the world. Aside from his professional and architectural accomplishments, Dr. Arzt won accolades in his avocational field of botany. His greenhouse was one of the first built at a private residence.

Dr. Arzt was a linguist of note, having at his command at least four languages-German, Bohemian, Slovak and Hungarian. A member of the St. Louis Naturalist Club, he continued to practice in St. Louis until his death in 1923 (age 78).

Description
Soulard neighborhood, St Louis Missouri, May 7th, 2022.

The one story section on the right is the solarium (green house). Dr Arzt kept lemon and orange trees there in addition to some colorful parrots.

I've read that somewhere in the house the doctor kept the first goldfish in St. Louis. That kind of blows my mind and reminds me of what a totally different world people lived in back then.

Sometime after the doctors death, the inside of the house was divided up and it became a boarding house. The solarium was torn down and replaced with an addition built of red brick. The current owners have removed that addition and have recreated the original solarium.

Many of the remaining old buildings in the area are (at least to my eyes) are pleasant to look at, and most of them are made of red brick built right up on front of their lot, right close to the street (row houses mostly). So a white marble house built in the center of a lot really stands out.

Dr Arzt had the house built in 1876 and it is apparently an impressive example of Italianate country style house built with Second Empire architecture (whatever that means).

Prominent St. Louis physician. Born in Austria, Dr. Arzt came to the United States in 1867. He practiced for many years in St. Louis where he built a mansion in 1876. The house owed its steel beam construction, the first in a St. Louis home, to Dr. Arzt's adaptive use of old railroad rails. It boasted the city's first residential hot-water heating system as well as its first natural air-conditioning system, made possible by a series of flues with both floor and ceiling vents.

Although underground caves run through the Soulard area of St. Louis, none existed under Arzt's home until he created them himself, complete with stalagmites and stalactites imported from around the world. Aside from his professional and architectural accomplishments, Dr. Arzt won accolades in his avocational field of botany. His greenhouse was one of the first built at a private residence.

Dr. Arzt was a linguist of note, having at his command at least four languages-German, Bohemian, Slovak and Hungarian. A member of the St. Louis Naturalist Club, he continued to practice in St. Louis until his death in 1923 (age 78).