I thought I would check up on how the former St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church was doing six months after the severe fire that struck in the depths of winter. The answer: not very good. There has been little change other than the dramatic growth of plants, trees and other vegetation up the sides of…
Crunden-Martin, Advanced State of Demolition
Crunden Martin, which was gutted and partially destroyed by a fire back in November of 2025, is now being demolished in earnest. Demolition had begun back in June. In fact, by the time you see these photographs, much more of the buildings will be gone. I suspect they didn’t save any of the iconic letters…
Old Potters’ Field Interment, Mount Lebanon Cemetery
Thirteen years ago, Toby Weiss of BeltSTL and I looked fruitlessly for the location of the reinterment of the St. Louis Potters’ Field, moved to Mount Lebanon Cemetery in 1950. This time, I came up with the ingenious idea of simply calling the cemetery on the phone, now owned by Alexander-White-Millen Funeral Home, and a…
End of Corpus Christi, Jennings
“That’s weird,” I remarked as we headed up Jennings Station Road to check up on the old factory on Xograph Avenue, “we should be seeing an old church I check up on occasionally.” After our visit to Xograph Avenue, we came back to the site of the former Corpus Christi Church, which I first visited…
Demolitions Coming, Former Marillac College
UMSL is planning on demolishing some of its buildings on the south side of campus, many of which I have documented before. On the chopping block is the building above, the former Franciscan monastery which I looked at back in June of 2011; it has spectacular stained glass windows which I assume will go in…
Harlan Court, The Long Apartment Buildings
Harlan Court has always been that apartment complex that pops up in the news every five years or so for the wrong reasons. It’s inexcusable that there are still so many buildings owned by out-of-state slumlords who hold on to once august addresses. (I checked and there was a Citizens’ Service Bureau complaint for a…
Savoy Court
You might have missed Savoy Court while watching for errant driers at the intersection of Delmar and Union boulevards, but if you look closely at the northwest corner, you’ll see a modern entrance to what is an interesting little street laid out in 1909. What was originally six apartment buildings, starting this one at the…
Enright Avenue Between Belt and Arlington Avenues
While the beautiful houses of the Central West End are well known, I feel like I need to come back again and again to north of Delmar, in this case to the Visitation Park neighborhood, to show how stately homes are here, as well. There are houses such as the one below that are fairly…
Washington Place Between Lake Avenue and Kingshighway
Moving east on Washington Place we past by the first houses and then we are greeted with a surprise. We are presented with a manse much larger than other houses on the block, and I wonder if this subdivision was originally intended for more expansive residences. It was owned by Allen Harwood Collins and his…
Washington Place Between Union Boulevard and Lake Avenue
The days of spraying oil on bricks or dirt are thankfully over, but the beautiful houses that line Washington Place are still here just east of Union Boulevard (you can see the gatehouse of Washington Terrace off in the distance). The style of these houses are hard to give a real name for. Perhaps we…