Thanks to help from a reader, Mark Baker, I gained access to this wonderful postcard view of the College Park/Hyde Park at what looks to be the turn of the Twentieth Century, which illuminated additional information on the Jewish Home for the Aged at Blair and Grand.  For starters, if you look closely, the Home, with its two projecting bays in center left of the photo, corresponds with the Sanborn map of the area.

Mark also took this picture below of the “cornerstone” of sorts for what I would suspect is the central wing facing Blair.  Perhaps now we can get a better idea of when the mansion was torn down and replaced with newer structures in 1924.

But what is also cool is that you can see the two building below, the frame house and the apartment building, clearly represented in the postcard in the lower center of the image.  It always fascinates me the arbitrariness of which houses survive in St. Louis; surely the wolf of demolition would have annihilated the wood frame house long before its sturdy brick neighbors?  Apparently not, and perhaps it was simply the resolve of the owners that determine if a house lives or dies.

I continued down the street from the ones above, and found these crumbling beauties.  Hyde Park has not yet relinquished even a fraction of its surprising finds to me.