Update: See more of the street with historic photos from late summer of 2020.

Hold on to your seats, because I need to do some explaining. In between Jefferson Avenue and Grand Boulevard, Chippewa Street bisects two neighborhoods, Gravois Park to the north, and Dutchtown to the south. As I think I’ve pointed out in the past, Gravois Park and its northern neighbor, Benton Park West, have been explained to me by old residents were really just North Dutchtown a long time ago. But I digress; in so many words, the buildings today and in the next two days are buildings on the north side of Chippewa Street, so they’re in Gravois Park.

I find Chippewa Street interesting, as it was never fully commercialized like its next east-west shopping corridor to the north, Cherokee Street. There are still a large number of residential buildings mixed in between the storefronts.

When millwork began to rot, there was a simple solution in the mid-Twentieth Century: cover it with aluminum siding! It would be interesting to see how it looks underneath.

It’s hard to tell, but below the house on the left is actually a wood frame house with a storefront built on the front of it.

Then we have a study in contrasts: a wood frame farmhouse, and an abandoned Modernist apartment complex. Why was there that much open land in the 1950s or 60s?

And look at this storefront and apartment building below, formerly the location of Slim and Zella Mae Cox’s furniture store. I can only imagine if the entire City of St. Louis was three stories tall how even more amazing it would be. It’s been or is in the process of being restored, I hope.