Halloween at the Lemp Brewery

I went to the Lemp Brewery haunted house in mid October, which gave me the chance to take some bad photos of the place at night. It’s pretty fun to walk around the place at night, with lights giving a nice perspective on the architecture. You enter the cellars under the brew house, and then…

Family Farm, August 2023

My last stop on my August travels was my family farm east of Peoria in Central Illinois. As longtime readers know, the cattle barn was destroyed by a tornado in late March. These photos are from late August, but the destroyed barn is now completely cleaned up. I also had a surprise, as the last…

Down By The River and the South Side, Peoria, August 2023

The public housing down by the river, which I first spotted way back in December of 2008, are finally being demolished. I had discovered they were built when Peoria demolished the red light district where Richard Pryor had grown up. The new buildings going up are nice, and they even feature the latest navy blue…

Grain Elevators, South of Peoria

These massive grain elevators south of Peoria along the Illinois River are slated for demolition–or maybe they aren’t. They’ll probably sit around for a long time until they’re finally, or completely, demolished.

Fairfield Avenue, Newport, Kentucky

We’ve looked at Newport, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati before, but this time we’re going to look at Fairfield Avenue, starting at Ward Avenue and heading east. As I’ve said before, one of the great tragedies of St. Louis and its relationship to the Metro East is that civic and business leaders have not…

Vine Street Over to Race Street, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati

“Lord, on this day of thanksgiving, we thank you for our loved ones, family and friends. We also thank you, oh Lord, that Chris has almost run out of photos from his trip back in August.” Heading down the hill from Clifton, passing through some other neighborhoods, I reached what I call “upper” Vine Street…

Clifton, Cincinnati

Up north, the Clifton neighborhood was an independent town dating to the 1850s, but street car lines, which made the arduous climb up the steep hills feasible, transformed the area in the 1890s. Much of the housing dates to the first years of the Twentieth Century, however, and filled in what had originally been the…

Glenway Avenue, East Price Hill, Cincinnati

Wow, East Price Hill is up a really steep hill! And again, just like over at Mount Auburn, a funicular railroad gave residents the ability to settle this neighborhood in the Nineteenth Century. I started at the intersection of Warsaw, Glenway and Seton avenues where they merge with Quebec Road. East Price Hill has been…

Maplewood Avenue, Mount Auburn, Cincinnati

Somehow accidentally wandering down the hill from the summit of Mount Auburn, I stumbled upon Maplewood Avenue, which contains one of the most amazing collections of Queen Anne Style I’ve ever seen. I would like to know the story behind the Swiss chalet, but after that begin the Queen Anne, some with a simple palette,…

Auburn Avenue, Mount Auburn, Cincinnati

Mount Auburn? That sounds interesting, I thought to myself, and then discovered that there was a historic site related to future president William Howard Taft. After taking a terrible photo of his boyhood home, I photographed many of the houses along Auburn Avenue, which follows the crest of the hill. The siting of Mount Auburn…