North Grand Boulevard is in transition; half of the right-of-way is being converted into a Great Rivers Greenway to connect Fairground Park to the center of the city. North Grand is also one of the most devastated stretches of a major thoroughfare. We’ll start at Finney Avenue and head north for two days. Above, this…
Tag: Demolition
End of Summer Odds and Ends
It’s a little late, but here are the odds and ends for the summer of 2026. Above, I snapped this photo of the wall of industry you spot as you pass under the Bellerive Bridge into Carondelet southbound on Broadway. Above is the vanished Twenty-First Street Bridge over the Mill Creek Valley. It is one…
Demolition Continuing Stouffer’s Riverfront Hotel
The demolition of the old Stouffer’s Riverfront Hotel is going along nicely, and this will be my last post about it, as the above photograph could be at twenty stories, ten stories, whatever. It looks the same regardless. According to my calculations, this is now the record holder for the tallest building in St. Louis…
Carr School, Before Demolition
Well, I heard in the news that the old Carr Elementary School, which has been abandoned since in 1983, is being demolished. By then, the neighborhood it served had largely been annihilated by urban renewal. I detailed the historically rich story of the Carr Square article in two parts, here and here, for St. Louis…
Demolition, The Chesterfield
Unlike most of the area south of Delmar Boulevard which is being repaired following the May 16, 2026 tornado, there was one building, the Chesterfield, that was not so lucky. Hit by the twister and then damaged further by a fire on January 24, 2026, the building was condemned for demolition. I caught a photo…
Crunden-Martin, Advanced State of Demolition
Crunden Martin, which was gutted and partially destroyed by a fire back in November of 2025, is now being demolished in earnest. Demolition had begun back in June. In fact, by the time you see these photographs, much more of the buildings will be gone. I suspect they didn’t save any of the iconic letters…
End of Corpus Christi, Jennings
“That’s weird,” I remarked as we headed up Jennings Station Road to check up on the old factory on Xograph Avenue, “we should be seeing an old church I check up on occasionally.” After our visit to Xograph Avenue, we came back to the site of the former Corpus Christi Church, which I first visited…
Demolitions Coming, Former Marillac College
UMSL is planning on demolishing some of its buildings on the south side of campus, many of which I have documented before. On the chopping block is the building above, the former Franciscan monastery which I looked at back in June of 2011; it has spectacular stained glass windows which I assume will go in…
Meramec Elementary School
Meramec Elementary School is another example of an earlier building, built when Dutchtown was well out in the exurbs of St. Louis, was replaced by a later commission. In this case it was William Ittner in 1911, having adopted his famous mature style of a central portal and two matching wings with some asymmetry. And…
Adams Elementary School
Adams Elementary has a history that stretches back to 1878, when the school above was constructed in what at the time was a relatively isolated but not unpopulated part of the city. The current building was designed by William Ittner in 1899, which is fascinating because the school is not in any way a “traditional”…