Moving east of T.E. Huntley Avenue, the former Ewing Avenue, we see some demolished Italianate rowhouses with late Queen Anne front porches. But what is amazing is the sheer size of the mansions that once lined this section of Locust, such as the ones below. The Phyllis Wheatley Branch of the YWCA is a historic…
Category: Central
Posts about Central St. Louis
Locust Street Between Cardinal and Huntley Avenues
Moving east, there are more businesses that replaced houses. The photo above is perhaps the southeast corner, but I can’t be sure. The house in the background is gone for certain. The Fountain on Locust has become a famous restaurant in the amazing Spanish Revival building below. While this building below was marked for demolition,…
Locust Street Between Former North Channing and Cardinal Avenues
Back in September, we looked at Washington Boulevard in Midtown, and its transformation in the early Twentieth Century from a tony residential neighborhood into a commercial district. One block to the south is Locust Street, which like Washington, stretches from downtown where it ends at Theresa Avenue (though Washington continues, of course). Locust, seen above…
Former Garavaglia’s, Redevelopment Coming Soon
I last looked at the former Garavaglia’s back in March of 2008(!) and I have some great news to report: the building will finally see redevelopment in the coming year. The building has been abandoned since at least 1990, having fallen victim to the construction of I-44 severing its clientele from the store. Lots of…
Crunden Martin, On the Cusp of Redevelopment
There is a slight chance that the redevelopment of the Crunden Martin buildings might actually happen this time, and I’m cautiously optimistic due to the involvement of some people I know in the project. Looking at the building damaged by fire over a decade ago, it looks like there has been the loss of much…
Viaducts, Trestles and Bridges, Chouteau’s Landing
Wandering around the vacant lot where the former Powell Square Building was located before it was demolished in Chouteau’s Landing, I was struck at just how much infrastructure there is clogging this part of the city. Perhaps it is a necessary evil, needed to move commerce and industry around the center of the city for…
Saint Mary of Victories
I realized I have never done a post on St. Mary of Victories down on Chouteau’s Landing, just across South 3rd Street to the east of Interstates 44 and 55. I wrote an article about the church several years ago at St. Louis Magazine. As can be seen above, the church was once part of…
Kingshighway Plan
There were once much bigger plans for the largest street in St. Louis, Kingshighway, which for the most part were never completed, though you can find little bits and pieces of that grand design here and there throughout the city. The main portion, between Christy Boulevard in the south and Penrose Park in the north,…
New Masonic Temple, Redeveloped
I never thought I’d see it, but the New Masonic Temple on Lindell has been successfully redeveloped into apartments, known as the B on Lindell. Not surprisingly, due to its massive size, its interior had never been completed, so the recent renovation was probably working with blank space in much of the building. It’s still…
South Tenth Street Across from the Interstate
Across the interstate from Soulard, which you can reach on a pedestrian bridge and St. Vincent de Paul, which just barely avoided being demolished, you find a short stretch of South Tenth Street in what I call Frenchtown. As is evident, these first houses we’re looking at are in-fill, maybe easy to tell due to…