Ever since the fire that largely destroyed the Crunden-Martin complex on Thanksgiving of 2025, the buildings have largely stood in ruins. But the demolition of the multi-block former manufacturing company is commencing. Millions of brick must make up the walls. Unfortunately, there probably won’t be a way to save the Crunden-Martin signs on the bridge…
Category: Central
Posts about Central St. Louis
Enright Avenue and Delmar Boulevard, June 2026
I wandered around Enright Avenue and Delmar Boulevard west of Vandeventer and took in some of the sights. There’s an old fires station that looks to have been converted into a house. There are a lot of original buildings but there’s also a lot in-fill from the early Twenty-First Century, such as the houses below….
Washington Boulevard, Revisited June 2026
I’ve looked at Washington Boulevard before west of North Jefferson Avenue, but I took another look a few weeks ago. Nothing has happened at the Jamison Memorial Church since the fire. Above is Central Baptist Church, an African American congregation which is over 180 years old, and I’ve always like its current Modernist home. This…
End of Spring 2026 Odds and Ends
It’s that time of year, so it’s time for odds and ends! Above is a spandrel from a storefront in downtown Belleville, looking suspiciously like something Louis Sullivan would design. Below is just another house we found while driving around town. Cleveland High School is looking really, really bad compared to earlier visits; I first…
Auditorium Details, Fox Theater
Finally, we’ll look at some of the details of the ornament in the main auditorium.
The Auditorium, Fox Theater
Moving into what I call the auditorium, for lack of a better term for the theater’s main room for viewing movies, musicals or music, we see more of the elaborate architecture.
The Lobby, Fox Theater
I’ve looked at the exterior of the Fox Theater before, way back in June of 2010, but I’ve never looked at the interior. We’ll start with the lobby. Designed by Charles Howard Crane and opening on January 31, 1929, the photograph above was probably commissioned right before or after the premiere of the lavish movie…
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…
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…