The St. Louis giant of Mallinckrodt Chemical began as a farm on the North Side, near the present day intersection of North Broadway and Salisbury Street. Emil Mallinckrodt, a native of Dortmund, and his wife Emily Vallmau owned a farm along the road that was then known as Bellefontaine Road, with their three sons Gustav,…
Northern Reaches, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
Up near the northern fence line, we came across some of the oldest clusters of graves with a large number of limestone grave stones. We were very interested. We also saw some iconography we had never seen before, of a spirit floating over an opened gate, surely representing a soul passing through the gates of…
Mausolea and Tumuli, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
The Busch Mausoleum was looking beautiful with a cloudless sky framing it as we looked at some mausolea. The Farrar “mausoleum” actually holds a crypt below the floor of the colonnade. If you move the stone back, it slides on these tracks. Very nice. This is one of the oldest large-scale monuments in the cemetery….
Obelisks, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
Let’s look at some obelisks, which go all the way back to Egyptian architecture and religion. You can read about their religious significance in ancient Egypt here. The Romans were famous for stealing Egyptian obelisks and setting them up in temples in Rome, particularly at the Iseum in the Campus Martius. This obelisk group of…
Monuments and Sculpture, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Late December 2025
What better way to celebrate the unseasonably warm weather the day after Christmas than to head to Bellefontaine Cemetery? So today and the three following days, we’ll look at four different themes of various sights we saw as we walked the grounds away from the roads. We saw old favorites and many new ones. Take…
Around the Former Plaza Theater, West End
It’s hard to believe it, but I first photographed the former Plaza Theater way back in April of 2009, when we were first starting to explore the West End and points to the north, such as Hamilton Heights and Wells-Goodfellow by heading up Clara Avenue. Today, it’s the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, which has occupied…
Julian Avenue Between Hamilton Avenue and Goodfellow Boulevard, West End
The first thing we see at the corner of Julian and Hamilton avenues is this nice church, and then we head east. A block west on Julian Avenue from the concrete block houses I looked at back in March of 2022 are houses that are more indicative of the West End as you move further…
West Cabanne Place, West End, Revisited
I hadn’t been back to look at West Cabanne Place, platted in 1888, in a while, so I thought I would go take a look and check up on it. I first explored the street back in August of 2009, and revisited the Theodore Link House in September of 2014 and August of 2019. In…
Enright Avenue Between Porter Mall and Clara Avenue, West End
I somehow forgot to go down Enright Avenue west of Ruth Porter Mall, but here is the street east of there. It is perhaps a portent of what the West End would have become if the City had not lost out to the suburbs: increasingly dense with apartments replacing single family homes built earlier in…
Cates Avenue Between Porter Mall and Clara Avenue, West End
Before we get up to Cates Avenue, we’ll look at a couple of buildings down on Clemens Avenue, such as this apartment building. We’ve looked at Clemens Avenue east of Clara Avenue, back in April of 2019. We looked at Cates Avenue west of Porter Mall back in late November. To the east of the…