I was walking down a quiet stretch of Westminster Place, admiring the houses built in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, when I spotted this house.  Wait a minute, I thought, this house doesn’t belong here.  The heavy damage to much of the architectural details is striking, as well.

City records state that the house was built in 1891, but as often happens, the records sometime record a later addition; I suspect this house is older, perhaps from the 1880’s.  It clearly once had a more elaborate cornice, which I suspect might have been a Mansard roof.  It doesn’t appear in the Compton and Dry view, either.  It’s not unusual to see a house that is decades older than its neighbors, as many streets were laid out long before development occurred on them.  One or two houses would be built, and then the years would slip by before more development occurred, as in this case, the years surrounding the 1904 World’s Fair in Forest Park.