It’s hard to believe it, but the houses above were once an almost completely ruined pile of smoking timbers and collapsed brick walls a few years ago. I wrote an article about those two houses, and the other Civil War-era survivors around the crossroads of Gravois and Arsenal a few years ago at St. Louis Magazine. Despite what the naysayers said, they were quite salvageable, and are quite nice and occupied with good people today.

Arsenal Street between Minnesota and Michigan is a wonderful mix of housing styles, showing how it developed over the course of decades, from the 1860s to the 1920s.

Single family tract homes sit right next to two-family houses

And stately Romanesque Revival apartment buildings with unique compressed arches over their windows and doors coexist with well-maintained apartments built as in-fill in the mid Twentieth Century.