The behemoth of the old Four Courts, named after the building in Dublin and demolished long ago, was based off the Tuileries Palace in Paris, as I mentioned a couple of years ago. Its attached jail was quite a work of engineering and architecture, with a huge half rotunda and tiers of cells. Replacing it…
Category: Downtown
Posts about downtown St. Louis
St. Louis Medical Examiner, The Morgue
For years after the demolition of the old Four Courts the morgue was still used at the corner of Twelfth and Spruce streets (you can see in the 1920 photo below how the old courthouse has vanished). But finally in 1927, the City of St. Louis turned to its staff architect, L.R. Bowen of the…
Former Police Headquarters
After featuring the Police Academy, I realized I had never shown the old Police Headquarters at the southwest corner of Clark and Tucker. It is now only partly occupied, with evidence storage, from what I understand, and that was told to me over a decade ago. It could have changed since then. You can actually…
Municipal Services Building
Opened in 1927-8 to designed by the firm Study & Farrar, the Municipal Services Building is diagonally across Clark Street and Tucker Boulevard from City Hall. It is perhaps a building that is missed by many people, but is still used in part by the City of St. Louis. It is actually a collection of…
Around the Courthouses, A Survivor
At the southwest corner of South Eleventh and Walnut streets is this lone survivor, one of what was once dozens of commercial buildings in the southwest side of downtown. One by one, they were demolished and replaced by courthouses, to the point today where it is the last survivor. According to City records, it was…
Pierre Laclede Monument
A little known fact: the grassy area around City Hall is technically Washington Square Park, and on its western side, in the former right-of-way of 13th Street is the monument to Pierre Laclede, which interestingly enough ignores the contribution of Auguste Chouteau. I didn’t realize this, but the dedicatory text doesn’t lie: this was installed…
John Poelker Park
John Poelker Park, part of the larger Gateway Mall, is looking better than ever, clean and well kept, with a new fence installed around the central statue. While Poelker was the fortieth mayor of St. Louis, the statue commemorates firefighters, dedicated in 1994 and sculpted by R.R. Daus. I find it fascinating that while there…
American Legion Auxiliary Monument, Gateway Mall
I noticed this small monument a few yards away from the Schiller Monument a few weeks ago. It is the smallest memorial in the Gateway Mall, by far. You can read more about the American Legion Auxiliary here.
Police Academy
Constructed at a cost of $800,000 in addition to the $1,000,000 that the original police headquarters to the north, the police academy, gymnasium and garage was built in 1928. I wrote about the construction of the police headquarters at St. Louis Magazine back in 2014, and Mauran, Russell and Crowell were the logical architects for…
Last Survivor
This house from the 1840s on North Tucker is a survivor. It is one of what were thousands of houses on the north and south side of downtown that were demolished for urban renewal in the mid-Twentieth Century. Most of those houses were never replaced with anything except parking lots or junkyards. I travel to…