The Merchant Laclede, or Merchant’s Laclede Building, depending on whom you ask, was another of the historic skyscrapers in the financial district of St. Louis, often forgotten in favor of the more famous Chicago School buildings to the west. It was built in 1886. It’s been simplified over the years, losing its pediment and conical…
Tag: Hotels
Former Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn
They sure had all sorts of great ideas in the 1960s about how they were going to revitalize downtown, and pretty much none of them worked. They’re either demolished, abandoned, bought out in corporate mergers or forgotten. Just look at all the vacant land in the heart of a major metropolis. The Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn…
Odds and Ends
When I’m out and about, I sometimes snap pictures of interesting buildings that later expand into larger posts, but other times, I can’t figure out what to do with them. These photos are “outtakes;” buildings that are worth publishing but didn’t grow into anything else. Above, this is an old warehouse complex on Texas Avenue…
St. Clair Avenue/Lincoln Trail, Revisited
There’s something fascinating about St. Clair Avenue as it comes up out of East St. Louis; as it hits the community of French Village, it starts the climb “up the hill,” which are really river bluffs (and carry both a literal and figurative connotation in the life and politics of the East Side), where the…
Main Street, Between 2nd and 9th Streets, Dubuque, Iowa
Starting in the south at 2nd Street, at the Hotel Julien Dubuque, named after the founder of the City of Dubuque, we head north through the southern part of downtown on Main Street. To the east, much of the old industrial area was destroyed by a highway built in the 1960s. There was even a…
From the Vault: Union Station Grand Hall, February 2014
Back in February of 2014, the Grand Hall of Union Station was just starting to undergo its massive renovation into its current incarnation. I snapped some pictures of the public areas. It turns out that some of the original decorative elements had been callously covered up in the 1980s renovation, and they were finding the…
LaSalle Building Rehabilitated
The renovation of the historic LaSalle Building is now complete, and it has opened as a Hotel Indigo. I took a peek inside a couple of weeks ago and it is really beautiful inside and out. As I had mentioned before, despite being next to the densest concentration of workers in the St. Louis region…
Kingshighway, Fall 2019
Kingshighway south of Lindell is dominated by apartment buildings, but most importantly by the hospitals which have come to symbolize the east end of Forest Park. The Park Plaza tower to the north will always be a landmark, above, but below the “ABCD” buildings are still iconic examples of the high style of the early…
The Central West End in Transition
Twenty years ago, when I would spend time in my friend’s family restaurant, the Majestic, I would have never imagined the way in which the Central West End south of Lindell would have been transformed in the last ten years. The signs were appearing, of course. First was the towering Park East, seen above, which…
Downtown Hermann, Revisited
I first photographed Hermann, which is the county seat of Gasconade County, all the way back in November of 2007. I was surprised and impressed at many of the positive changes. I visited Hermannhof Winery, which I learned was originally a brewery that was ruined by Prohibition. In fact, the town’s economy never really recovered…