You never know what you’ll find down a quiet subdivision street in Town and Country. Passing down an old road in between squares of eighty acres of old farmland-turned-subdivisions, something doesn’t look normal. An old aerial photograph from 1955 reveals that there was a quarry active since at least 1937, and it was still visible…
August Nasse Residence
August Nasse was a grocer and dry goods store owner, first with Bernard Goldschmidt, and then when the latter left the firm, he continued on with Conrad Fink. From the late 1860s, they were located on South Second, near many German businesses, before moving to North Fourth Street. Surviving the Great Fire, the business bounced…
Historic American Buildings Survey: 21 Benton Place
Photographed by Paul Piaget in May of 1960 and cataloged as HABS MO,96-SALU,54, these images shows what #21 Benton Place looked like right before the rehabbing and rebirth of Lafayette Square began. I looked at the west side of Benton Place earlier this week, which you can see here. The story of the house is…
Benton Place, East Side
We looked at the west side of Benton Place yesterday where we went through much of the history, so we’ll jump right in to the houses on the east side of the private place in Lafayette Square, where there is a remarkable amount of preservation with only one demolished house that has been replaced by…
Benton Place, West Side
Benton Place is named after Thomas Hart Benton, and is the first private street designed by Julius Pitzman, who designed the majority of the private streets in St. Louis. Originally, a fifty cent levee was charged per foot of frontage on the place from each resident. A light switch for the streetlights was in #25…
Historic American Buildings Survey in Soulard
Always remember, they wanted to completely demolish Soulard, and put in a totally forgettable suburban style neighborhood that probably would have been torn down by now, too. But just because buildings are abandoned, or missing a pillar, doesn’t mean they can’t be saved. Houses in Soulard now typically go for over a half million dollars,…
Ten Years Gone, Gravois Park
I found a couple of old photos from about a decade ago of two corner storefronts in Gravois Park, a neighborhood that has undergone rapid and major changes in the last twenty years. Older residents have told me it had become more dangerous over the course of the new millennium, but now rampant real estate…
Albion Place
North of Whittemore Place is Albion Place, named after the archaic appellation for Britain. The street was nothing but open land and a sinkhole in 1876; even Park Avenue remained to be developed. An allee of trees may delineate the future alley, but I am not sure. Like its neighbor to the south, it was…
Whittemore Place
Along the west side of Lafayette Square, in between Missouri Avenue and South Jefferson are Whittemore and Albion places. We’ll look at Whittemore Place today. Nothing of the street had been developed by 1876, when Compton and Dry published Pictorial St. Louis, as can be seen above, even though Lafayette Avenue had already been built…
Old Zion Evangelisch Cemetery, Des Peres
An early German congregation, Zion German Evangelisch founded this cemetery around 1847, when they built a log cabin church in this area north of the intersection of Ballas and Manchester roads. The congregation had originally been formed in 1838. It sits just an eighth of a mile east from I-270, but is now surrounded by…