I really love this amazing aerial photograph of the Lemp Brewery, a decade after International Shoe had taken over. You can see how the shoe company had already added several floors onto a couple of buildings and altered the smokestack of the third boiler house or power plant to say ISCO. The railyard is still…
Tag: Watertowers and Standpipes
North Up Blair Avenue, North of Penrose Street, Hyde Park, March 2024
Heading north from Penrose Street and continuing our tour in Hyde Park, we see that Ferry Street is blocked off again, no doubt due to another problem with the sewer underneath in what was originally a deep chasm in the natural topography of the earth before the neighborhood’s development. We detour to the east down…
Survivors, Chicago, August 2023
We’ll finish up Chicago by looking at those vestiges from the past that survived the rapid gentrification and rebuilding of the central core of the Windy City which has happened over the last forty years. A hundred years ago, the area north of the Chicago River was a relatively peaceful residential neighborhood, but with the…
Around Blair Avenue, Hyde Park
If you wondered what that giant forty foot deep hole looked like before it was almost completely filled in, this is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago. MSD was working to get the sewer line fixed. Interestingly, it broke in the same place one hundred years ago. I suspect, looking at old…
Eden Park Reservoir, Cincinnati
I’ve long been interested in the now largely abandoned practice in Western civilization of combining utilitarian structures with pleasure grounds in urban and even rural environments. Take Compton Hill Reservoir Park in St. Louis or Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, for example. Such practices go far back in history until at least the Renaissance and…
Compton Hill Reservoir Park, Revisited November 2021
The shadows were growing long late on a Saturday when I decided to go by Reservoir Park in the Compton Heights neighborhood, which I realized I first photographed way back in October of 2007. The park represents a time and place where civic architecture beautified even the most functional features of the St. Louis landscape….
Randall Place, West Side, Revisited
The weather was nice and sunny and I was up visiting Piekutowski’s Sausages in Hyde Park, so I thought I would swing by Randall Place, an exceptional collection of houses near the Bissell Mansion. It seems like the first house in the post from September of 2017 has been demolished, as well as the one…
Bissell Water Tower, October 2020
I stopped by the Bissell Water Tower after looking at the Grand Water Tower. It’s on tap for rehabilitation next, according to people I’ve spoken with.
Grand Water Tower, Repainted
I went by and photography the Grand Water Tower (yes, I know it’s technically a standpipe) and checked out the new paint job. It looks great. Compare it to my photograph of the capital in particular from March of 2019 to see the difference.
Arnold
Update: Tornado damage in the spring of 2025 necessitated the demolition of the church. Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church has a rich history stretching back to 1840, making it one of the oldest parishes in Missouri, and probably west of the Mississippi. The current church dates from 1895. Franciscan sisters provided for the education in…