I found myself wandering up Macklind Avenue north of Manchester Avenue, and there’s a unique group of post-World War II light industrial buildings. I’d love to know the story behind the two anachronistic doorways that flank the two sides of this first building. This building obviously dates earlier, probably to the 1930s. This, of course,…
Grant School
I could have sworn I’d photographed Grant School before, and I may have, but I can’t find it now. Nevertheless, it’s a great example of first, a pre-Ittner/Milligan school in St. Louis, and secondly, a perfect example of how an old school building can be renovated into apartments. Tower Grove East is a stable neighborhood…
Alley Spring Mill, Shannon County
Dating from 1893, Alley Spring Mill, or just Alley Mill, is one of the most picturesque places that I have found in Missouri. Deep in the woods of the southern part of the state in Shannon County, it sits near a spring, so the water is still a vibrant blue color when it flows through…
Route 19 Bridge Over Round Spring, Shannon County
Built in 1930 by C. F. Johnson & Son, this span is also known as the Spring Valley Bridge, according to Bridgehunter.com. It is interesting to think that even though it was built in the Twentieth Century, it is approaching the one hundred year mark.
Salem, Dent County
The Dent County Courthouse in Salem is one of the more interesting courthouses in Missouri, and I can’t help but notice that it looks like a Second Empire house. I even remember my time in Washington, DC, and loving one of the houses on Logan Circle, and it bears a striking similarity in massing. The…
Kutis Funeral Home, Revisited
Kutis Funeral Home started out in a much smaller building, but was still anchored at the corner of Gravois and Nebraska, as it is today. You can see St. Wenceslaus on Oregon Avenue in the background. The current building apparently dates to around 1922, according to City records. It’s an intriguing building architecturally, sort of…
The Vanished Theaters of Gravois Avenue
There used to be so many more theaters in St. Louis, and they’ve mostly been demolished. Take the Granada, seen above, and then look below, where the theater and its entrance have been removed and turned into a parking lot for the apartment building that originally attached to the theater. It was fairly common for…
Fruin-Bambrick Quarry
I never got a chance to photograph them, but there used to be a row of one story buildings that lined the west side of Grand Boulevard just south of the viaduct over the railroad tracks, just north of the intersection with Chouteau Avenue where this vacant lot now lies. Little did I know that…
The Crossroads of the World: Grand and Gravois
Inspired by a World Wide Magazine visit to the intersection of Grand and Gravois, I photographed the old South Side National Bank. It’s been turned into condos or apartments. It was going to be demolished for a Walgreen’s but cooler heads prevailed. It’s sort of St. Louis’s own shorter version of the Empire State Building….
McKinley Bridge, Revisited
I really like the McKinley Bridge, and I realized I had never really photographed it very well. There are some nice historic photographs of it, as well. I-70 came crashing through in the 1950s and there was a fair amount of new infrastructure built to connect the bridge to the interstate. You can see Mallinckrodt…