St. Columbkille Roman Catholic Church

This row of houses hides the location of the former Roman Catholic church of St. Columbkille’s one of the three most important patron saints of Ireland along with St. Bridget of Erin and St. Patrick. It was demolished back in the 1950s and after the parish closed in 1952. The cornerstone was laid on June…

Shenandoah Avenue Between Jefferson and Missouri Avenues

Shenandoah Avenue through McKinley Heights marks a transition from very old houses in the DeVolsey Addition on the south side of the street, to the late suburban buildings of the late Nineteenth Century. First we head east starting just east of South Jefferson, looking at the north side of the street. There’s a wide variety…

North Fifth Street, Hannibal

North Fifth Street goes up a steep hill, and is lined an array of beautiful homes built from what I would suspect are the 1850s through 1900, with the majority built around and after the Civil War. Starting at the bottom of the hill, at Center Street, we see a Queen Anne style house on…

McKinley Heights Updates

There was a recent Riverfront Times story about this house in McKinley Heights, located in the southern portion of the neighborhood. It’s a very interesting house, and I’ve tried to figure out what the heck its original configuration was. there was clearly an addition window or doorway in the middle, and then it was altered….

Nicholson Place, Lafayette Square

I had always glanced down Nicholson Place while traveling down Lafayette Avenue, and had foolishly believed that the sadly truncated little street surely contained little history and few historic houses. After digging a little, I discovered I was dead wrong. I had learned several years ago that the south side of Lafayette Square facing the…

Mississippi Avenue Between Kennett Place and Park Avenue, Part Two

Moving north on Mississippi Avenue, we see that again, much of what was there in 1876 is now gone, with the exception of the half-flounder house, which you can see on the far left of Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, and below in the middle, sitting far back on its lot, as is frequently…

Mississippi Avenue Between Lafayette Avenue and Kennett Place

The entire block of Mississippi Avenue between Lafayette Avenue and Kennett Place is in-fill, constructed in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. But if we look back to Compton and Dry, we learn there was a whole other life to this block, one that was already complete when Pictorial St. Louis was published in…