Kutis Funeral Home started out in a much smaller building, but was still anchored at the corner of Gravois and Nebraska, as it is today. You can see St. Wenceslaus on Oregon Avenue in the background. The current building apparently dates to around 1922, according to City records. It’s an intriguing building architecturally, sort of…
Tag: Gravois Avenue/Road
The Vanished Theaters of Gravois Avenue
There used to be so many more theaters in St. Louis, and they’ve mostly been demolished. Take the Granada, seen above, and then look below, where the theater and its entrance have been removed and turned into a parking lot for the apartment building that originally attached to the theater. It was fairly common for…
The Crossroads of the World: Grand and Gravois
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….
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.