If you wondered what that giant forty foot deep hole looked like before it was almost completely filled in, this is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago. MSD was working to get the sewer line fixed. Interestingly, it broke in the same place one hundred years ago. I suspect, looking at old maps, that there was once a deep ravine here. Fixed now!
Anyway, I also looked at the fascinating mix of houses on the block of Blair to the south of the break, and it’s what I love about the neighborhood: built over the course of a century, with all sort of styles represented.
The old Bissell House Dinner Theater seems to be closed, still, though the grass is being mowed.
There are beautiful wildflowers that someone has planted around the base of the Bissell Water Tower, but wow, who hit the guardrail? It’s destroyed. It’s at the top of an incline, so someone had to have been going super fast up a steep grade to smash into it…
Nearby, the service wing(?) of the old nursing home has collapsed further as it continues to go through a revolving door of owners. Back in the winter of 2020 it was already in bad shape.
But there are so many beautiful houses nearby that are being impeccably maintained, and they should be recognized and supported against the forces of blight.
And hopefully this church will continue to stand and not be demolished.
I lived a few blocks away on Obear off of Blair and this still well-maintained house was the Family of the Farrell’s, whose son Jim and I went were classmates in the Catholic Parish of Holly Name (a few blocks down off of Grand, past the Water Tower).
This inside of this house was impeccable and had lots of customized woodworking……a huge house.
We graduated from the school in 1964 and from the outside, looks remarkably the same.
Sadly, we finally had to move out of the neighborhood in 1969 and based on recent photos, it has evolved into a crime-ridden, drug-infested area.
It tears me up to think of the demise of this once, blue-collar, middle-class neighborhood…..believe it or not, it was a safe, fantastic place to grow up!
Thank you for the memories! Which house are you referring to?