East Grove Street is the next historic district, which extends out east from downtown Bloomington. It is primarily populated with Queen Anne style houses from the 1880s. There has been extensive rehabbing of the houses, and it is really an impressive group of homes from the period. There are one or two Italianate style houses…
Tag: Illinois
Four Historic Districts, Bloomington, Illinois, Part One: North Roosevelt Avenue
I was up in Central Illinois, so I thought I would check out some of the historic districts in Bloomington that looked interesting. I’ve already checked out White Place, one of the other prominent historic districts, back in March of 2016. We’ll be looking at four in all, starting with the North Roosevelt Avenue Historic…
South Main Street, Revisited, Washington, Illinois
I first photographed these houses all the way back in July of 2009, and then I completely forgot I just photographed them again back in May of 2024 in Washington, Illinois. But I liked how the branches were casting shadows on the facades of the houses in the early morning late of the early spring….
Family Farm, Late March 2025
Time to get back to the family farm now that the weather is getting warmer and the sun is staying up later. Planting has not begun yet, of course, so the landscape has not yet transformed.
Cahokia Power Plant, December 2024
Well, the smokestacks have all but disappeared from the venerable Cahokia Power Plant, and the future of the building is looking grim. But on a brighter note, years ago a reader generously shared with me a brochure that Union Electric published about the plant, and I present it to you here on the occasion of…
National City Sanborn Maps
I stumbled across these fascinating Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the three major packing houses in National City that surrounded the stockyards. Armour, above, still had a substantial portion of its plant still standing when I first saw it back in 2008, though of course it was gone by 2016. Hunter, which was demolished in…
From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Five
The roof featured sawtooth clerestory windows, which let natural light down on to the slaughter floor. But the upper floors were offices and the storage of promotional materials, which had been left in giant piles of boxes and reams of papers. As a post script, I think it goes without saying that it’s not a…
From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Four
On the upper floors, view of the nearby Armour Meat Packing Plant and downtown St. Louis are afforded. Now it becomes obvious, from similar rooms in Armour, that this is where beef carcasses were wheeled along overhead tracks through different parts of the slaughtering process, as can be seen below. The tile walls made the…
From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Three
We moved upward in the building to upper floors that may have been more cold storage, but I’m not sure. We were now looking out over the tops of other buildings in the complex. Hunter had its own power plant, though its smokestack was not the most photogenic, made out of concrete, I believe and…
From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Two
Moving along in our tour from 2008, we see more demolition debris; I am not certain what part of the building we are in, but I suspect it was more of the cold storage. What you’re looking at below are floors above that collapsed after the support columns in front of them were demolished, causing…