I have some good news to report about the Second Empire corner storefront at 1000 Morrison Avenue in the LaSalle Park neighborhood which I looked at in June of 2019. Due to the efforts of Landmarks Association of St. Louis and Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, control of the building has been wrested away from…
Tag: Frenchtown
Peabody Elementary School
Peabody Elementary School is another institution with a long history in the neighborhood just south of downtown that can be traced back to at least the 1870s if not earlier. At one point it became known as Clinton-Peabody, and as some readers might remember, it shared the name of the housing projects nearby. A new…
Madison Elementary School
Designed by William B. Ittner, Madison Elementary once sat in what was a bustling, crowded and dense neighborhood. Now, the stretch of South 7th Street is sits on is desolate, largely devoid of buildings, and certainly empty of the residences that were once full of thousands of residents whose children attended this school. But these…
Convent of the Sacred Heart
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…
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…