Moving north on Mississippi Avenue, we see that again, much of what was there in 1876 is now gone, with the exception of the half-flounder house, which you can see on the far left of Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, and below in the middle, sitting far back on its lot, as is frequently typical. Number 11 on the Pictorial St. Louis was the Lafayette Park Hotel, which was demolished by the early Twentieth Century. The land seems to have sat vacant for much of the rest of the 1900s. The building at corner of Park Avenue was demolished, the lot sat vacant, and then another building was built was demolished in the 1970s and replaced with a pocket park.

The house below makes me suspicious; was it repaired and its style changed after the 1896 Cyclone; I am not sure.

Looking more closely at that half-flounder, we see that it is typical of many middle class houses of its type. We saw ones similar to it up in the College Hill neighborhood.

Looking at the Sanborn Map in the early Twentieth Century, we see that the houses coming up next had been built, but they were demolished, according to historic aerial photography, sometime in the 1960s.

I think the in-fill, in grand Second Empire style, are wonderful replacements for the vacant lot. They were built in 1983.

Then there are some more Second Empire houses with an Italianate style house thrown in. They are original houses, and are in great shape.

Finally, there are two new in-fill houses that are built on the land that once held the Lafayette Park Hotel. The house below on the right is famous for having the Domino Sugar sign painted on its north wall. When I lived in Baltimore, the hulking mass of the Domino Sugar Refinery on the south side of the Inner Harbor was a landmark that could be seen for miles around. The sign also gives us a clue that the lots next to the sign had been vacant for a long time since an advertiser felt it was worthwhile to paint a sign there.