Granite City – Saint Louis Patina®

Checking In on the Metro East: Northeastern Granite City and Pontoon Beach

Leaving behind the steel mill, I headed north on Maryville Road. I had no idea where I was exactly, but later analysis of maps revealed I was in the northeastern reaches of Granite City. Like so much of the Metro East, you can be driving along and it’s suburbia, and then there’s just farm fields…

Checking In on the Metro East: Granite City Industry

After leaving Madison, I wandered over into Granite City, where I soon found myself on East 23rd Street, and lo and behold, there was TMS Services. I went to their website, and after reading their “About Us” section I still have absolutely no idea what they do. I guess it looks like they probably scrap…

Former Granite City Moose Lodge

I took a look at the old Moose Lodge on State Street this last weekend when I was over at GCADD in Granite City. It’s an impressive building, and like many fraternal organizations, it looks like it might have had storefront space on the first floor with the meeting rooms on the second or third…

State Street and Environs, Granite City, August 2019

A lot has been happening on State Street since the last time I posted any photographs of the downtown area of Granite City. Galen Gandolfi, who had opened the first art gallery on Cherokee Street, Fort Gondo, bought a series of buildings at tax auctions on State Street, and has opened up the Granite City…

Granite City, Revisited

I looked around the residential areas north of Niedringhaus Avenue in Granite City back in early April. The town’s heart is still the steel mill, which lies on the southeastern part of town, but the houses on this side of Niedringhaus are not the workers’ homes. They date from the early Twentieth Century, and are…

Granite City Modernist Slipcovers

I’m always intrigued at how downtowns adapted in the 1950s and 60s to the rise of Modernist strip malls and shopping centers in the suburbs. One of the most common tactics, done in downtown St. Louis, as well as downtowns around America, was the construction of “slipcovers” that modernized the fronts of historic buildings. Some…

Granite City Steel, From State Street

State Street, what appears to have been the second of two major commercial streets along with Niedringhaus Avenue, is basically 100% vacant.� There are some stores converted to apartments.� But what is truly interesting about walking down the street is seeing how the U.S. Steel mill peeks out from behind the buildings.� In an era…

Granite City Steel Building, Revisited

Update: See some of the older buildings in downtown nearby that were adapted to the Modernist era. Surrounded by abandoned buildings and parking lots, the Granite City Steel Building was cutting edge when it opened in 1958 to the designs of Sverdrup and Parcel, and is largely preserved in its original state, save for the…