I’m sure by now many people have heard that the State of Missouri is vacating the Wainwright Building in downtown. Let’s not waste time on trashing the State of Missouri or Chesterfield, which will be the recipient of those government workers. I want to stress that from my understanding, forty years ago the State of…
Tag: Chicago School
Broadway Street West of 4th Street, Paducah
Retracing my steps back down Broadway Street to Fourth Street, we see a bank, perhaps the tallest historic building in downtown Paducah with some interesting modern additions… West of 4th Street is perhaps not as rehabbed as east, but there is just as beautiful of Victorian Period buildings from Paducah’s Nineteenth Century heritage. The Weille…
Wainwright Tomb, Bellefontaine Cemetery
I was visiting Bellefontaine Cemetery and was pleasantly surprised that the Wainwright Tomb recently underwent routine cleaning, making it look better than ever. Go check it out if you haven’t ever or if it’s been a while.
Three Downtown Office Buildings, St. Joseph
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…
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…
Cadillac Square and Broderick Towers, Detroit
Originally known as the Barlum Tower, the Cadillac Square was the first office building outside New York and Chicago to reach forty stories, opening in 1927. I’m always fascinated by the optimism of the builders; note the blank wall to the southwest. They were expecting that Detroit would continue to grow and another skyscraper or…
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…