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,…

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…