Riverview Boulevard has been known by many names over the years: Tracy Road or Avenue until 1907, Kingshighway Northwest until 1925 and Partridge Avenue at some point. Regardless, it forms the southeast boundary of Walnut Park West and has been a major artery since the Nineteenth Century, traveling to the northeast where it intersects with…
Tag: Abandoned Buildings
Sherry Avenue Between Mimika Avenue and Riverview Boulevard, Walnut Park West
Doglegging across Mimika Avenue (whose name is an interesting choice–was it from a daughter of the Jennings family or the people in Indonesia?), we look at the block of Sherry closer to Riverview. The housing is much older than the block to the west, and much of it is in worse condition or abandoned. A…
Family Farm and Environs, Early November 2025
I visited the family farm east of Peoria for the last time this year, but will be back up in the spring, as usual. The harvest has been over for weeks, so the landscape has been transformed to the fallow fields with its stark beauty. I photographed this corn crib to the northwest of the…
Clinton Peabody, Today
Over the next week, we’ll be examining the Near South Side, the area seen above around 1961, and how it has changed over the last eighty years due to government urban renewal plans. Clinton Peabody, built in 1942 on the Near South Side, is being demolished. Long known for crime and entrenched poverty, it will…
Moline, Illinois
Moline is contiguous with Rock Island, so we entered the former from the west. Moline is famous for being the home of several industries, including an elevator manufacturer and John Deere, which everyone has heard of. First up is the former headquarters of Montgomery Elevator Company, which is now abandoned. The tower functioned as the…
Cook Avenue, JeffVanderLou
I was up this way a couple of weeks ago and there were a bunch of streets blocked off so I ended up detouring on some side streets, including Cook Avenue. I saw some interesting houses, so I came back a couple weeks later to look some more. For whatever reason, some of the streets…
Chouteau’s Landing, Early October 2025
We were back down on Chouteau’s Landing much like I was almost a year ago and the the buildings and bridges were looking good in the evening light. The MacArthur Bridge’s road deck is now completely gone, and is only used for trains. I’m always impressed by the massive concrete footings for the other rail…
Wells Avenue Between Academy Avenue and Union Boulevard
I’ll have to admit when I got home and actually looked at the photographs I had taken of this street, I was very disheartened. I have photographed the twin apartment buildings above twice, once back in May of 2012 (badly) and again in August of 2015. I also photographed these two just really beautiful twins…
Wabada Avenue Between Arlington Avenue and Union Boulevard
Leaving behind Arlington Avenue, we head east on Wabada Avenue, on a section that we have not looked at before. While the street traverses much of the North Side, this section is quiet.
Arlington Avenue, Wells-Goodfellow
I’ve looked at Arlington Avenue in Wells-Goodfellow further to the north in these two posts from March of 2017 and July of 2023, but this time I started at Dr. Martin Luther King Dr. and went north. There’s a wide variety of housing styles, from four-family flats… …to in-fill that looks like it was damaged…