Taking its name from the historic golf club across West Lockwood Avenue, Algonquin Place possesses a host of houses from the 1910s and 20s. Not surprisingly, there are many Tudor Revival homes. There are also larger houses that I might describe as upper class examples of the Arts and Crafts style with their use of…
Tag: Central County
Marshall Place and the Former Webster College
Platted early in the history of Webster Groves and served by the nearby train station, houses on Marshall Place date from 1860 to 1910, a span of fifty years. It was platted by John Marshall in 1860, and the first couple of houses are more Colonial Revival. But clearly one of the oldest houses is…
Blackmer Place, Webster Groves
Blackmer Place was clearly the former estate of the house we’ll see in a second. It was also subdivided in the 1910s or 20s, judging from the housing styles of the elegant homes built on the street. The houses range from the Tudor Revival to the more common Colonial Revival. We now get to the…
Monday Club and Other Historic Houses, Webster Groves
I thought it was time to get back to Webster Groves, considering that the last post I made on the city was in May of 2013(!) and there are a grand total of nine for the historic suburb. We’ll start by looking at the Monday Club at 37 S. Maple Avenue, which was built around…
Pershing Avenue West of Forest Park Parkway
When you’re caught up in the traffic flying down Forest Park Parkway, you might not have ever really noticed that Pershing Avenue peals off to the right at the bend as it sweeps off towards downtown Clayton. This is in fact University City right here; it dips down and blocks Clayton from reaching over and…
Tropicana Lanes
Tropicana Lanes opened in 1960, with a face-off between Olga Gloor and Johnny King defeating Sonny Fitter and Mildred Stauder. It’s still a landmark all these years later, with 52 lanes between its two sides. It has some interesting features, such as this concrete block screen wall below that helps shield the porte cochere from…
Shanley Building, Recalled to Life
I’ll have to admit I didn’t think I’d see the day, but the Shanley Building has been rehabilitated and saved from demolition. A very large residential building has taken up much of the rest of the block, but it has been built around the former orthodontist’s office, originally designed by St. Louis architect Harris Armstrong….
Davis Place
South of downtown Clayton and Country Club Place is Davis Place, laid out in a series of curving streets as well as continuing many of the north-south streets of the central core, though they are cut off by Forest Park Parkway, the former Rock Island Railroad tracks. Heavily developed and marketed in the mid-1920s by…
Country Club Place and the Sporting News
Country Club Place is another interesting subdivision in Clayton off Hanley Road. Turn off Hanley onto Polo Drive and it splits off into West, East and Middle Polo drives, but to make it simpler to understand, the streets basically create a “reserve” in the middle with huge lots and houses, and on the outside perimeter…
Wydown Forest
Wydown Forest is another one of those subdivisions that developed along Hanley Road, and when we look at the plat map for it above (north and south are inverted), we see like many of these early Twentieth Century automobile suburbs, there are triangular parks placed at strategic locations, creating long vistas and curving lines. Wydown…