A tree fell in the forest and I wasn’t around to hear it, so to speak. As a couple of my readers know, I lived in Baltimore, Maryland, from 2004 to 2005 in the Hampden neighborhood, a former mill town north of downtown along the Jones Falls. One of the most prominent landmarks in the…
Tag: Demolition
The End of Rock Alva
Thanks to a tip, I learned that Rock Alva’s last central portion (the majority of the estate had already been sold off) was recently sold and subdivided off into a small housing development. The only building to survive is the stable, where the Griesediecks used to skeet shoot. I do not know what its future…
Old Cervantes Convention Center
So I didn’t know this, but America’s Center is actually four distinct entities, with the old Cervantes Convention Center being one component. Originally opened in 1977 on Convention Plaza (ever wondered why there was a street named that nowhere near the entrance?), Cervantes took up much of the old Columbia Square neighborhood. Designed by HOK,…
Gumbo
Where there is now a Walgreen’s, a McDonald’s, a gas station and an entrance ramp onto Interstate 64/Highway 40, there was once a small town named Gumbo, which lay in the larger area known as Gumbo Flats, rechristened Chesterfield Valley nowadays. Settlement occurred out here early with the Long Family being prominent; Chesterfield Airport Road…
Foundations, Benton Park
Alerted to a recent demolition in Benton Park, which is rare due to its historic district status, I went by to take a look. The property, owned by an infamous slumlord, was once a corner store with an alley dwelling whose collapse I covered back in May of 2019. It was in bad shape before…
The Stockyards and Industry Today, St. Joseph
Opening in 1887, the St. Joseph Stockyards was just one indication of the importance of the city to the burgeoning trade in the West. It once stretched to 413 acres and moved a half million animals a year in the 1920s. A beautiful exchange building sat at the front door, and according to my research,…
The Other Gateway to the West: St. Joseph
I was giving a lecture in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwestern corner of the state, and lo and behold, I found one of the most architecturally rich cities in the Midwest, if not in the whole United States. Powered by immense stockyards and industry that dwarfed Kansas City to the south for most of…
Demolition, Old Bumper Plating
Some old buildings, due to their history, just need to be torn down. One case in point was a squat building at the southwest corner of Victor Street and Texas Avenue. As can be seen, a small duplex house was added on to by the Koken Barber Supply Company, where shellacking occurred for some of…
North Up Blair Avenue, North of Penrose Street, Hyde Park, March 2024
Heading north from Penrose Street and continuing our tour in Hyde Park, we see that Ferry Street is blocked off again, no doubt due to another problem with the sewer underneath in what was originally a deep chasm in the natural topography of the earth before the neighborhood’s development. We detour to the east down…
Kinloch Park, Berkeley
I recently stumbled upon the plat map of Kinloch Park, which as its name suggests, has to do with the street grid of Kinloch, the historically middle class African American suburb in North County. But it is not so simple. Kinloch Park formed only the northwest portion of Kinloch, and that part has actually been…