Like many industries, Stupp Brothers moved out to more suburban surroundings in the Twentieth Century after being located in the city. The story of the Stupps is fascinating, having been founded in 1856 by Johann Stuppd and his sons The company is still privately held and has built steel components for bridges, pipelines and even…
Caroline Street Between South Ewing and Ohio Avenues, Compton Hill
A couple of weeks ago I covered the historic survivors of the Compton Hill neighborhood on the blocks just to the west of South Jefferson Avenue, including Caroline Street. I found a nice collection of those survivors along Caroline Street to the west of Ohio Avenue, with a predominance of Italianate style houses. In other…
Carr Square, May 2026
I realized that while I investigated the Carr Square neighborhood in two pieces at St. Louis Magazine several years ago (you can read the first part here, and the second part here), I had neglected to take a look at what the area looks like now. To put it mildly, you would never imagine that…
Cass Avenue Between Elliott Avenue and North Grand Boulevard, South Side
I took a look at the south side of Cass Avenue, after having looked at the north side of the street on several occasions over the years, including January of 2013, again in January of 2017, and one more time in December of 2022. While clearly once and still a somewhat trafficked thoroughfare, I never…
Dale and Spring Avenues, Old Orchard, Webster Groves
We next turned into the residential streets to the north of the commercial strip along Big Bend in the Old Orchard area. As was typical of suburban neighborhood movements in the late Nineteenth Century, and as can be seen in Julius Pitzman’s Clifton Heights and Compton Heights additions, there is a move away from rigid…
Big Bend Boulevard, Old Orchard, Webster Groves
Let’s head two Frisco Railroad stops to the northeast and get off our imaginary train and get off at the Old Orchard stop. Sadly, the station is lost, but it was located at the dead end of Old Orchard Avenue, at the railroad tracks, obviously. Old Orchard, not surprisingly, took its name from the large…
Frisco Railroad Station, South Webster, Revisited
Way back in March of 2011 I took one really bad photograph of the Frisco Railroad Station that once served the South Webster section of Webster Groves, so I thought it was time to come back and revisit it as well as the area. The South Webster station was one of three Frisco lines stops…
Hermann Columbarium, Bellefontaine Cemetery
Just a few days after Found St. Louis posted about Charles Hermann and his stately house in Compton Heights, we walked right up to his columbarium in Bellefontaine Cemetery. How’s that for luck? But this is a columbarium? It sure is small, isn’t it? As far as we can tell, the remains of the family…
Hickory Street Between South Jefferson Avenue and Missouri Avenue
After looking at the fascinating surviving urban fabric of Hickory Street and others in the Compton Hill neighborhood that survived urban renewal, I wondered if there were any similar streets across South Jefferson Avenue that weren’t mansions in Lafayette Square. And lo and behold, Hickory Street bears a similar working class character as the streets…
Madison Elementary School
Designed by William B. Ittner, Madison Elementary once sat in what was a bustling, crowded and dense neighborhood. Now, the stretch of South 7th Street is sits on is desolate, largely devoid of buildings, and certainly empty of the residences that were once full of thousands of residents whose children attended this school. But these…