Heading west from the square and downtown, we come across St. Paul Lutheran Church, founded in 1921 and originally met in an older building. The current church is from 1952. Houses are relatively simple in town. But I did find this nice Queen Anne Style house back closer to the courthouse. Out southwest of town,…
Downtown Union, Franklin County
I rolled into Union, the county seat of Franklin County, on a quiet afternoon last Saturday and took a look around. Union, like Washington to the north up Route 47, has seen explosive growth in the last thirty years as an exurban community in the larger St. Louis Metropolitan area, so there is a lot…
Farmsteads, Southwest of Washington, Franklin County
Southwest of Washington in Franklin County along Route KK are a collection of beautiful central hall houses that sit on prominent hilltops, probably built as early as the 1840s but certainly complete before the Civil War. Certainly many of the original owners/builder of these houses were Germans brought to this country by the famous work…
Stix, Baer and Fuller, Crestwood Plaza
I thought the former Stix, Baer & Fuller department store at Crestwood Plaza deserved its own post, considering its shear size and accompanying enclosed mall which attached to the strip mall to the west of the original development from 1957. Opening on January 23, 1967, the new department store represented a substantial addition to the…
Crestwood Plaza, Revisited January 2025
What’s present is past. I’d long documented the slow demise and demolition of Crestwood Plaza, and today there is substantial redevelopment on the site. The irony, of course, is that it was originally built as a strip mall with a single anchor tenant and a grocery store, and now it has been rebuilt as a…
South County Center
Developed by the May Department Stores and originally anchored by a Famous Barr department store in Mehlville, the South County Shopping Center opened in the fall of 1963, spurring increased residential development around the intersection of what would become Interstates 55, 270 and 55, just west of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge. This was the fourth…
Requiem for Shopping Malls?
The announcement that Macy’s will be closing the store at South County Center raised the specter that there will be another round of mall closures after an initial wave that struck the St. Louis region earlier this millennium. As Toby Weiss at B.E.L.T. St. Louis documented so well at Northland Shopping Center and River Roads…
Fassen Street Between Virginia and Michigan Avenues
Down at the furthest southern end of Dutchtown, almost to Carondelet, is Fassen Street, which is an interesting mix of housing styles. Heading east from Virginia Avenue, we see this streetscape. It’s interesting, having just looked at Angelrodt Street in Hyde Park, to see houses that are very similar to the ones up north. Each…
North Dakota Street
Just off Virginia Avenue is the short street of North Dakota, one block north of Dakota Street, which strangely enough was not named South Dakota Street. It’s just another one of those nice, tidy streets in Dutchtown, with some one story houses, some two story houses, and those ubiquitous four-family apartments. The intersection with South…
Angelrodt Street from North Twentieth Street to Blair Avenue, Revisited
Continuing around Hyde Park, I headed down Angelrodt Street east of Twentieth Street, which I looked at back in January of 2018. I first spotted this house, which is rapidly losing its vinyl siding. I’ve always been fascinated by these little houses, built a half century or more after Hyde Park was already a bustling…