I could have sworn I’d posted all of these buildings before, but apparently not. The house above was actually originally a school, sitting on the northeast corner of the intersection of Fourteenth and Hebert. Heading west, we encounter one of the most intact blocks in all of Old North. There is a wall of Second…
Tag: Schools
St. Francis de Sales Parish School
I’ve often regarded Roman Catholic parishes as much more than simply a church, but rather campuses of multiple buildings, including but not limited to a rectory, convent, school and even other buildings. St. Francis De Sales originally had a building on the southeast corner of Sidney and Iowa that housed a musical corps. The parish…
Gundlach School, April 2022
It seems like the most popular school post I’ve done is when I looked at Gundlach School in Wells-Goodfellow back in September of 2014 (I went back in March of 2017) so I thought I would check in on how the building was faring after over a decade of continual abandonment. As seen yesterday with…
Richard M. Scruggs Elementary School
The former Richard M. Scruggs sits along a busy stretch of South Grand Boulevard, so I had never gotten a chance to photograph it before a recent early Saturday morning when traffic was at a minimum. As this historic photo shows, and I suspect was common with many Itter/Milligan schools, this building was built in…
Campus of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Springfield
The story of how the Diocese of Springfield came into being is perhaps a story of how the locus of social, economic and political power has migrated around the State of Illinois over the last two hundred years. It was originally the Diocese of Quincy, founded in 1853, reflecting the primacy of the Mississippi River,…
John F. Kennedy High School, Demolished
Kennedy High School is no more. There are only long piles of rubble. The machines who did the deed are sitting around surveying their work, and other Caterpillar products are awaiting their turn to permanently alter the topography to allow for the construction of half a million dollar houses. I’ve seen it across the country,…
Pierre Laclede School
Opened in 1914 according to designs by William Ittner, Pierre Laclede Elementary School is at least the second school to hold that name in the St. Louis Public School system. The first was deep in the city and was a typical design that can still be seen in designs such as the Blow and Des…
Former John F. Kennedy Catholic High School, Under Demolition
Update: Completely demolished by March of 2022. My prediction that the old John F. Kennedy Catholic High School in Manchester would be sold to a developer for houses has come to pass. McBride Berra is demolishing it for Arbors at Celtic Meadows. It is an interesting phenomenon of smaller universities buying old high schools and…
Ohio Avenue Between Winnebago and Miami Streets, Gravois Park
Editor’s Note: Due to the malfunctioning of St. Louis Patina in mid-January 2022, the original text of this post was lost. In the future, the commentary will be rewritten, but in the meantime, the post’s photos that survived the website crash will be presented as is.
5,000th Post: The Ruins of the Freie Gemeinde
None of my friends who live up north around the St. Louis Place and Old North St. Louis neighborhoods told me they were terribly surprised when the old Freie Gemeinde when up in flames on a bitterly cold night a week ago. It suffered a partial collapse way back in 2013, and when I checked…