It wasn’t publicized in the news, but if you were watching the St. Louis Fire Department’s Twitter feed, you noticed a passing reference to a firefighter being injured fighting a fire in a warehouse on the Near North Riverfront. This is the former Federal Cold Storage Company, which was part of a general trend of…
Category: North
Posts about North St. Louis
Water Main Break, Hyde Park
A massive, thirty-six inch water main burst at the intersection of North Blair Avenue and Penrose Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood just down the hill from the Grand and Bissell watertowers (standpipes, technically). Obviously, while the standpipes are long out of use, the water line system still uses a route that once passed through…
Grand Motel, Closed and Burned Out
Back in January of this year, the now-closed Grand Motel was severely damaged by arson. It is actually very sad because the new owner was planning on renovating the buildings for a homeless outreach center. I saw her on the news, and her heart was in the right place. I don’t know what will happen…
Former Most Holy Name, Attacked
Well, this is not good. I was coming from somewhere and when I drove by the former Most Holy Name Roman Catholic Church, I was startled to discover a very bad development. Much like what doomed St. Augustine’s and what has also happened at St. Mark’s, someone has stolen all of the copper flashing and…
Enright Avenue Between Pendleton Avenue and Whittier Street
Enright Avenue is the street one block north of Delmar, and it is often in the news nowadays, first for a series of arsons, and also as the target of redevelopment–or gentrification–depending on your perspective. The architecture is just as impressive as the Central West End, just to the south, and to be honest, more…
St. Augustine’s the Day After the Third Fire
To say the visit to the former St. Augustine’s the day after the towering inferno that gutted the church was depressing would be an understatement. About the only positive thing I could say is that at least all the timber, potential fuel for another fire (the gigantic piles of wood from the roof collapse), was…
St. Augustine’s a Week Before the Third Fire
I may have taken some of the only photos of the former St. Augustine’s after the collapse of the roof over the nave sometime in February and before the fire on the night of March 18th. Honestly, it probably wasn’t a terribly good idea for my friend and I to be inside the heavily compromised…
North Up Blair Avenue, College Hill, March 2024
We cross into College Hill and look down Obear Avenue, which I looked at back in the snow of the winter of 2019. Below is the wood frame half flounder I’ve photographed many times over the years. Further north I came across that pocket of wood frame houses, which must be very, very old. Sadly,…
North Up Blair Avenue, North of Penrose Street, Hyde Park, March 2024
Heading north from Penrose Street and continuing our tour in Hyde Park, we see that Ferry Street is blocked off again, no doubt due to another problem with the sewer underneath in what was originally a deep chasm in the natural topography of the earth before the neighborhood’s development. We detour to the east down…
North Up Blair Avenue, South of Penrose Street, Hyde Park, March 2024
Heading north up Blair into Hyde Park, we pass by those streets with little bungalows built in the early Twentieth Century. I know there are many more that are abandoned now than when I first came up this way in 2008. The house below hasn’t changed for the better since I photographed it in January…