Occasionally I build up some photos that don’t really go with anything else, and I present them to you here. Above is a nice house on Lemp Avenue across from the brewery that is now an AirBnB. For the longest time, it was a band practice space. Moving across the old St. Louis Commons to…
Tag: Central West End
In the Footsteps of Lillian Handlan Lemp
Many readers are no doubt familiar with Lillian Handlan, who would marry William Lemp, Jr., the heir to the Lemp Brewery. Later, their acrimonious divorce would make headlines around the country. But she also lived in many places around St. Louis, and I’ve identified several places she called home. There may be more, but for…
Engineers Club of St. Louis
Here we go again! Another Mid-Century Modern “Masterpiece” is threatened with demolition, or at least in this case a thorough gutting that leaves the shell of the building, and a huge apartment building will rise in the swath of blacktop behind it. This section of Lindell is a freaking dead zone, by the way, and…
The Grant Medical Clinic
The Grant Medical Clinic is an interesting building just south of the Optimist International Building, which I featured in a post back in August of last year (Whoa–it was that long ago? Time sure flies by). Washington University Physicians make use of the building, which revolutionized doctors’ offices with a more residential feeling with couches…
New Cathedral, Interior, January 2022
Whew, we’re back and I’m going to celebrate by showing you my photos I took with my new fisheye lens that I inherited from my friend Mike that I’ve known since 1986. He moved to the Big Island of Hawai’i, and the harbor is very shallow, so everything has to be shipped by freighter into…
Suspicious Fires Week: The Campanile of the Former Second Baptist Church
A serious and potentially devastating fire struck the campanile, or Italian-style bell tower of the former Second Baptist Church this last week. Thanks to the professionalism of the St. Louis Fire Department, the flames did not spread to the rest of the complex. Also, due to the variety of the Gothic Revival that the church…
Grain Elevator, Central West End, Revisited
I’ve looked at the landmark grain elevator in what is technically the Central West End but feels more like Midtown twice before over the years, here and here, but the light was so beautiful on an early Saturday morning I took another look at it.
Edmund R. Norris House
Why is this house abandoned?! This beautiful house sits just to the west of Saint Louis University on West Pine Boulevard across Vandeventer, and is a wonderful survivor. I would love to know the story behind the steel beams that created either an outdoor patio for a former restaurant or maybe a loading dock. It’s…
The Gustav William Niemann House
Regardless of the fate of the Optimists Building, I still just absolutely love the Niemann House. Gustav William Niemann lived in this house around the turn of the Twentieth Century, and it’s a reminder that Lindell Boulevard was once lined with residences such as this. It was renovated into law offices several years ago, and…
The Optimist International Building
Update: On August 23, 2021, the Optimist building’s demolition received another denial from the Preservation Board. No word on what the Optimists will do with their building in the future. The Engineers Club, further down Lindell to the east, is now threatened with demolition for a similar conversion to an apartment building. As of this…