Bank and Insurance Building, Dubuque, Iowa

Built by a host of Dubuque’s financial giants to create what we would probably now call “Class A Office Space,” the Bank and Insurance, or Fischer, Building, dominates Main Street at the corner of 9th Street. It opened in 1895 and is a tour-de-force of terracotta ornament. The top and street level stories have been…

Main Street Between 11th Street and 9th Streets, Dubuque, Iowa

I cut over from Locust Street towards Main Street; like many cities in America, living close to the central business district was once prestigious, before the noise and smoke of the automobile made it less desirable. The incredibly beautiful Second Empire townhouses left behind along Main Street and its side streets remind me of what…

Art Deco, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis “came into its own” a little later than St. Louis, so its historic skyscrapers are younger than the Gateway City’s, which tend to be clustered around 1900. In Minneapolis, there are a plethora of absolutely stunning Art Deco office buildings, and I photographed some of them, which you can see here.

Park Avenue Between Jefferson and Missouri Avenues, North Side

Lafayette Square certainly has clearly defined borders; on the west it is the traffic sewer that is South Jefferson Avenue. Automobiles hurtle along this stretch, rushing to get to the I-44 interchange since there is not a complete set of onramps from Highway 40/I-64 due to the aborted construction of 755 in the late 1980s….

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…

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…

Uranium, Venice and Madison, Illinois

Update: Due to reader feedback, this post has been modified to reflect that the majority of the plant and a portion of the neighborhood are in fact in Venice. Portions of the plant and the neighborhood are in Madison. There’s a portion of Venice and Madison, Illinois that’s literally, not figuratively, on the wrong side…

Blocked View

Gateway One (the Peabody Coal Building) should have never been built. St. Louis should have never built the Gateway Mall, either, but since it did, at the bare minimum it could have at least done it correctly. Sigh.

Redevelopment on Broadway

Update: Renovation of the LaSalle Building into a Hotel Indigo is now complete. A long-forgotten stretch of Broadway is finally seeing redevelopment. First up is the LaSalle Building, which I have photographed in the past, but that Built St. Louis has covered with much better images. Korte Construction has a great page explaining its renovation…