Update: I went back and looked at Loughborough Avenue again in 2018.
It’s hard to quantify much of the housing on the southern edge of St. Louis; it’s all sorts of different styles, and there’s not really one single style that predominates.
Large turrets, like you might see in houses in Clayton, are common on grand corner houses like this one below.
But development continued into the 1950’s and Modernist ranches joined their predecessors, some of which look to date from the Nineteenth Century.
Turning off of Loughborough onto Leona, one is soon greeted with the sight of this eclectic beauty, complete with tower, stonework and a rich, almost burgundy red brick. It’s a favorite of many people in St. Louis.
This house, with its sweeping Tudor Revival lines, bucks with the style and sports an almost dark mustard brick, with a unique little medallion above the upstairs window of what appears to be a ship. And also, a rarity in St. Louis, it has a front facing garage in its basement; I wonder how often it’s used as it looks quite narrow.
These low, right-off-the-street, garages had their day back when cars had much more ground clearance on those steeply-angled approaches to the sidewalk . Nowadays they are fairly useless, and even for SUVs of any size; while the ground clearance may be there, their height and width precludes their use.
I saw an interesting piece on, I think, Jalopnik a few years ago on how some residents of San Francisco solved this problem of their old houses with similar garages (but for cars only). It involved a sort of added ramp between the sidewalk and the garage entrance that reduced the acuteness of the angle; since it perforce reduced the height, it worked for cars only.
And Thanks for these photos – lots of good memories from HS parties there in the ’50s.
Love the rounded-top front doors so common; my modest little brick house in Kirkwood has one as well.