I had looked at the quiet streets east of SLU Hospital and had been pleasantly surprised at the development that had been going on back in February of 2021.

Spurred by a recent visit by Mark Groth over at St. Louis City Talk, I thought I would go back myself this last weekend. I was happy to see that the vacant lots were continuing to be filled in.

There are still large swaths of vacant land that could be redeveloped. This is a nice part of the city, centrally located, and one of the biggest annoyances I have with current residential patterns in St. Louis is that there are so few houses in the central corridor east of the Central West End–in other words, right in between the two major clusters of employment at the hospitals and downtown.

Oh, and yeah, that building at the northwest corner of Park and Grand that was “unusable?”

It turns out that it can be used in the Twenty-First Century! I’ll be darned.

And that horrible fire escape had been removed.