Continuing north of Alaska Avenue, we see a variation on the classic four-family apartment building, with a simple front but variagated brick. Then there’s a mix of one story single family houses. We then encounter a tract of two story, two family houses which are all exact in massing and probably interior, but with slightly…
Category: Uncategorized
Vulcan Street, Early September 2026
I returned to the 7700 block of Vulcan Street that is tucked away in a quiet corner of Carondelet sometimes known as the Patch. Some houses, such as the ones above and below are occupied by stalwart owners, hanging on as industry creeps in around them. I’ve looked at this street in November of 2012,…
Casco Methodist Church, Leslie, Franklin County
Located near Ebenezer Lutheran Church, we find Casco Methodist Church. The original rubble stone church, most likely dating from 1871, has a more contemporary narthex built out the front, probably built in 2002 The back wall of the church is unadorned except for two tie rods. The cemetery is large, with what looks to be…
Demolition Continuing Stouffer’s Riverfront Hotel
The demolition of the old Stouffer’s Riverfront Hotel is going along nicely, and this will be my last post about it, as the above photograph could be at twenty stories, ten stories, whatever. It looks the same regardless. According to my calculations, this is now the record holder for the tallest building in St. Louis…
More of New Harmony, Indiana
We saw some other interesting buildings in New Harmony, including the Working Man’s Institute, founded by William Maclure in 1838. The current building is from 1894 and is still open to the public. Besides serving as a library, it also contains a museum of artifacts from the earliest period of New Harmony, as well as…
Bryan Hill Elementary School
Opened in 1911, Bryan Hill Elementary School serves the College Park neighborhood. Designed by William Ittner, it is squeezed into a narrow parcel of land, making photographs of the building difficult. Named after Dr. John Gano Bryan, a famous educator in the late Nineteenth Century, that appellation still does not explain the “Hill” portion. Perhaps…
Adams Elementary School
Adams Elementary has a history that stretches back to 1878, when the school above was constructed in what at the time was a relatively isolated but not unpopulated part of the city. The current building was designed by William Ittner in 1899, which is fascinating because the school is not in any way a “traditional”…
Peabody Elementary School
Peabody Elementary School is another institution with a long history in the neighborhood just south of downtown that can be traced back to at least the 1870s if not earlier. At one point it became known as Clinton-Peabody, and as some readers might remember, it shared the name of the housing projects nearby. A new…
Friedens Cemetery, Late June 2026
In response to some concerns I heard about the condition of Friedens Cemetery, which I hadn’t visited since September of 2024, we took a look a week or so ago. While the grass looks to have been mowed relatively recently, there were a large number of tree limbs broken and lying on the ground. And…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part Four
This will be our last day looking at Sloss Furnaces. The bridge above has an interesting story; it was built to take traffic above the giant piles of slag the furnace dumped on the ground (it’s been cleaned up, obviously). Above, as you can see, the ingots of pig iron, which is not pure enough…