The Missouri Historical Society embarked upon the Lewis Place Oral History Project for the History Happened Here program to document the street’s role in eliminating barriers to fair housing in St. Louis. The project also sought to record the memories of current residents in their ongoing efforts to safeguard its legacy and sustain the neighborhood. William A. Lewis and family began developing Lewis Place in 1890. It is a three-block street with a center parkway lined on both sides with beautiful homes built between 1890 and 1928. Seventy-eight homes comprise the Lewis Place Historic District which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Lewis Place neighborhood encompasses surrounding city streets to the north, south, and east of the historic private place and is bound by Dr. Martin Luther King Drive to the north, Delmar Boulevard to the south, Newstead Avenue to the east, and Walton Avenue to the west. Lewis Place was the first private street where the racial line was breached. In 1928, fourteen white Lewis Place residents initiated a pact valid for twenty years prohibiting the sale, lease, or rent to African Americans. In 1943, African American couple Clifford and Carrie Robbins purchased 4739 Lewis Place, five years shy of the expiration of the covenant. Dentist Richard Layne and his wife Mae, the owner of a millinery shop, purchased 2 Lewis Place. White residents immediately went into action, suing the Laynes, who had moved into their new home, and illegally squatting in the Robbins’ home. African Americans continued to buy property on Lewis Place through straw parties - white buyers who then transferred the deed to Black families. By October of 1944, while the legal battles were still unresolved, an estimated seventeen Black families had bought homes on Lewis Place. By 1946, when it was still necessary for African Americans to use a straw party to purchase property on Lewis Place, only two white families remained. African American residents took over the homeowner’s association and negated the racially restrictive agreement. These early battles set the stage for the ground-breaking Shelley v. Kraemer decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948.