I was checking out the new Sugarwitch ice cream sandwich store at the Ivory Triangle and then wandered over to Minnesota and headed south, checking out some of the cool buildings of Carondelet.

We head south, and this building intrigues me; St. Boniface is just northwest of this Gothic Revival beauty, and I have to wonder if this was the convent for the church. The crosses in the gables are sort of dead giveaways. Does anyone know?

It was previously labeled “stacks of lumber” for the lumberyard that operated on the other side of the alley in fire insurance maps. It’s currently “Chateau Ann Marie.”

Anyway, I was totally blown away at the discovery at one of the most intact streets of wood frame and rough brick workers’ cottages anywhere in the City of St. Louis from the mid-Nineteenth Century.

There are some more middle class brick Greek Revival houses mixed in, which probably date from the 1870s at the latest, but wow.

I think it’s so important to realize that Carondelet is preserving, for the time being, such a wealth of so many extremely old houses.

And also commercial properties; this building below is no different than McGurk’s in Soulard; it just has a sales value of six hundred thousand or less because of what neighborhood it’s in.

These are the houses where the workers in the Jupiter Ironworks and other “dirty” industries, which made the far south end of St. Louis an industrial power house.

Look at that little weird guy on the left; it is old, and right next to a wood frame Second Empire house, no less. We must keep Carondelet thriving to protect these resources.