Inspired by a World Wide Magazine visit to the intersection of Grand and Gravois, I photographed the old South Side National Bank. It’s been turned into condos or apartments. It was going to be demolished for a Walgreen’s but cooler heads prevailed. It’s sort of St. Louis’s own shorter version of the Empire State Building….
Tag: Gravois Avenue/Road
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…
Convent of the Good Shepherd
Several weeks ago, I wrote about Bamberger’s Grove at my regular St. Louis Magazine weekly column. As I also wrote, Adolphus Busch later bought the Grove and donated it to nuns, who opened the House of the Good Shepherd, who opened a school for girls. Here are a couple of extra maps that didn’t make…
National Candy Company
The old National Candy Company factory sat empty for years, and was first the target of redevelopment for a charter school a few years ago. That never happened, so in a continuing trend, U-Haul got a hold of it and renovated it for storage, which I think is a perfectly fine reuse. It’s a great…
Gravois Avenue Viaduct
The Gravois Avenue underpass, started in 1940, is much deeper than its neighbor, the Chippewa Avenue underpass. Much like its neighbor, it was built to go under the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks, and was originally budgeted to cost around $600,000. It ended up costing $850,000. And similarly, the right-of-way and its bridge are now much…
Gravois Avenue Between Compton and Minnesota Avenues
In my dreams I have this fantasy where I win the lottery, and among other things, I secretly purchase all the crumby autocentric stores and used-car lots along Gravois east of Grand through straw buyers, and rebuild a pedestrian-friendly urban environment–you know, like what used to be there one hundred years ago. I’m not expecting…
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…
St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Church
Dating from 1909, St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Church was completed in 1929. There seems to have been some work on the dome in the years since I first photographed the building through an alley across Gravois. The church, like many in St. Louis, draws people from around the region.
The Bend in Gravois Avenue
Many of my longtime readers probably know by now that major arteries such as Gravois or North Florissant were widened due to a bond issue passed by voters back in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. Amazingly, Gravois Avenue was a two-lane street before this. But what you might not realize is that between…
Gravois at Arsenal and Pennsylvania
The intersection of Arsenal, Pennsylvania and Gravois is a fine mess, but what a view you have if you manage to get stopped on Gravois northeast-bound towards Downtown.