Iowa Avenue Opposite St. Francis de Sales

The west side of Iowa Avenue in between Lynch Street (which continues as sort of an afterthought west of Gravois) and Sidney Street opposite of St. Francis de Sales has some interesting houses. The first house above has an explanation of why it sits at an angle. It was most likely built before the addition…

New Lease on Life

I was alerted by a valued and longtime reader to the recent commencement of major tuckpointing and masonry rebuilding of the beautiful Second Empire storefront at the diagonal intersection of Lynch, Ohio and Gravois in the Fox Park neighborhood, just to the south of St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Oratory. On-line City records show…

Gravois Avenue Between California and Ohio Avenues, Fox Park

On my way to photographing St. Francis de Sales in the fog, and continuing my slow documentation of Gravois Avenue, having done Tower Grove East to the west a while back, I shot some of the buildings on the north side of that main thoroughfare in Fox Park. This giant Spire, formerly Laclede Gas building…

St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Oratory, In the Fog

I thought it would be interesting to rush out into the fog Saturday morning and see if I could get any interesting photos of tall buildings. St. Francis de Sales was almost invisible on the fog-cloaked streets around 8:30 AM, even just two blocks away. But when I drew closer, it appeared out of the…

Bumper Plating, Cleaned Up

The northern end of Texas Avenue between Sidney and Victor streets on the west side has possessed a fascinating and strange history since the 1870s. Originally, the house above, a Greek Revival duplex, sat on an isthmus flanked by a lake to the south and a pond to the north in the southeast corner of…

St. Francis de Sales Parish School

I’ve often regarded Roman Catholic parishes as much more than simply a church, but rather campuses of multiple buildings, including but not limited to a rectory, convent, school and even other buildings. St. Francis De Sales originally had a building on the southeast corner of Sidney and Iowa that housed a musical corps. The parish…

Looking Out Over South St. Louis

I recently was up on top of the roof of a warehouse in the Fox Park neighborhood just to the west of the intersection of Gravois and South Jefferson avenues, and I snapped these quick photos. Above is to the northeast. Below is to the northwest. Below is to the west. Below is to the…

Odds and Ends

When I’m out and about, I sometimes snap pictures of interesting buildings that later expand into larger posts, but other times, I can’t figure out what to do with them. These photos are “outtakes;” buildings that are worth publishing but didn’t grow into anything else. Above, this is an old warehouse complex on Texas Avenue…

Jefferson and Gravois, Revisited

I’ve looked at the intersection of South Jefferson and Gravois avenues in July of 2012, and I came back over the course of several months to photograph the crossing of two of the most important streets in the inner South Side. It’s come a long way from when it was a small exurban village surrounded…

Details of the Spire, St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Oratory

You probably noticed over the last three to four months my photographs were becoming increasingly blurry, overexposed, underexposed and just all around incredibly lower quality (even more so than usual). This was because my old camera was coming to the end of its life. Thankfully, I received a new camera for Christmas, and with it…