Learning that the Citizens’ National Bank was going to be demolished, and hoping maybe I could coax some important architectural elements from the crews working there, I headed up to East Alton on a recent Saturday. East Alton is an interesting town, with parts from the Nineteenth Century but also with clear signs of a…
Tag: Abandoned Buildings
Down By The River and the South Side, Peoria, August 2023
The public housing down by the river, which I first spotted way back in December of 2008, are finally being demolished. I had discovered they were built when Peoria demolished the red light district where Richard Pryor had grown up. The new buildings going up are nice, and they even feature the latest navy blue…
Grain Elevators, South of Peoria
These massive grain elevators south of Peoria along the Illinois River are slated for demolition–or maybe they aren’t. They’ll probably sit around for a long time until they’re finally, or completely, demolished.
Vine Street Over to Race Street, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati
“Lord, on this day of thanksgiving, we thank you for our loved ones, family and friends. We also thank you, oh Lord, that Chris has almost run out of photos from his trip back in August.” Heading down the hill from Clifton, passing through some other neighborhoods, I reached what I call “upper” Vine Street…
Reading Road, Avondale and the Riots, Cincinnati
I’ve looked at Fourteenth Street NW before in Washington, DC, and probably elsewhere, so I was interested in what had become of Reading Road in the Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. High up in the hills, there were two riots, one in 1967 and then less than a year later in 1968. The first one revolved…
Leaving, Youngstown
After surveying the remnants of what had once been the workplace of literally tens of thousands of Americans, I worked my way out of Youngstown, passing through the neighborhoods where they once lived. I saw St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, which alludes to the Eastern European origins of many of the immigrants who once flooded…
Steel, Long Gone, Youngstown
As I mentioned before, the glow from the furnaces in Youngstown could be seen at night in Akron, around fifty miles away. Perhaps more than anything that fact sums up the giant crucible that was one of the greatest industrial powerhouses in America for one hundred years. And it’s all gone now, except for a…
Wick Park, Youngstown
My first stop off the interstate in Youngstown was Wick Park, which is a historic district up on a plateau of sorts just north of the downtown area. The outstanding focal point of the neighborhood and sitting at the end of Park Avenue where it t-bones with 5th Avenue is the Stambaugh Auditorium. I think…
In Search of the Sidaway Bridge and John D. Rockefeller, Cleveland
Sometimes I go searching for something and I don’t find it, but the journey becomes interesting (and a little scary) in of itself. In this case, I went looking for the Sidaway Bridge, further up one of the tributaries of the Cuyahoga River, after reading about it online, and besides being fascinated by its structure,…
East of Downtown, Cleveland
Cleveland is much like St. Louis in that it is much longer than it is wide. In this case, however, the city stretches along a lake, and is longer east-west. St. Clair and Superior avenues in many ways are like the equivalents of North Broadway back in St. Louis, as well, passing through industrial zones…