I know I’ve read and heard it passed around as common knowledge (and even repeated it myself) that the two lamella roofs in St. Louis were the now-demolished Arena and the gymnasium of the former St. Elizabeth’s Academy-now-International Institute. So I got excited when I learned that a warehouse on Manchester Avenue just west of…
Tag: Dogtown
Breezy Heights
Cut off by Interstate 44 in the 1970s, there’s a small sliver of the Breezy Heights Addition tucked in between the highway to the south and the railroad tracks to the north. Laid out in the late Nineteenth Century, the development was early with an Italianate house or two, but then other houses were built…
Enclaves of St. Louis #2: Balson Avenue
Update: See the southern portion cut off by the train tracks here. Down Ecoff Avenue, an anonymous street just south of Manchester Avenue almost to the city limits, you then turn right onto Balson Avenue, and there you will find one of the most quiet streets in St. Louis, delineated in red below in an…
John J. Roe Elementary School
Sitting on the west side of Franz Park, John J. Rose Elementary School has existed in two forms over the last century. The first iteration was a Romanesque Revival school, as was typical of many of the more rural buildings in the system. It was replaced in 1919 by a design by Rockwell M. Milligan…
Outlet of the River des Peres, Revisited
I’m endlessly fascinated by one of the largest public works projects in St. Louis history, which is the “harnessing,” for lack of a better word, of the River des Peres. While today, we would consider it to be a horrible ecological disaster, I think it is important to realize at the time and place in…
St. James the Greater Roman Catholic Church
Sitting on a dramatic hill on some of the highest ground in Dogtown, St. James the Greater is the Irish parish of St. Louis. Many other churches have held that title over the centuries: St. Patrick, St. Bridget of Erin, St. Leo, St. Lawrence O’Toole, St. Columbkille–but now we are left with St. James the…
Macklind Avenue Between Oakland and Manchester Avenues
I found myself wandering up Macklind Avenue north of Manchester Avenue, and there’s a unique group of post-World War II light industrial buildings. I’d love to know the story behind the two anachronistic doorways that flank the two sides of this first building. This building obviously dates earlier, probably to the 1930s. This, of course,…
Hi-Pointe Theater
The Hi-Pointe Theater would never be built today; the corporation would require a giant parking lot, and it would never be located so close to the street. But it was built, and it is still a landmark after all of these years. Read more about the history of the theater here.
Oakland Avenue, Dogtown
Oakland Avenue, before Highway 40 was built, must have been a beautiful, slightly more middle-class version of Lindell on the north side of Forest Park. But alas, the highway came crashing through, and the roar of the automobile now pervades what must have once been a beautiful part of Forest Park. I don’t think those…