It’s been almost exactly sixteen years since I first visited Pasadena Hills, and judging from the extremely low quality of the photos I took of the beautiful North County suburb I took back then, it was well past due to revisit. Comprising 120 acres and developed starting in 1928, the initial investment of the Carter…
Ira Avenue, Northwoods
I turned off Pasadena Boulevard in Northwoods and found this pleasant and nice street named Ira Avenue It continues that theme of houses developing from the 1920s into the 1950s. I love how Northwoods bucks the stereotype that many people hold for North County; it’s a beautiful area with well kept homes with beautiful architecture.
Pasadena Boulevard, Northwoods
Pasadena Boulevard follows the old right-of-way of the streetcar line that comes up out of Pine Lawn to the east. Just to the north of the park above was Minoma, the Italianate country estate of Jefferson Kearny. It is no longer extant. We enter Northwoods, which was the giant Edgewood survey, which you can see…
Pine Lawn
Pine Lawn is one of the many small inner ring suburbs just outside the boundaries of the City of St. Louis along Natural Bridge Road and Jennings Station Road forms a north-south “spine,” so to speak. The name comes from the estate, one of many out this way, of Charles Clark, of which only the…
Police Academy
Constructed at a cost of $800,000 in addition to the $1,000,000 that the original police headquarters to the north, the police academy, gymnasium and garage was built in 1928. I wrote about the construction of the police headquarters at St. Louis Magazine back in 2014, and Mauran, Russell and Crowell were the logical architects for…
Last Survivor
This house from the 1840s on North Tucker is a survivor. It is one of what were thousands of houses on the north and south side of downtown that were demolished for urban renewal in the mid-Twentieth Century. Most of those houses were never replaced with anything except parking lots or junkyards. I travel to…
Sligo Steel Fire
Update: Everything on this block has now been demolished. A catastrophic fire struck the buildings of what I understand to be the old Sligo Steel buildings on the Near North Side along North Broadway just north of Downtown. This is not the first time these buildings have been hit by fire; I covered a previous…
The Ruins, North Broadway, Far North Riverfront
I was heading up North Broadway when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye that made me make a U-turn and investigate. Through the lush undergrowth that had sprung up from the heavy rains we’ve seen this spring, I spotted the ruins of an old building peeking out. Through some research, I…
Gatehouses, Bellefontaine Cemetery, Revisited
I was driving up North Broadway past Bellefontaine Cemetery when I noticed that the gatehouse was undergoing some renovation. With so many absentee landlords and other slumlords letting their properties fall into disrepair, its nice to see the Cemetery taking pride in their buildings. I’ve looked at these gates back in November of 2016. As…
Demolition, The Workhouse
Regardless of your opinion of the Workhouse, or more properly called the Medium Security Institution, it is being demolished, and I thought I would swing by and take a look at the site. I had never actually stopped before, and really, driving along Hall Street, I’m generally looking out for maniac drivers around me so…