Unlike most of the area south of Delmar Boulevard which is being repaired following the May 16, 2026 tornado, there was one building, the Chesterfield, that was not so lucky. Hit by the twister and then damaged further by a fire on January 24, 2026, the building was condemned for demolition. I caught a photo…
Category: Central
Posts about Central St. Louis
Washington Terrace Gates, Summer 2026
I’ve looked at the Washington Terrace gates before, first in January of 2012 and then again in November of 2014. I would probably describe the architecture as Norman Romanesque Revival, it seems like it was shrouded in ivy for much of its early existence. Readers have told me that college students or young men lived…
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…
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…
Westminster Place Between Union Boulevard and Lake Avenue
West of Lake Avenue, which bifurcates the area, there are some handsome houses that I might describe as Colonial Revival almost of maybe Georgian, which is a break from the more cube-shaped houses that dominate Westminster Place. But there are plenty of what I would call semi-Renaissance Revival houses such as the one below. It’s…
Westminster Place Between Lake Avenue and Kingshighway
Now that we’ve looked at some of North St. Louis, let’s head south of Delmar and check up on how things are doing on the long blocks north of Portland Place and Westmoreland Place, which was the Forest Park Addition. These subdivisions were laid out in the 1890s, a couple of years after the aforementioned…
School Supply Warehouse
I made an interesting discovery near the Rock Church just off North Grand Boulevard regarding this building. Due to the size of the smokestack, I assumed this was a factory, but since at 1909, this building was a school supply warehouse for Saint Louis Public Schools. The fourth floor was labeled “bindery,” so I wonder…
Progress in LaSalle Park
I have some good news to report about the Second Empire corner storefront at 1000 Morrison Avenue in the LaSalle Park neighborhood which I looked at in June of 2019. Due to the efforts of Landmarks Association of St. Louis and Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, control of the building has been wrested away from…
Clyde C. Miller Career Academy
Opening in 2004, the Clyde C. Miller Career Academy was designed by KAI and Kwame Building Group. It is the newest building proposed for closure, but the building will not be abandoned, but used for a different purpose, just the end of high school classes. Sitting at 1000 N. Grand, it is just north of…