North Up Blair Avenue, Hyde Park, May 2026, Part Four

I always enjoy the moment when Blair starts heading up the hill towards the Bissell Stand Pipe and the houses sit high up on elevated earthen plinths on the left and right sides of the street. I’ve always liked this extremely old wood frame house below. I still love the Bissell tower, which is one…

North Up Blair Avenue, Hyde Park, May 2026, Part Three

Continuing north up Blair in Hyde Park, we see a Gingerbread house and then the styles go back to what we would expect to see in the neighborhood. Windsor Park was a former quarry, which I’ve talked about before in the past. This little church is still in great condition. But there’s a lot of…

North Up Blair Avenue, Hyde Park, May 2026, Part Two

At Salisbury, we continue on past the fire station, which has been there for over a century, though the one below is not the original. The park is probably the original topography of the land. It starts to get very leafy north of the park as we continue up Blair Avenue. There have been many…

North Up Blair Avenue, Hyde Park, May 2026, Part One

Now, as we head north up Blair Avenue into Hyde Park, we see this substation. A pet peeve of mine is how AmerenUE makes no effort to integrate its utilities into city neighborhoods. They’re not so ugly and obtrusive in West County; trust me. I’ve seen lots of abandonment in southern Hyde Park in the…

Twenty-Three Years of Paul McKee: Hyde Park

Hyde Park was never in the footprint of the Northside TIF, but I can’t help think that it was affected by the disruption that was occurring in the neighborhoods to the south. This neighborhood is really suffering from the effects of abandonment, and the City’s reliance on McKee’s plans diverted attention from residents’ real needs…

Hyde Park, 2011, From the Vault, Part Two

Here are more photographs from the vault. This is south of Salisbury Street in Hyde Park, I can tell. Things have gotten better with the filling in of vacant lots, but there have also been demolitions.

Hyde Park, 2011, From the Vault, Part One

I found some old photographs from Hyde Park that I took back in 2011 that I never used. I don’t know why, and apart from a few views, I have no idea where these photos are. I think the majority are along Salisbury Street or thereabouts. Things have changed dramatically in fourteen or fifteen years.

Jewish Orthodox Old Home, September 2025

Not much has been happening up at the old nursing home at Grand and Blair. There’s more graffiti, that’s for sure. There hasn’t been more demolition after the removal of the crumbling wing back in 2024 that I noticed.

North Twenty-First Street From Bremen Avenue to Penrose Street, Hyde Park

It turns out that I’ve apparently never looked at any of the buildings on North Twenty-First Street, but there are some nice houses along. There are some Second Empire apartment buildings, but also some never ones from the early Twentieth Century, like the ones above. These two houses below are just totally trashed. Sadly, there…