Looking across North Florissant Avenue into the St. Louis Place neighborhood, we see the apse of the old St. Liborius, which we probably shouldn’t be able to do if it weren’t for the demolition of so many of the buildings between here and there. Below, we can see again how the street grid of Old…
Tag: Churches
Old North, Revisited Winter 2022, North Eleventh Street Between Montgomery and Monroe Streets
I’ve long been intrigued by this corner storefront sitting right by the interstate. The black paint is the from the never-ending efforts of Operation Brightside to cover up graffiti. The city agency is currently winning at this address, but the tide of battle will probably turn the other way sometime this summer, and so on….
Odds and Ends from the Winter of 2022
Occasionally I build up some photos that don’t really go with anything else, and I present them to you here. Above is a nice house on Lemp Avenue across from the brewery that is now an AirBnB. For the longest time, it was a band practice space. Moving across the old St. Louis Commons to…
First Baptist Church, St. John
Rapid growth along the St. Charles Rock Road in the years after World War II translated into concurrent expansion of religious institutions along the corridor. First Baptist Church of St. John found its new church buildings too small for its congregation in the matter of years as the number of congregants grew. The Post-Dispatch reported…
Interior, Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church
We finally were given the opportunity to see the inside of Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, one of the oldest and most historic parishes in St. Louis. Its appearance has changed over the years, first due to the tornado that altered its exterior form from the original design above, and then later in the…
Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church
I learned an interesting story about this church and its parking lot at the southwest corner of Marcus and Maffitt in the Greater Ville neighborhood. If you look closely, it becomes obvious that the large white rectangle on the brick wall is in fact an old movie screen, and the parking lot is a former…
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Interior
The interior of the cathedral is a simple, basilica style church with no transepts or side aisles, and a rectangular apse at the end, flanked by two colonnades in the Ionic order. The high altar is dominated by a huge mosaic of the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception, with the Latin Inscription, “There is no…
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Exterior
The exterior of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception follows the Doric Order, in an interesting late, or as I might call it, terminal Beaux-Arts interpretation of the Greek Revival designed Joseph William McCarthy. Of course, it is architecture adapted for the modern world, as Greek temples did not have windows, whether on the side…
Campus of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Springfield
The story of how the Diocese of Springfield came into being is perhaps a story of how the locus of social, economic and political power has migrated around the State of Illinois over the last two hundred years. It was originally the Diocese of Quincy, founded in 1853, reflecting the primacy of the Mississippi River,…
Washington, Illinois, March 2022
I last photographed Washington, Illinois back in August of 2019, and I was passing through so I thought I was take a look around. My grandfather helped dig the basement of the church above with his team of horses back in the early Twentieth Century. This house nearby unfortunately has suffered a recent fire. I…