St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 107

BXPLORIMG TH 0 TTli m) mWmmiww story ft photos by Jinny Ravenscroft Danzer rfCononVnewrS1of Sunset Hills Slats Population: A small city still, with only 4,915 residents. (Compare it with close neighbor Kirkwood at as in Clayton, extra "bodies" roughly 15,000 come to Sunset Hills for a 40-hour work week and then head home again. Size: Six and a half hilly square miles bounded approximately by vvaison, LinaDergn, uenny, Uravois and the Meramec River. (Not incorporated until '57.) Median home price: $147,900, most on one-acre lots. Median family income: $58,530.

Assets: Mostly single-family homes; Friendship Village retirement community; two major parks (Laumeier and Powder Valley); low population density; bounty of trees; farmland and wildlife such as deer, foxes, turkeys (and an occasional coyote) add a bucolic, rural feeling. And it's a golf mecca. Three golf courses Sunset Country Club, a tight, hilly 18-hole private course with pro Gary Fee; Tapawingo National Golf Club, a hilly public course designed by Gary Player on 500-plus acres with lots of water hazards, 18 holes scheduled to open June 1 (golf director John Kokoruda); Sunset Lakes Golf Club, a fairly level 18-hole course with golf pro Tom LaBarbara. One driving range, Sunset Tee Golf Range. There's an abundance of parks.

In addition to Watson Trails, a woodsy city park with lake, trails and picnic tables. Sunset Hills boasts two major parks: The Missouri Conservation Dept's Powder Valley Nature Center (in Kirkwood but entered through Sunset Hills), and St. Louis County's Laumeier Sculpture Park. $10,000 Dollar Question: How did Kirkwood's pool get to Sunset Hills? Things Change: High-priced homes, especially in the new Tapawingo development where house and lot prices range from $600,000 to over $1 million; new streets everywhere you look. What the Hills Needs: Shopping opps beyond Marshall's in Sunset Plaza; development of plaza to insure tax base.

What There's no I iram the beginning, people here liked a li 'life unpolluted by certain things. "Absolutely no hog or poultry farms I allowed" said one sign just before J. 1920 at the intersection of Denny (now Lindbergh) and Robyn roads in what is now Sunset Hills. And Sunset Manor had a 1926 subdivision code that ordered: "No livery stable, slaughter house, soap or glue factory, dairy or nuisance of any character, shall be this subdivision." People in their 40s and 50s remember driving through farmlands and past fields where horses grazed when they took a shortcut through Sunset Hills to Gravois. Students from nearby schools such as Webster High would sneak down to a cave called the Zombie on dark nights for parties.

Barb Pate-Novotny remembers spending part of her 16th birthday at the cave, where a large gargoyle guarded the entrance. Once an area of turkey, chicken and pig farms, with a horse-training center, and dairies set among rolling hills as well as a summer playground for both the wealthy and the average citizen Sunset Hills is now a small community of almost 5,000 residents and several mutli-generational businesses, and a mecca for golfers, hikers and picnickers. Left underdeveloped for years partly because of the difficulty of building in the hilly, limestone-rich terrain, Sunset Hills is one of the few areas so close to the city where houses are still being constructed. lira house known as "the castle" at Frederick Farm (below), and grave markers In St. Lucas Cemetery one showing the European style of showing photographs, another honoring the Gashouse Gang's Ducky Medwlck.

grocery store, no pharmacy; some loss of wooded areas and farms to development. Tennis anyone? Sunset Tennis Center, the place for up-and-coming young players to learn or improve their game with pros Craig Sandvig and Douglas Smith. Secondary Education: Sunset Hills has a real variety: Lindbergh High, with 5,091 students; South County Technical, 859 students; private Thomas Jeffer son School, with 60-85 students, offering an academically intensive curriculum; Vianney, a Catholic high school of 545 students, actually just over the border in Kirkwood. A History: There's a Grave Under that Garage Prehistoric native Americans left polished stone implements, potshards, light green granite, village sites, burial mounds, graves lined with limestone slabs, and evidence of large-scale salt production at mineral springs in the area. Then came members of various historic tribes, including Osage, Shawnee, Onoda- ga and Sauk.

Members of Boy Scout Troop 40 used to have to brave a night on Indian Hill, where 10 graves faced the sunrise. And some homeowners digging up dirt to lay a concrete floor in the garage discovered an Indian grave but considerately reburied the skeleton and left it to lie in peace. Spanish land-grant recipients in the late 1700s included Gabriel Cerre, father-in-law of Auguste Chouteau. Daniel Boone's accounts of land available in Missouri enticed the Sap-pington family, with their 17 children, to come from Kentucky. Germans flocked here after reading Dr.

Gottfried Dudin's glowing descriptions of the Missouri and Meramec valleys, which he compared with the Rhine's. It's All Ikutsch to Me In 1880 the many Germans in the area read papers like the Westliche Post and heard sermons in German in the newly built St. ft M. etf 9' ft rj yrj i I i Uli 'AiSXtiJ i'. i 'jV'm WOU1 I Oil IS CAKD1NM.S nl'v MOM VM I I 1 iiiiril IKCWN WAS I II.