The West End neighborhood is one of my favorite parts of the city, and I recently went back to explore some more. I discovered that while many streets are seeing revitalization, there are others just east of the border with St. Louis County that are struggling with abandonment. These houses are off of streets such…
Tag: In-Fill
Fire at the Former St. Liborius, SK8 Liborius
The unthinkable happened late on the night of June 28 at the former St. Liborius Roman Catholic Church, which had been closed in 1992 by the Archdiocese. It became SK8 Liborius approximately ten years ago. The people behind SK8 Liborius had been working tirelessly over that time to fix up the former church, and I…
North Side of Lynch Street, Benton Park
Heading east down Lynch Street, we skirt the southern edge of the slender Barsaloux Addition, platted in 1866 after having originally been surveyed in 1858. It’s another one of those French farm fields that came up from the river; you can see the addition surveyed on the left in the plat above. Lynch is an…
Indiana Avenue Between Lynch and Pestalozzi, West Side
Turning around at Pestalozzi and heading north, we see that originally the west side of Indiana Avenue was fully built up like the east side, if not as densely. It’s also interesting to see that already in 1876, towards the north end of the block, a substantial portion of a hill had to be cut…
Indiana Avenue Between Lynch and Pestalozzi, East Side
A reader recommended I look at the 2800 block of Indiana Avenue in Benton Park, which is in between Pestalozzi Avenue and Lynch Street. I’ve looked at the block of Indiana just to the north back in December of 2022, as well as a section to the south back in June of 2015. I’ve also…
Pennsylvania Avenue Between Haven and Fillmore Streets, Carondelet
Leaving behind Haven Street, formerly Nebraska, which we’ve looked at before back in March of 2021, we then see newer construction, including an early Twentieth Century gas station and then even more recent in-fill. Beyond Mott Street, formerly Malt and Miller streets, the next block is completely dominated by the retaining walls of the Sisters…
Henrietta Street and Environs, Compton Hill
I am still trying to understand the so-called Gate District, which I still stridently refer to as Compton Hill, its historic name. I wrote an article about it back in 2020, but one thing I can’t do is go back in time and see the area before redevelopment began. Was it as bad as claimed,…
The Streets Around Norwood Square
One of the most interesting neighborhoods in St. Louis is Norwood Square, which I first looked at way back in August of 2009. It sits on the site of an old quarry, which is settling badly (I tried to figure out what kind of quarry it was, but it does not show up on this…
Mount Adams, Cincinnati, Ohio
We’re going to take a break from Over the Rhine to visit Mount Adams, an example of a successful community fit into a tight space. As the name implies, and as can be seen above in the historic photograph, the steep slopes of the hill have kept the outcropping isolated northeast of downtown Cincinnati. Eden…
Lockerbie Square, Indianapolis, Indiana
Moving on on our tour of Midwestern neighborhoods and their relation to downtowns, we next come to the Lockerbie community of Indianapolis, Indiana. First of all, I had never realized that Indianapolis had a planned street grid, with radiating arteries coming out from a central roundabout (we’ll look at that sometime in the future). Lockerbie…