Heading east on Fifth Street from Easton Street (named after Rufus Easton, the founder of Alton), we see some very early housing. We then angle onto the diagonal Court Street, which mysteriously exists for only about three blocks. We then hop onto Fourth Street as we head out of town. I really like this two-car…
Tag: Churches
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…
Demolition and East Alton
Learning that the Citizens’ National Bank was going to be demolished, and hoping maybe I could coax some important architectural elements from the crews working there, I headed up to East Alton on a recent Saturday. East Alton is an interesting town, with parts from the Nineteenth Century but also with clear signs of 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…
Vine Street Over to Race Street, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati
“Lord, on this day of thanksgiving, we thank you for our loved ones, family and friends. We also thank you, oh Lord, that Chris has almost run out of photos from his trip back in August.” Heading down the hill from Clifton, passing through some other neighborhoods, I reached what I call “upper” Vine Street…
Glenway Avenue, East Price Hill, Cincinnati
Wow, East Price Hill is up a really steep hill! And again, just like over at Mount Auburn, a funicular railroad gave residents the ability to settle this neighborhood in the Nineteenth Century. I started at the intersection of Warsaw, Glenway and Seton avenues where they merge with Quebec Road. East Price Hill has been…
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…
Reading Road, Avondale and the Riots, Cincinnati
I’ve looked at Fourteenth Street NW before in Washington, DC, and probably elsewhere, so I was interested in what had become of Reading Road in the Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. High up in the hills, there were two riots, one in 1967 and then less than a year later in 1968. The first one revolved…
Leaving, Youngstown
After surveying the remnants of what had once been the workplace of literally tens of thousands of Americans, I worked my way out of Youngstown, passing through the neighborhoods where they once lived. I saw St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, which alludes to the Eastern European origins of many of the immigrants who once flooded…