State Street and Environs, Alton

Working my way around on Mill Street over to Carroll, I saw some of the wide variety of houses on the steep slopes of the bluffs to the west of downtown Alton. Below is looking up William Street. Finally, I turned up State Street, which is the main artery up to the bluffs above the…

Downtown, Alton

We’re going to swing back through Alton for a few days. Like Hannibal, Quincy or even Cairo, and a bunch of other towns, I can’t help but imagine that except for a few twists of fate, Alton could have been the center of a metropolitan area of two million people, or at least maybe a…

Down By The River and the South Side, Peoria, August 2023

The public housing down by the river, which I first spotted way back in December of 2008, are finally being demolished. I had discovered they were built when Peoria demolished the red light district where Richard Pryor had grown up. The new buildings going up are nice, and they even feature the latest navy blue…

Auburn Avenue, Mount Auburn, Cincinnati

Mount Auburn? That sounds interesting, I thought to myself, and then discovered that there was a historic site related to future president William Howard Taft. After taking a terrible photo of his boyhood home, I photographed many of the houses along Auburn Avenue, which follows the crest of the hill. The siting of Mount Auburn…

Downtown, Youngstown

Downtown Youngstown is really nice! Now, I’m defining it as the area enclosed by Highway 422, which surrounds it to the northeast, effectively cutting it off from the rest of the city; on the southwest, the Mahoning River forms the other border. Youngstown State University clearly breathes much of the life into the area northeast…

In Search of the Sidaway Bridge and John D. Rockefeller, Cleveland

Sometimes I go searching for something and I don’t find it, but the journey becomes interesting (and a little scary) in of itself. In this case, I went looking for the Sidaway Bridge, further up one of the tributaries of the Cuyahoga River, after reading about it online, and besides being fascinated by its structure,…

East of Downtown, Cleveland

Cleveland is much like St. Louis in that it is much longer than it is wide. In this case, however, the city stretches along a lake, and is longer east-west. St. Clair and Superior avenues in many ways are like the equivalents of North Broadway back in St. Louis, as well, passing through industrial zones…

Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Cleveland

St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Cathedral, while showing a 1940s exterior renovation that belies its 1852 construction, sits at a busy intersection in downtown Cleveland. The original design of the cathedral was by Irish architect Patrick Keely, who was active out of Brooklyn and is responsible for churches throughout the eastern United States. While…

Downtown, Part Two, Cleveland

Moving along through downtown Cleveland, we reach the “Beaux-Arts” or “City Beautiful” portion of the city, which every metropolitan area seemed to have dabbled with in the early Twentieth Century to better or adverse effect. Below is the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, completed in 1913. Moving along, we spot the 1922 Public Auditorium, which sits along…

Vistula Historic District, Toledo

Down by the approaches to the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway Bridge is the Vistula Historic District, which retains some amazing architecture. The majority of my phots are from along East Superior Street. Platted in 1833, Vistula was originally one of two towns, the other being Port Lawrence, that combined together in 1837 to form the…