With the old South Public Market on our right, we turn left onto South Broadway from Schirmer Street. Before we get to Steins Street, there is this impressive row of commercial spaces.
Many of them were probably built as Greek Revival houses that were then converted into stores with long cast iron beams holding up the front facade to allow for large windows on the first floor.
After Steins Street are these two buildings.
Unfortunately, after them is a parking lot for a pawn shop.
Just after Koeln Avenue, which is just the German name for Cologne, we see this little guy, which is now a music venue called the Sinkhole.
At the northwest corner of Upton Street is this fantastic Second Empire storefront, which until recently was a “family outreach center.” All vestiges of its occupancy on the windows are completely gone.
Next comes one of those “hybrid” Italianate-Second Empire buildings, as I call them, but this one is rare in that it is a storefront.
This next building is quite the mess, isn’t it? The front facade was built in the early decades of the Twentieth Century with white terracotta but then at some point it was lumped together with new construction, probably in the 1960s to the north.
I wonder if the house below was actually filling in an alley, as space became premium on this stretch of commercial activity.
After these stately buildings we then reach Robert Avenue. A huge, wasteful parking lot is next, which once served the building I looked at back in March of 2021. The other row of buildings on across Nagel that I looked at in that post were damaged in a fire in the spring of 2023. It turns out I had actually looked at both of them back in February of 2011.
The building below has been in the news lately for being hit by the police SUV; it’s actually a really interesting building as I believe it was originally a Greek Revival house renovated into a business in the early Twentieth Century.
While photographing these two abandoned buildings, a guy poked his head out of the second floor of the building on the far right and asked if I could get the City to board them up to keep the squatters out. The old Watkins Ice and Fuel is now a vacant lot across the street.
