Tucked in a valley in Bluebird Park in Ellisville is the Reinke Barn, moved from its original location west of Clarkson Road on Manchester Road. Originally built in 1905 for Henry Reinke, laborers came from the communities of Sherman and Glencoe to help build the barn. It could originally hold two horses, six cattle and…
Tag: Parks
Winfield Lock and Dam No. 25
I find it fascinating just how heavily modified and altered the Mississippi River is north of St. Louis. Starting at Alton, or perhaps we should say at the Chain of Rocks Canal, humans force barges into a series of artificial channels all the way to Minnesota. Of course, the river channel itself it completely altered…
Downtown Civic Buildings, Lincoln, Illinois
Oh no, they pulled a Chambord on me! But anyway, the Logan County Courthouse, constructed in 1905, is a beautiful building, nonetheless. It is relatively unadorned, and seems to be constructed out of yellow limestone or sandstone. Like many palaces in Europe, the first floor possesses rusticated stonework, while the upper stories features polished finish….
Chesterfield, Post-Chesterfield Mall
Big things are happening out to the west of the now almost completely defunct Chesterfield Mall, which entered the hallowed halls of my Crumby Run-Down Malls of St. Louis pantheon with this post in June of 2017. But Chesterfield still boasts some of the highest income levels in the region (even if other zip codes…
Lick Run Reborn, Cincinnati, Ohio
I have often said that I post about other cities not as a boring tour of my vacations, but as a way of comparing and contrasting with St. Louis, so we can learn how other cities are doing things better, and to see how other cities in America developed in the same way, and sometimes…
Liberty, Sycamore and Thirteenth Streets, Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’ll look at a variety of streets next. Liberty Street is a classic example of a narrow street that was widened by the demolition of historic structures, creating what I call a traffic sewer. The north street wall is preserved, as you can see above and below, but on the south side, there’s a jagged,…
Over the Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’re heading to Cincinnati, Ohio next, to look at Over the Rhine, which is one of the best preserved early Nineteenth Century neighborhoods in America. St. Louis used to have numerous neighborhoods like Over the Rhine, but we annihilated them like fools. Kosciusko, Carr Square (read part two) and Mill Creek, all neighborhoods in St….
Schiller Park, German Village, Columbus, Ohio
We’ll leave German Village and Columbus today with this final look at greenspace. Much like Lafayette Square in St. Louis, the center of German Village is a park, the aforementioned Schiller Park. Originally known as City Park (its western boundary street preserves that name), the current name reflects the strong German heritage of the neighborhood….
North First Street, Laclede’s Landing
We come up the steep incline and reach North First Street, where the above photograph captures the street in 1968, right before the grand plans for redevelopment had begun. Interestingly, old fashioned street lights had already appeared. Below, on the southwest corner, a plaza that appears to still be incomplete replaced the vacant lot where…
Near North Riverfront, Early Fall 2022
It had been a little while since I had photographed the rapidly diminishing warehouses of the Near North Riverfront, specifically the ones just to the north of the casino, which has weirdly changed its name to the Horseshoe, which makes it sound like it should be out in the middle of nowhere in Texas or…