I rolled into Union, the county seat of Franklin County, on a quiet afternoon last Saturday and took a look around. Union, like Washington to the north up Route 47, has seen explosive growth in the last thirty years as an exurban community in the larger St. Louis Metropolitan area, so there is a lot…
Tag: Courthouses
A Courthouse and A City Hall, Louisville, Kentucky
I was in the mood for looking at a little Greek Revival architecture so we’re heading into the recent archives and looking at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, obviously they’ve built a bigger one nearby but this building still has some government functions inside. Like the Old Courthouse in St. Louis and…
View from the City Museum Roof
I was invited to a special event at the City Museum and when I made it up to the roof, I realized that the sunset was casting downtown and the rest of the city in a wonderful light. I waited until dusk and then took many of the same views again. Above and below is…
Mid-City, Cairo, Part One
Did you ever see that weird movie, Return to Oz? That’s how I felt when we first parked at that cluster of civic buildings in the middle of town in Cairo, much as my visit had begun ten years ago. We were greeted with a closed U.S. Customs House Museum, which had been open back…
Don’t Fence Me In, St. Louis Edition
I want to tell you about a man you’ve never heard of outside of a news story last week, who died anonymously for unknown reasons less than a block from the center of our city’s government. My coworkers and I never knew the name his mother named him, but his nickname around City Hall was…
Civic Buildings, St. Joseph
The Buchanan County Courthouse in downtown St. Joseph is perhaps one of the most public impressive buildings I’ve seen in America. Constructed in 1873 and still largely identical in appearance other than its cupola (which now looks similar to the one in Lancaster, Wisconsin). Its sheer size, particularly in 1873 and second only to the…
The Other Gateway to the West: St. Joseph
I was giving a lecture in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwestern corner of the state, and lo and behold, I found one of the most architecturally rich cities in the Midwest, if not in the whole United States. Powered by immense stockyards and industry that dwarfed Kansas City to the south for most of…
Two Midwestern Towns, 500 Miles Apart
The town of Rushville, Indiana, possesses one of the more exceptional courthouses out in the country that I’ve seen in awhile. Built in 1896, it still sports its central clocktower, which sometimes is removed, as was done in Kirksville, Missouri, after structural problems appeared. I really love the Damascus arch for the main entrance. The…
Downtown, Youngstown
Downtown Youngstown is really nice! Now, I’m defining it as the area enclosed by Highway 422, which surrounds it to the northeast, effectively cutting it off from the rest of the city; on the southwest, the Mahoning River forms the other border. Youngstown State University clearly breathes much of the life into the area northeast…
Downtown, Part Two, Cleveland
Moving along through downtown Cleveland, we reach the “Beaux-Arts” or “City Beautiful” portion of the city, which every metropolitan area seemed to have dabbled with in the early Twentieth Century to better or adverse effect. Below is the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, completed in 1913. Moving along, we spot the 1922 Public Auditorium, which sits along…