Ah, Lindell Boulevard! I avoid the street like the plague because it is such a dysfunctional street. Once a residential street lined with mansions, sometime in the Twentieth Century it became the busiest street in the city. The mansions were demolished, and it became lined with businesses, while the through traffic jumped over to Highway 40/Interstate 64. I’ve decided to create a tag for Lindell Boulevard, uniting the dozens of posts I’ve done for the street over the years, and over the next couple of days I’ll look at the street from Grand Boulevard to Kingshighway. Above is the Scottish Right Temple, looking west. One hundred years ago, you would have seen this mansion below, around where the Masonic Temple is today.

If you turned around and looked to your right, you would see this parking lot, but this had a much more interesting history.

This mansion once stood there, along with several others. In 1876, most of Lindell Boulevard heading west of here was barren and devoid of any houses west of this house and its neighbors. It’s long gone now.

You can see the Continental Building off in the distance on Olive Street.

Jesuit Hall, which I thought was being renovated into apartments, fills out the northwest corner of the intersection with Grand Boulevard. It was originally built as a hotel.

On the southwest corner of the intersection is St. Francis Xavier, which I photographed a while back at night. It’s fascinating church I wrote about here.

And then comes the beautiful original buildings of Saint Louis University at its current location. While these are institutional buildings, they still work with the street wall, and are urban in character.

They’re a great example of the Gothic Revival style as influenced by John Ruskin.

These are buildings constructed in an era when university leaders understood how to be part of the urban fabric of the neighborhood they worked in. The building has been expanded, and overall I think it has been successful.

I also like how the Euston Mansion has been incorporated into the campus, and not swept away as “obsolete.”

Further west is a part of Lindell that I have documented extensively before, on both the north and south. First are the historic residential hotels of the Coronado, the Mark Twain and the Lindell Towers West. We then see the Brown Mansion, the now-demolished Papin Mansion, as well as the now-closed Moolah Theater, which is technically on the spur of McPherson Avenue. On the south side, just after the Euston Mansion is the Bannister House on SLU’s campus, and then the old Donnelly funeral home on the former site of Shaare Emeth.