ST. LOUIS • On Thursday morning in Old North St. Louis, a tractor-trailer toting an oversize load rumbled down Wright Street, past rows of vacant buildings with boarded-up and broken-out windows. It carried a steel shipping container, one of nine, to drop off on a vacant lot.

As a group of toddlers, watched by their grandmother, played together at Wingmann Park, neighbors perched on the side of the road near Wright and 14th streets. They sipped coffee and murmured about the strange new project.

Gina Sheridan, 39, watched as mallets banged against corrugated steel, circular saws sent sparks flying and a crane lifted each 40-foot-long, 9-foot-high containers to stack them like Legos. After two years of planning, Gina beamed at the scene.

“Now, to see the house actually coming together, it’s mind-blowing.”

The Sheridans are bringing a new idea to Old North St. Louis.

Gina and Travis Sheridan see the vacant lot across from their house as perfect for a shipping containers-as house project. It’s a little less than a quarter of an acre, but large enough for a house made out of nine stacked shipping containers. Looking south, it has a picturesque view of the Gateway Arch.

The Sheridans consider themselves nontraditional people, and wanted a house to reflect that. Living a life of “re’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle), investing in places that need investment and encouraging innovation are core beliefs the couple shares. They celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in September and moved here from California more than six years ago in part for the affordable real estate.

In 2013, the Sheridans went on an informal house tour in Old North St. Louis and fell in love with the neighborhood. It was the community and the people who made the decision easy, Gina said. When they were moving in to the renovated, classic red brick walk-up duplex they currently own, people they had never met stopped by to help.

Travis, 44, is president of Venture Cafe Global Institute, a firm based in the Cortex District that aims to connect local innovators. Gina is branch manager at the Lewis and Clark branch of the St. Louis County library.

Both have good credit, but they struggled to obtain financing to buy their duplex because of the shaky mortgage market in north city. They approached several banks, and even talked with one for months, before being denied.

“She basically said, ‘Look you qualify for this loan but you should probably just pick a different neighborhood,’” Gina said in a February interview. Eventually they found a bank with a mortgage product that worked.

The couple always wanted to build a house, but in a way that fit Old North and their values. “We wanted to honor the last 200 years of history in St. Louis, but be ready for the next 200,” Travis said.

It might not seem like a container house fits the neighborhood. The Sheridans said they feel it does because St. Louis, nestled next to a major economic conduit, has a long history in shipping. The steel boxes the Sheridans will soon call home came from a container yard in Illinois just across the Mississippi River.

They had their eye on an empty lot across from their duplex, owned by the Land Reutilization Authority, the city’s land bank.

LRA became the city’s biggest owner of abandoned property because of forces unleashed in the 1960s, as people and businesses left for the suburbs and unpaid real-estate taxes piled up. State law at the time required the city to file suit against each individual parcel of tax-delinquent land to attempt to collect revenue — an unfeasible task.

City Hall at the time decided St. Louis needed a state law that would allow it to hold, maintain and eventually sell vacant property with a clear title for redevelopment, in hopes of revitalizing decaying neighborhoods. In 1971, the LRA — the nation’s first city-run land bank — was born.

The LRA now owns almost half of the city’s vacant property, which accounts for 19 percent of all real estate in St. Louis, according to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s vacancy report.

The Sheridans paid $3,500 for the vacant lot. They’re determined to show people that out-of-the-box, or in this case inside-the-box, thinking can transform property long considered dead.

The Sheridans first considered a traditional home, but quotes landed in the $350,000 range, which was more than they wanted to spend. They looked for other ideas and liked the principles behind building a container house. The project gives the containers a new life instead of being discarded or recycled another way.

They learned a lot from Zack and Brie Smithey, who built a roughly 3,100 square-foot container home in St. Charles.

The cost of the house, made out of eight steel shipping containers, was roughly $130,000.

After touring the Smithey home, the Sheridans drew up plans and consulted with Zack Smithey on design.

The first shipping container home was built in the U.S. in 2006, according to containerhomeplans.org, and since then several have popped up in cities such as Kansas City and New Orleans, most with an upscale feel.

The Smitheys’ interior is mostly made of reused and re-purposed materials, all done with a lot of color and eye-popping decor.

The Sheridans’ container house also will have artistic flair. In addition to a couple of pieces of Zack Smithey’s, they’ll feature work by St. Louis artists Damon Davis, Basil Kincaid, Faring Purth and Diana Zeng. The entire third floor will be devoted to art.

The Sheridans said the city has been overwhelmingly supportive of the project.

“We have thousands of vacant lots in the city,” Krewson said through her spokesman Koran Addo. “Creative ideas like this are exactly what we need.”

Buying the vacant lot, which was owned by the LRA for almost four decades, was easy, Travis said.

The Sheridans had to show construction plans, a nest egg for the project and the capability to get financing for the project. Just like when they wanted to buy their duplex in Old North, the last part of the process, however, wasn’t easy.

“Banks would often say, ‘Yes, this looks exciting, but all you need to do is put 30 to 40 percent down,’” Travis said. The Smithey house wouldn’t count as a comparable sale because there was never a mortgage taken out. With nothing similar in terms of price or structure to base a loan on, they started to lose hope. They finally talked to the right bank.

Enterprise Bank & Trust offered to look at other markets similar to St. Louis. Those included cities of comparable size with container houses.

The Sheridans hope their 3,000 square-foot, three-level house in Old North will be move-in ready by sometime in December. It will have three bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms.

It’s not often that Old North St. Louis residents see a new, innovative housing project go up in the neighborhood.

Some onlookers on Thursday morning remembered days past. Gilbert Edgar, 60, grew up in the neighborhood. In two layers of flannel, a distressed black newsboy hat and a pair of old white sneakers, he watched the avant-garde idea come to life.

He reminisces about a different Old North St. Louis.

“Back when I was growing up, it was a neat place,” he said. “There were nice houses all over, and people got along with each other. Now people don’t care no more, and you got all these wannabe gangsters killing people.”

Vacant property contributes to the problem. He recalled a neighbor who was shot and killed in nearby vacant house.

Waking up to a new housing project was a pleasant surprise.

“It’s taking care of an empty, old lot that was not doing nothing,” he said. “It’ll make the neighborhood look better.”

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