Regardless of your opinion of the Workhouse, or more properly called the Medium Security Institution, it is being demolished, and I thought I would swing by and take a look at the site. I had never actually stopped before, and really, driving along Hall Street, I’m generally looking out for maniac drivers around me so…
Tag: Historic Buildings
Barley Cleaning House, Anheuser-Busch, Revisited
I looked at the Barley Cleaning House all the way back in June of 2015, almost a full decade ago, but I was traveling up Sidney Street, and it was looking great in the morning sun. Looking closer at the two turrets, it looks like the bricks have bee relaid, and there is even on…
Central Post Office
It dawned on me that after I had posted about the major expansion to the Central Post Office, I have never actually posted about the original building, opened in 1935. I’d even featured the murals on the interior back in 2011. Designed by Klipstein and Rathmann, who also designed the Eighteenth Street Parking Garage from…
Post Office Expansion
No one seems to know when this expansion to the Central Post Office downtown was built, or who was the architect. It’s a huge building, and stretches for an entire block; there’s even parking for employees on the roof which you can see from satellite images. Note the soot on the side of the building…
Fire, Former Beiderwieden Funeral Home
The old Beiderwieden Funeral Home on Chippewa Street just west of South Grand Boulevard was severely gutted by flames on February 14. Long vacant and only appearing in the news briefly a few years ago when it was considered as the new location of the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum (the founder’s daughter was confused when…
Magnolia Avenue from South Grand Boulevard to South 39th Street
The next couple of weeks I’m going to be looking at that strange, awkward strip of land that extends from South Grand Boulevard to Tower Grove Avenue between Magnolia Avenue and the north alley behind Botanical Avenue in the Shaw neighborhood. Why is the space between Magnolia and Botanical not wide enough for another street,…
North Dakota Street
Just off Virginia Avenue is the short street of North Dakota, one block north of Dakota Street, which strangely enough was not named South Dakota Street. It’s just another one of those nice, tidy streets in Dutchtown, with some one story houses, some two story houses, and those ubiquitous four-family apartments. The intersection with South…
Former Friedens German Evangelical Church, In Ruins
Well, I guess there’s not much to say but St. Louis has lost another beautiful church to fire, most likely set by squatters trying to keep warm on one of the coldest nights of the winter so far. In this case, it was the former Friedens German Evangelical Lutheran Church, which I first looked at…
Historic Photographs of the Workhouse
It never ceases to amaze me that there was once a gigantic quarry along the riverfront just to the east of South Broadway, more or less where Interstate 55 now cuts through. It was the Workhouse Quarry, and for around a century inmates broke up rock for use in the roads around St. Louis just…
Two Unique Buildings, Indianapolis
The former Deutsches Haus, renamed the Athenæum during World War I due to anti-German sentiment remains a landmark in the Lockerbie or Germantown neighborhood of Indianapolis. There was some major restoration going on around the front of the building when I visited, so these historic photos show what it looks like overall. It’s perhaps a…