I was giving a tour of Parkway South to Found St. Louis on Friday before the Homecoming football game and was startled to discover every horizontal surface has now been covered with linoleum. What is up with that? Ever heard of texture? It didn’t used to be like that.
Winston Churchill Apartments
Constructed in 1927, the Winston Churchill Apartments are located at the northeast corner of Cabanne Avenue and Belt Avenue. Like many of the large apartment buildings I’ve been looking at in the West End area and neighboring streets, this was another upscale address that replaced what had originally been suburban frame and brick country and…
St. Louis Avenue Between North 23nd and North 25rd Streets, South Side
Moving west of North 23rd Street, we see much less lavish homes. And if we look closely many, but not all, are actually two-family houses. I always joke in St. Louis architects designed multi-family houses to look like single families. Of course, there are obvious multi-family apartment buildings like the ones below. But as I’ve…
St. Louis Avenue Between North 22nd and North 23rd Streets, South Side
While I’ve looked at St. Louis Avenue numerous times over the last eighteen years, I’ve never actually published any photographs of the south side of the street in St. Louis Place (except for ones that have all been demolished and this one weird one). We’ll start at North 22nd Street and work west. First up,…
History of Cass Bank, Part Two
Now we come to the Cass Avenue Bank location that has been in the news, which was built in 1927, showing how quickly the institution had grown in twenty-one years. A severe, late Beaux-Arts building, it served as the headquarters of Cass Bank until 1974. This was near the Carr Square and Old North neighborhoods,…
History of Cass Bank, Part One
Perhaps you’ve been watching the news and heard a lot of coverage of the old Cass Bank building being in the crosshairs of demolition, and then at the last second it had been been saved. I thought it would be helpful to readers to explain what is going on. Cass Bank is still in business…
A New Discovery at the Union Trust Building
It’s long been accepted that Adler and Sullivan’s original design of the round windows on the second floor with bearcat terracotta sculptures and a Damascus arch entryway (seen here) for the 1892 Union Trust Building were removed at some point in the early Twentieth Century. However, we now know it was incorrect to believe that…
South 38th Street Between Taft Avenue and Meramec Street
We now turn to South 38th Street, which is just a total mess of architectural styles and years of construction. We see houses that could have been built in the 1890s to the 1950s. We see nice bungalows such as this one below, which might be described as a restrained version of the Gingerbread style….
Dewey Street Between Meramec Street and Taft Avenue
Leaving behind South 37th Street, we move one over to the west and head down Dewey Street, which reveals some more interesting houses. While the first couple of buildings look standard to Dutchtown, now we are confronted with four-families with some very interesting little gables over the windows. There is a wide variety of brick…
South 37th Street Between Bingham Avenue and Meramec Street
Not everything is nice and neat on South 37th Street, however. We were heading north on the street, and all of the sudden the houses go backwards in style by about a decade or so, with the bungalows more typical of Dutchtown to the east of South Grand Boulevard. Whoever built these cornices apparently didn’t…