One of the most interesting neighborhoods in St. Louis is Norwood Square, which I first looked at way back in August of 2009. It sits on the site of an old quarry, which is settling badly (I tried to figure out what kind of quarry it was, but it does not show up on this…
Tag: Abandoned Buildings
Wells-Goodfellow, Post-Federal Conviction
Former alderman Jeffrey Boyd went off to federal prison a week ago today, and I thought I would go check up on the heart of his former ward, which is the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood. It’s a huge neighborhood, and I discovered this church that I had never seen before at the northeast corner of Hodiamont and…
German Singing Society, Destroyed by Fire
On the same tragic night St. Louis lost Bob Kramer, the city also saw the destruction of the Old North Sängerbund, a German singing society located at the southwest corner of North 14th and Howard streets. Originally built as a church, and ending its life as a church known as the New Jerusalem Church of…
Race Street Between Liberty and Elder Streets, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
As I’ve often said, wide streets are impediments to redevelopment, and it is obvious in Over the Rhine, where Liberty Street, a major artery which widened with the demolition of buildings on its south side, has a dramatically different character to the north of that high-speed traffic boundary. While heading north on Race Street, which…
Lower Price Hill, Cincinnati, Ohio
When I spotted a small enclave of a neighborhood tucked at the bottom of the hills that form the western edge of the Mill Creek Valley in Cincinnati, I knew I had to visit. By poking around, I discovered this area is known as Lower Price Hill, settled early in the history of the region….
Lick Run Reborn, Cincinnati, Ohio
I have often said that I post about other cities not as a boring tour of my vacations, but as a way of comparing and contrasting with St. Louis, so we can learn how other cities are doing things better, and to see how other cities in America developed in the same way, and sometimes…
Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’re heading to Cincinnati, Ohio next, to look at Over the Rhine, which is one of the best preserved early Nineteenth Century neighborhoods in America. St. Louis used to have numerous neighborhoods like Over the Rhine, but we annihilated them like fools. Kosciusko, Carr Square (read part two) and Mill Creek, all neighborhoods in St….
Former Blessed Sacrament, Revisited
It turns out that Most Blessed Sacrament, which I looked at back in December of 2020, was founded in 1907, and originally worship occurred in a wood frame structure with dimensions of 73 x 30 feet, that was built in six weeks at the behest of its first pastor, Father P.H. Bradley. The whole campus…
Hammett Place
Hammett Place is one of those special places that I found on accident and that I suspect most people in the St. Louis region have never heard of before. Whilte technically part of a neighborhood created by the City government in the late Twentieth Century called Kingsway East, it’s tucked away on the edge of…
The Squeezed Streets, Wabada and Highland Avenues, The Western Greater Ville
This is a little hard to explain, but the streets of the western Greater Ville were not laid out by any higher authority, and they were once part of a larger estate known as the Papin Tract. Consequently, they’re all messed up, becoming incredibly narrow, having houses on only one side of the street, dead-ending…