Kinloch Park, Berkeley

I recently stumbled upon the plat map of Kinloch Park, which as its name suggests, has to do with the street grid of Kinloch, the historically middle class African American suburb in North County. But it is not so simple. Kinloch Park formed only the northwest portion of Kinloch, and that part has actually been…

St. Joseph’s, Manchester

“Kick out the jams!“ Thanks to the eagle eyes of readers, I discovered that St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church once had an earlier location in Manchester. With the help of the Archdiocese, I was able to obtain photographs of that church, which was up Creve Coeur Avenue, which surprisingly a very historic street dating back…

Humboldt Elementary School

I’ve driven by the Humboldt School so many times I was beginning to be a bit embarrassed that I had never photographed it. At the bare minimum, just like the former Webster and Roe schools (and probably many more), Humboldt started out as older style–in this case more of an Italianate–school which was replaced by…

From the Vault: Manchester

Manchester is one of the oldest settlements in the St. Louis region, with its roots going back to the early Nineteenth Century. Manchester Road has long been a major artery not just through St. Louis County but the City as well, and was even known as Market Street Road for a portion of its history….

Our Lady, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Cathedral, Toledo

I didn’t realize it, but Toledo is a diocese, and the cathedral is located northwest of downtown. The current cathedral was completed in 1940, after an earlier school and chapel dedicated to St. Francis de Sales were completed in 1914. The design is practical, with a smokestack matching the rest of the composition, and again,…

River Rouge

I’ll be blunt: I was deeply concerned by my visit to the famous River Rouge area, a short drive just south of Detroit. First, a bit of clarification is in order; there is the actual town of River Rouge, which is located along the banks of the Detroit River, and includes the mouth of the…

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,…