Update: The mall was demolished in 2023-2024. What better way to begin our look at Florissant than to take one last examination at the abandoned Jamestown Mall, where demolition will begin soon. Located east of the city limits of Florissant, in what is still semi-rural surroundings, the mall has failed while contemporary and historic shopping…
Tag: Department Stores
Downtown Springfield
Downtown Springfield is dominated by a public square at the intersection of two major cross streets. While for much of its history during the Twentieth Century it was a morass of open pavement, in what looks to be the 1970s it was converted into a park and traffic was routed into a single lane that…
End of the Skybridge
This might be considered sappy, but in all seriousness one of my first memories of downtown St. Louis is walking across the skybridge from the parking garage into the old Famous Barr in the Railway Exchange Building during our first visit to St. Louis Centre. Fast forward almost forty years and St. Louis Centre has…
Rapid Changes, Mill Creek Around Grand Boulevard
Late on Saturday, I checked up on how the residential development of the former railyards of the western Mill Creek valley was going. This is west of the historic African American neighborhood, but is the actual valley, where roundhouses and light industry, as well as massive switching yards once lay. The building that was under…
Macy’s Closing at Chesterfield Mall
Back in May of 2020, I had predicted the shuttered Macy’s at Chesterfield Mall would never reopen after it closed at the beginning of the pandemic. It did in fact reopen, but now it is closing again, and reopening in a smaller version in the Chesterfield Valley. I would imagine that the remaining portion of…
Some Final Thoughts on Paris
OK, we’re done with Paris. I did want to give some final thoughts on the French capital, and share some things that St. Louis could learn, and also be honest on some other matters. First of all, it’s sort of unfair to compare the two exactly because with any world capital, particularly a European one,…
Old St. Peters, St. Charles County
The historic Main Street of St. Peters has a substantial number of architecturally significant buildings. We start at the northeast corner of Main and Depot streets and work our way west, looking at the north side of the street. While the area was originally settled by the French, the story is similar to much of…
Wells-Goodfellow, Autumn 2021, Part Two
Just beyond that well kept block of Hebert we are confronted with the abandonment of Clara across from the Horseshoe, which has not gotten any better than when I walked down these streets back in March of 2017. The Horseshoe is gone, of course, and is serving as parking for this church as well as…
Chesterfield Mall: Epilogue
Update: With little fanfare, both Macy’s and the mall reopened after all in mid-May 2020. Macy’s eventually closed in November of 2020 before reopening a smaller store in Chesterfield Valley. I don’t think the Macy’s at Chesterfield Mall is going to reopen. Back after the Dillard’s was flooded due to a water main break, they announced…
The Grove, January 2020
Update: The building above was demolished, and then the Preservation Review Board, at the behest of the citizens, forced the owners to rebuild it. If there’s any neighborhood that’s changed the most dramatically as far as the built environment goes in the last decade, it has to be the Grove. Sure, there has been more…