Update: In late 2024, the Lake School was threatened with demolition. The Lake School was built in 1897, to serve students south of Olive Street Road, and took its name from Creve Coeur Lake. It was replaced in 1925 by a brick schoolhouse.
Tag: Parks
Dan Fogelberg Memorial, Peoria
“Dan Fogelberg? Who’s Dan Fogelberg?” As at least one friend has remarked to me recently, Google Maps has been arbitrarily highlighting some features and ignoring other more important landmarks. Recently, while scanning around Peoria on Google Satellite, one such arbitrary landmark popped up near the shores of Lake Peoria: The Dan Fogelberg Memorial. Peoria, as…
The Beauty of Dutchtown, 60: Minnie Wood Memorial Square Park Pavilion
Minnie Wood was a wealthy widow who found herself with around $2.5 million in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. She donated the land for the park that bears her name that was created by city ordinance in 1925. Later WPA and the city parks department held dance nights here. The pavilion is a…
Fort Zumwalt Park, O’Fallon
Fort Zumwalt is a real place, and not just the name of four high schools, and this reconstruction of the fortified log cabin that gives its name to the surrounding park and area gives us an idea of early settler days in St. Charles County. Interestingly, Fort Zumwalt, which was originally constructed by Jacob Zumwalt…
The Naked Truth, November 2021
I looked at The Naked Truth back in 2007, and I thought it was due time to go back and more carefully examine this famous sculpture that was moved around Reservoir Park with the construction of Interstate 44. It commemorates the three editors of the Westliche Post, a German language newspaper that I can attest…
Compton Hill Reservoir Park, Revisited November 2021
The shadows were growing long late on a Saturday when I decided to go by Reservoir Park in the Compton Heights neighborhood, which I realized I first photographed way back in October of 2007. The park represents a time and place where civic architecture beautified even the most functional features of the St. Louis landscape….
Twenty Years Since 9/11, Revisiting Washington, DC, Part One
As a few of my readers know, I was living in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, exactly two miles away from the Pentagon when the plane crashed into it. I moved back at Christmastime of 2006, and had only been back to the District of Columbia twice since then. I just returned for the…
Wild Acres Park, Former Holy Family Seminary
Update: The seminary buildings were demolished in 2023. The former Holy Family Seminary in Overland is now Wild Acres Park, but the buildings are still well-preserved and the grounds well-maintained. They have sort of a 1940s proto-Modernist interpretation of the Spanish Revival, which I sort of like. Like St. Stanislaus Seminary in the Florissant area,…
Sister Marie Charles Park
Down below Bellerive Park, which I’ve looked at before, and is nowhere near the country club of the same name, is Sister Marie Charles Park. It’s one of the last places you can access the Mississippi River in St. Louis outside of The Levee.
Joie de Vivre by Jacques Lipchitz
Located north of the skating rink, this sculpture, Joie de Vivre, or “Joy of Life,” is a work by the famous French Cubist sculptor from 1927, and is one of seven copies. It is really wonderful that we have a work by this artist in St. Louis on public display. It is meant to be…