It’s hard to believe it, but I first photographed the former Plaza Theater way back in April of 2009, when we were first starting to explore the West End and points to the north, such as Hamilton Heights and Wells-Goodfellow by heading up Clara Avenue. Today, it’s the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, which has occupied…
Tag: Theaters
Sheldon Memorial
The Sheldon Memorial was built in 1912 for the Ethical Society according to designs of the architect Louis Clemens Spiering. Spiering is actually a very interesting figure, having participated in the design of the 1904 World’s Fair, as well as being a descendant of the famous German Marxist Karl Ludwig Bernays. St. Louis, as pretty…
St. Andrew’s Cinema, St. Charles
St. Andrew’s or Andrews Cinema opened in 1970 and is one of the last of the movie theaters of its stylistic kind left in the St. Louis region. It passed through a large number of owners over the years, but eventually ended up being a second run theater selling tickets at a steeply discounted price….
Avenue G, Part One, Fort Madison, Iowa
As part of our continued series of looking at Iowa river towns north up the Mississippi River from St. Louis at the end of the month this summer, we next head to Fort Madison, crossing over a massive bridge combining both rail and road. Fort Madison’s street grid is laid out with numbered streets starting…
Theaters Demolished, Chesterfield Mall
The last expansion to Chesterfield Mall, the AMC theater with a food court, Borders and Cheesecake Factory, was demolished in the last couple of weeks.
Leveque Tower, Former American Insurance Union Citadel, Columbus, Ohio
Clocking in at 47 stories, the Leveque Tower in downtown Columbus, Ohio, is a standout example of an Art-Deco skyscraper that opened in 1927 as the American Insurance Union Citadel. It was built as a 600 room hotel with an attached theater. The architect was Charles Howard Crane, who was actually active mainly in Detroit….
Twentieth Street Between Newhouse and Bremen Avenues
Despite the sad loss of Friedens, I still think that Hyde Park is such a great neighborhood, full of so many beautiful buildings. Twentieth Street, one block over, is almost completely intact. I really love this storefront church, below. There is an old wood frame house behind, which must be very old, and then here’s…
Two Unique Buildings, Indianapolis
The former Deutsches Haus, renamed the Athenæum during World War I due to anti-German sentiment remains a landmark in the Lockerbie or Germantown neighborhood of Indianapolis. There was some major restoration going on around the front of the building when I visited, so these historic photos show what it looks like overall. It’s perhaps a…
Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa
Buddy Holly played the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on April 15, 1958. Less than a year later, he, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens would be crisscrossing the Upper Midwest in the dead of winter, hitting small ballrooms such as the Surf Ballroom in the small town of Clear Lake on the shore of…
Tina and Ike Turner Haunts
I recently read Tina Turner’s autobiography, and I thought it would be interesting to see if any of the places in the book were still standing. To put it bluntly, most of the famous clubs where rock n’ roll began (yes, it began here in St. Louis, but our leaders are so bad at their…