We’ll look at three important buildings in downtown St. Joseph; the first up is the Corby-Forsee Building, designed by the St. Louis architecture firm of Eames and Young, opening in 1910. Due to its importance, there was also a one story mercantile grain exchange room added later. It even sort of looks like a skyscraper…
Tag: Chicago School
Upcycled Garden At the City Museum
There’s a cool exhibit up on the fourth floor of the City Museum for the next couple of months featuring the sculpture of Daniel Seifert, entitled Upcycled Garden. The works are made of cardboard from Seifert’s normal everyday life, and painted in imaginative colors. It’s a lot of fun, and worth taking a look. While…
Sealed Shut, Railway Exchange Building
I think many of us have fond memories of Christmas at Famous Barr downtown in the Railway Exchange Building, so there’s something deeply sad to see it clad in massive metal sheathing now, a necessary step the City of St. Louis has taken to secure the structure from further intrusions after a fire earlier this…
Other Fall Updates, Fires, Demolitions, Etc.
It finally happened, the Mullanphy Emigrant Home, which I last looked at back in June of this year, caught on fire and burned to the ground on the night of September 14th. There is certainly no grand conspiracy, but simply the fact that overnight lows reached 50 degrees, and a squatter’s fire probably spread out…
The Penobscot Block, Detroit
Time to move to downtown Detroit, and start with one of the most interesting square blocks in the United States, the Penobscot Block. Like all good things, it was the result of the accretion of decades of history and multiple building campaigns by disparate developers. This first building of the ensemble is the 1905 Penobscot…
From the Vault: Gary, Indiana
Update: I went back in the summer of 2023. This is Gary, Indiana. A city only founded in 1906, which peaked at a population of 178,320 in 1960, an increase of 33% from the 1950 federal census. In the most recent census of 2020, it has dropped to 69,093, a drop of 61%. These photos…
The Chicago River and Civic Identity
I would argue that the approximate one mile from the Lake Shore Drive Bridge to Wolf Point, where the Chicago River splits into its North and South branches, is easily one of the most famous vistas in the world. Along it you will see the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower and many others you’d recognize…
Civic and Retail Monuments, Chicago
I was always intrigued how for decades, the Cook County Building/Chicago City Hall stared at the Marshall Fields Department Store across the Daley Plaza and Block 37. Then, several years ago, Block 37 was redeveloped, Marshall Field’s became a Macy’s, and that grand urban vista was blocked and altered, most likely forever. While it looks…
Main Street, Galesburg, Illinois
We’ll be looking at Galesburg, Illinois for the next six days, as part of my continued examination of the cities and towns within the sphere of St. Louis’s economy. Located along the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, there is still a giant railyard going through the town in a northeast-southwest orientation southeast of downtown. Main…
Downtown Springfield
Downtown Springfield is dominated by a public square at the intersection of two major cross streets. While for much of its history during the Twentieth Century it was a morass of open pavement, in what looks to be the 1970s it was converted into a park and traffic was routed into a single lane that…