Pennsylvania Avenue, Tower Grove East, Revisited, Part One

Moving past the intersection of Gravois, Arsenal and Pennsylvania, which I’ve looked at in June of 2011, May of 2014 and 2019, we pass by the Grant School, which I looked at back in October of 2020, we pass through a very old section of Tower Grove East that I first looked at way back…

Oak Hill Elementary School

Named after the heights that were owned by the Russell family and contained their clay and coal mines (their estate was to the north), Oak Hill was designed by William B. Ittner and opened in 1907. As is typical of many of Ittner’s schools, the building has a Northern European Sixteenth Century influence to it,…

Former Mount Saint Rose Sanitorium

Always question why there’s an old stone wall along a major roadway in St. Louis! I was doing some research on a gentleman whose death was recorded in the “Deaths Outside of St. Louis,” but yet he was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery the next day. He clearly did not die very far away from the…

St. Francis Borgia Roman Catholic Church, Washington, Franklin County

Heading east from New Haven, we’re going to be looking at Washington, Missouri in Franklin County. I’m actually kind of surprised, only two months from the sixteenth anniversary of St. Louis Patina, that I’ve never covered this important city on the Missouri River. We’ll start our tour by looking at St. Francis Borgia Roman Catholic…

New Haven, Franklin County

The land for New Haven was purchased by Phillip Miller in 1836 down along the river, and at the basis for the settlement was the selling of wood to riverboats that passed by. But first we’ll look up in the highlands, where streets follow the ridgelines from Highway 100. First up is the school, which…

St. Thomas of Aquin School, Renovated

I was extremely pleased to see that Blackline took on the difficult task of renovating the old St. Thomas of Aquin parish school. It is in Dutchtown, which is seeing increased not-for-profit investment, but also extensive out-of-town predatory speculation. The former church is nearby. Sure, the windows were probably not black originally, but it’s more…

Two Churches in the Land Between the Rivers

We looked at two churches in that flat bottomland sandwiched between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers that forms an almost peninsula-like eastern tail of St. Charles County. The first one, Trinity Lutheran Church at the intersection of Highway 94 and Church Road, dates from 1876, when it was calved off from Emmanuel Lutheran. The church…

Checking In On Mark Twain and Central High Schools

St. Louis voters recently overwhelmingly passed Prop S, which will allow the St. Louis Public Schools to issue bonds for much needed improvements to buildings, most of which are now over one hundred years old, though as anyone who will admit it, are extremely well built and will last for centuries if properly maintained. The…

Schiller’s Grove and the Former St. Elizabeth’s Academy

I had long known that the former St. Elizabeth’s High School and convent, now the International Institute, had once had a larger chapel that had been partially demolished when its new Modernist wing had been built in the 1960s in Tower Grove East. Christopher Schiller, owner of the Swan Tavern on the Levee, had bought…

John F. Kennedy High School, Interior and Today

I dug up some old photos of John F. Kennedy High School from when it had just opened back in 1971. As I covered back in March of this year, it has been completely demolished for new houses named Celtic Meadows. As can be seen below, there has been some major grading work going on…