I remember seeing Clay’s Wellston Food Market and Restaurant at the corner of Page and Stephen Jones avenues when I was driving around photographing old factories for my St. Louis Magazine article back in May of this year. Compared to its surroundings, it looks like something I would expect to see out in my rural…
Tag: Crime
The Golden Eagle Tavern, Revisited
So this corner tavern has quite the history. The infamous Thomas Venezia, after serving time for the racket he was running over in Washington Park in the 1990s, ran a bar here back in the early 2000s, until he turned up dead, in the house next door. Read the two part story by Malcolm Gay…
College Hill in the Snow #15: Bottles, DeSoto Avenue
DeSoto Avenue is a place that many people would like to pretend doesn’t exist, but it does. Shrouded from view for decades by a thick tree cover, it now sits out in the wide open due to the recent clearing of foliage on the hillside in between DeSoto and East Prairie avenues. A young man,…
College Hill in the Snow #11: Ice Capades
It is a shame that the good, law-abiding people of College Hill have to put up with the fools that were driving like this the night before I photographed these tire tracks in the snow. That is a four-way stop in the photos above and below, and there is no way someone could lose control…
Evans Avenue, JeffVanderLou, Revisited
As the sun was setting on the last Saturday of January, I found my way back to that single block of Evans Avenue just north of Grand Center in the JeffVanderLou neighborhood that I looked at back in February of 2015, almost four years ago. Some things did not seem to have changed, such as…
Antelope Street, Revisited
Update: The houses have been demolished. Yes, there is a street in St. Louis where there is an active train track going right through people’s front yards. It is Antelope Street in the Baden neighborhood, and you reach it by turning right just after the viaduct when you’re heading north on Broadway. “Wait a minute,”…
The 4400 Block of Gibson Avenue
I discovered that photographer Joel Sternfeld had created a series of photographs where various tragedies had occurred. He also photographed 4421 Gibson Avenue, in the Grove, where Christopher Harris was shot to death when he was used as a human shield by a drug dealer exchanging fire with another man. The photograph above is my…
Burn Out in JeffVanderLou
Update: The minivan was replaced by an abandoned trailer filled with old tires in November of 2018. A year ago, these houses on Laflin Avenue in JeffVanderLou were in acceptable shape, even though they had been abandoned for a long time. I was shocked to drive by in the last week of August to discover…
Old St. Mark’s, Despoiled
Update: I went back and revisited the church in October of 2020 and again in May of 2022. So they’ve stolen just about all of the copper off of the old parish church of St. Mark’s on Page Boulevard (I could have sworn I’ve posted pictures of the church in the past). All of the roof…