My mind wandered back to a post I did all the way back in May of 2010, about a neighborhood east of North Broadway and just to the southeast of Bellefontaine Cemetery that had already been decimated by demolition, and would cease to exist within months of my documentation, replaced by a large interstate travel plaza. My research revealed it had originally been platted in 1870 as the Harlem Addition, and may have been land owned by the O’Fallon family. You can see in the above view from Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis that already only a few years after its platting, a rural exurban community had sprung up along the North Broadway streetcar line. If you look closely, you can see the Harlem Creek wending its way through the middle of the settlement.

By the 1930s, aerial photography by Curtiss-Wright planes showed a densely settled neighborhood, but of course we know that the interstate would come crashing through here in only a couple of decades, cutting the houses off from the rest of the city and stranding them next to an increasingly industrial area.

I went back to the St. Louis Patina archives and found some more houses from the area that were probably not exactly in the Harlem Addition, but nearby. They all seem to have been demolished. The house above was very old, and probably appeared on the Compton and Dry view.

But these houses are so isolated, and the industry that does still hold on east of Interstate 70 tends to spread out, snatching up these houses for low prices, demolishing most of them.

And we lose an interesting link to the past.