Update: The building above and below was the E. Schweigler Soda Water Company. I went back and looked at many of the houses on Ohio Avenue in the fall of 2019.

I’ve continued to be interested in the first generation of houses that appeared out Gravois Avenue past Jefferson in the years after the Civil War. They’re often isolated now, sitting among the primary period of development in the area in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Take this mansard-roofed house, with an accompanying stable of some sorts attached to the back above; what was its original use?

I love these small duplexes that cluster around the narrow streets of Benton Park West’s northern fringe.

Update: The Second Empire house in the pictures above and below was demolished. I went back to view the survivors in 2016 and 2019.

Or this complex of buildings in Fox Park, just north of St. Francis de Sales. They’re abandoned now, but their old age shows.

The wood frame house would be one of the earliest houses, while the three story alley houses is old enough to appear in the Compton and Dry View (in the black square below).

Unfortunately, because they are decades older than other buildings in these neighborhoods, it seems like these survivors suffer the most.

The huge number of sinkholes and other quarries in the area probably delayed the development of the area around Jefferson and Gravois.