It was hiding in plain view. This old photograph of the French Market, which I had posted way back in October of 2020, featured a very prominent gable roof with windows that are obviously that of a church or chapel. Digging deeper, I discovered that the block of South Broadway, Hickory, 6th and LaSalle streets…
Tag: Frenchtown
Darst-Webbe
Darst-Webbe, which like many housing projects in the United States, is spoken about as a single complex today, but like Pruitt-Igoe on the Near North Side of St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago, was really two different projects originally. It was built on the grounds of the neighborhood annihilated in the 1940s between Soulard and…
St. Raymond’s Maronite Cathedral
St. Raymond’s began in 1912 a short distance from St. Anthony the Hermit. And like its predecessor, it was inside an old house; in this case it looks to have been a Second Empire duplex shorn of its Mansard roof. The interior of what looks to be a large expansion out the back of the…
St. Anthony the Hermit Maronite Church
Wait a minute, I said to myself, the home of William D’Oench, one of Eberhard Anheuser’s early business partners, has the same address as the early Maronite church of St. Anthony the Hermit. It sat in the neighborhood we looked at the last couple of days. And yes, it was not hugely common, but down…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part Two
Continuing our tour of the Near South Side streetscapes demolished in the 1940s for the Clinton Peabody Housing Project, we move over to Dillon Street. William Swekosky seems to have been drawn to St. Ange Avenue, with its strong mix of different architectural styles predating the Civil War. This was actually the suburbs before the…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part One
As I began to research the business community in pre-Civil War St. Louis, the addresses of some of the most important factory owners often seemed to come up in the later footprint of Clinton-Peabody. Certainly the Cracker Castle is a well-known example, but there are many more. It turns out that streets such as St….
Clinton Peabody, Today
Over the next week, we’ll be examining the Near South Side, the area seen above around 1961, and how it has changed over the last eighty years due to government urban renewal plans. Clinton Peabody, built in 1942 on the Near South Side, is being demolished. Long known for crime and entrenched poverty, it will…
Rutger Street, West of South Eleventh Street
I’ve looked at the greater Frenchtown area before, particularly the part known as LaSalle Park, a neighborhood left behind after the streets around it were annihilated in urban renewal. We’re going to look at one last remnant, the south side of Rutger Street in between South 11th and Tucker Boulevard today, seen above highlighted in…
South Tenth Street Across from the Interstate
Across the interstate from Soulard, which you can reach on a pedestrian bridge and St. Vincent de Paul, which just barely avoided being demolished, you find a short stretch of South Tenth Street in what I call Frenchtown. As is evident, these first houses we’re looking at are in-fill, maybe easy to tell due to…
Sad Loss in Bohemian Hill
A critical surviving component of the rapidly disappearing Bohemian Hill neighborhood was severely damaged by fire on January 15, 2024. While the front was clearly replaced in the early Twentieth Century, the building itself surely dated to well back into the Nineteenth Century. (Note: You can actually see the belltower of the church damaged in…