Update: There’s some great news to report on these two houses. For once this is not land speculation but rather the Sisters at Alpha Kappa Alpha rebuilding a founder’s home as part of what will be a museum and community center. Heading east on St. Louis Avenue just east of Garrison, I spotted a strange…
Tag: Northside TIF
Another McKee Property Burns
Another one of Paul McKee’s buildings went up in flames on Tyler Street. I realized I had photographed the building way back in February of 2016 (last photo) as well as June of 2019 (second photo), and now it is completely ruined. It doesn’t matter if it was arson or accidental, the end result is…
Checking Up on McKee Land
Little has changed where Paul McKee owns vast swaths of real estate since I went by this area last year. There are still abandoned and fire-gutted buildings. Update: By July of 2022, the ruins below were finally torn down. The large apartment building on St. Louis Avenue is still sitting as a burned out shell….
Old North and Another Fire
There are still so many great things happening in the Old North neighborhood, where houses are being rehabbed, and other buildings, while still vacant, have been stabilized, leaving them secure for future residents to buy and renovate. Not so with properties still owned by Paul McKee. At the beginning of March, another one of his…
Historic American Buildings Survey: The Clemens Mansion
It seems like it’s been far longer, but it’s coming up on three years since fire gutted the James Clemens Mansion, resulting in its final demolition. But back in November of 1960, Paul Piaget photographed the mansion when it was still part of a religious complex as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey, cataloged…
Fires and the Northside TIF, Old North St. Louis
The Northside TIF and Paul McKee’s damage to North St. Louis is not some abstract academic discussion about what role government should play in financing and aiding private developers. It impacts real people, when houses that are left to rot for over a decade are set on fire by an arsonist, and the flames and…
Thirteenth Anniversary of Saint Louis Patina
2507-9 Hebert Street are both owned by Paul McKee’s Northside Regeneration. The thirteenth anniversary technically happened yesterday, on the Sixteenth, but I wanted to finish up my series on Dubuque first. What’s one day nowadays, anyway, when days run into the next and weekends are meaningless? I was struggling to think of something to write…
The Wall, Back from the Dead
Update: Here is a piece written by a resident of the Ville neighborhood explaining why the name Homer G. Phillips is so sacred to African Americans in St. Louis. The wall was taken down by construction workers in late 2020. Remember the preposterous wall that was knocked over in high winds on the site of…
North Up Blair Avenue, Again
Update: I went back up this way again in late summer of 2019. Last fall, I did a post entitled “North Up Blair Avenue,” which looked at a cross section of the neighborhoods that were affected by the construction of Interstate 70, but that also show signs of rebounding. Beginning above, a house long admired…
Winkelmann Mansion Property For Sale, and Other Follies
Update: Construction on the “green” houses started back up again in mid to late 2019. Oh hey, if you’d like to buy the vacant lot at the corner of St. Louis Avenue and 20th Street, it’s for sale, minus the historic mansion that Paul McKee let collapse and be demolished back in 2013. Meanwhile, another…