I had always glanced down Nicholson Place while traveling down Lafayette Avenue, and had foolishly believed that the sadly truncated little street surely contained little history and few historic houses. After digging a little, I discovered I was dead wrong.… Continue Reading
Moving west of Eighteenth Street, except for the loss of a couple houses just to the left of these two Second Empire storefronts, the north side of Lafayette Avenue is intact all the way to the alley behind Mississippi Avenue.… Continue Reading
Moving north on Mississippi Avenue, we see that again, much of what was there in 1876 is now gone, with the exception of the half-flounder house, which you can see on the far left of Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St.… Continue Reading
The entire block of Mississippi Avenue between Lafayette Avenue and Kennett Place is in-fill, constructed in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. But if we look back to Compton and Dry, we learn there was a whole other life… Continue Reading
The block between Benton Place and Mississippi Avenue is well-preserved, with many of its original houses from the 1870s still standing, but with some interesting twists and in-fill, both from the late Nineteenth Century and early Twenty-First Century. The Sanborn… Continue Reading
Heading east of Missouri Avenue, we encounter one of those houses that I have a weakness for: the three story Italianate townhouse. It’s hard to see, but it has a hipped roof on top. It’s also missing its cornice, but… Continue Reading
Lee Avenue is extra wide as it used to have a streetcar track down the middle of it (the rails are probably still buried under multiple layers of asphalt). It is a heavily abandoned and demolished street, but there are… Continue Reading
Update: Here is a piece written by a resident of the Ville neighborhood explaining why the name Homer G. Phillips is so sacred to African Americans in St. Louis. Remember the preposterous wall that was knocked over in high winds… Continue Reading
I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the builders of the three “green” houses on Montgomery Street in St. Louis Place. It turns out construction has picked back up again and was not in fact abandoned forever.
Twenty years ago, when I would spend time in my friend’s family restaurant, the Majestic, I would have never imagined the way in which the Central West End south of Lindell would have been transformed in the last ten years.… Continue Reading