Fountain Park, which has been in the news a bunch already, was crowded with disaster relief efforts so I continued on, not wanting to get in the way. I headed up North Taylor Avenue, taking a quick look at the Lewis Place neighborhood before heading into The Ville.
I’ve looked at the building above before, I think multiple times, but I definitely saw in back in March of 2016 (seventh photo), and now it’s been severely damaged. I don’t know what its future holds.
Sadly, Cote Brilliante School, which has been shuttered for years, was hit badly. The school is just downright devastated, and it’s not fully conveyed how much damage the school took. This is when I started to get emotional.
The devastation in The Greater Ville is extensive. It’s just horrible. I was having trouble going down streets to photograph the damage because so many streets were still covered in debris. Streets such as Lexington, Ashland and Labadie venues were hit hard. What I photographed several years ago on those streets is now extensively damaged. There are whole stretches and blocks where every single house is damaged or destroyed.
Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church, which I photographed back in September of 2017, has been pretty much destroyed. The congregation is planning on building a new church. I don’t blame them for not trying to rebuild what has been so heavily compromised. Where would you find all those yellow bricks today? I also realized the long-suffering former St. Mark’s sustained severe roof damage; I suspect its end will come in the next couple of years.
A reader mentioned that Western Lutheran Cemetery had been hit, and that is true. Multiple trees were down, as seen below, and it is so overgrown that I wasn’t able to see how many gravestones might have been damaged.
So heartbreaking, and as you note, and as anyone who has been in or photographed disasters knows, the pictures never tell the full story–it is always worse to the native eye. But thank you again for sharing. What you’re doing is so important and so well done, not just photographically but because of the emotion you convey. Perhaps organizations like Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church will use some of the bricks in new construction or even hire an architect who can creatively, say, incorporate a remaining wall or other feature.
Thank you for documenting this. It’s so hard to see but it’s so necessary to record. I know how often I look for old tornado photos and I can’t help but think records like this will be essential for the future historians of our city.