Norbury Wayman was a historian and artist who researched and chronicled much of St. Louis and its built environment. I’m presenting here his additions and subdivisions of the city maps, which are incredibly useful for anyone looking to see when different portions of St. Louis were platted. Above is an overall map, and below are…
River Roads, Then and Now
It had been awhile since I’d checked in at the site of the former River Roads Mall, and the contrast between 1962 and 2025 cannot be greater. But perhaps it also reflects the changing pattern of suburban shopping; large, anchor-based shopping centers are being demolished and replaced with single parcel stores, each with their own…
Second Empire, Reborn
Well, I’ll be darned! That Second Empire beauty at the southeast corner of South Jefferson Avenue and Miami Street wasn’t actually a hazardous building in imminent danger of collapse after all! It’s been reopened as a space for a non-for-profit that provides housing for people in need. Looks like it’s structurally sound!
Claymont, Today
Today, the houses of Claymont look much the same as they did when they were built, but there is pressure in the economically desirable city of Ballwin for “tear downs,” where lots are worth more than the houses on them. While that has spelled the end of many ranch houses in West County, so far…
Claymont, Beginnings
I was always interested in the Claymont subdivision, located on the southeast corner of Clayton and Kehr’s Mill roads in Ballwin in West County. Developed around 1963, the subdivision was a great example of the new sort of development appearing in the mid-Twentieth Century. Unlike Glasgow Village or Castle Point, which we’ve looked at before,…
Darst-Webbe
Darst-Webbe, which like many housing projects in the United States, is spoken about as a single complex today, but like Pruitt-Igoe on the Near North Side of St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago, was really two different projects originally. It was built on the grounds of the neighborhood annihilated in the 1940s between Soulard and…
St. Raymond’s Maronite Cathedral
St. Raymond’s began in 1912 a short distance from St. Anthony the Hermit. And like its predecessor, it was inside an old house; in this case it looks to have been a Second Empire duplex shorn of its Mansard roof. The interior of what looks to be a large expansion out the back of the…
St. Anthony the Hermit Maronite Church
Wait a minute, I said to myself, the home of William D’Oench, one of Eberhard Anheuser’s early business partners, has the same address as the early Maronite church of St. Anthony the Hermit. It sat in the neighborhood we looked at the last couple of days. And yes, it was not hugely common, but down…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part Two
Continuing our tour of the Near South Side streetscapes demolished in the 1940s for the Clinton Peabody Housing Project, we move over to Dillon Street. William Swekosky seems to have been drawn to St. Ange Avenue, with its strong mix of different architectural styles predating the Civil War. This was actually the suburbs before the…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part One
As I began to research the business community in pre-Civil War St. Louis, the addresses of some of the most important factory owners often seemed to come up in the later footprint of Clinton-Peabody. Certainly the Cracker Castle is a well-known example, but there are many more. It turns out that streets such as St….