Formerly Butler Avenue, the street that bisects many of the streets in Walnut Park West is now named Park Lane, no doubt a result of the platting of the North Pointe neighborhood across West Florissant Avenue. While most houses are built facing the northeast/southwest facing streets, there are a handful of homes built on the…
Tag: Italianate
Riverview Boulevard, West Side, Walnut Park West
Riverview Boulevard has been known by many names over the years: Tracy Road or Avenue until 1907, Kingshighway Northwest until 1925 and Partridge Avenue at some point. Regardless, it forms the southeast boundary of Walnut Park West and has been a major artery since the Nineteenth Century, traveling to the northeast where it intersects with…
St. Anthony the Hermit Maronite Church
Wait a minute, I said to myself, the home of William D’Oench, one of Eberhard Anheuser’s early business partners, has the same address as the early Maronite church of St. Anthony the Hermit. It sat in the neighborhood we looked at the last couple of days. And yes, it was not hugely common, but down…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part Two
Continuing our tour of the Near South Side streetscapes demolished in the 1940s for the Clinton Peabody Housing Project, we move over to Dillon Street. William Swekosky seems to have been drawn to St. Ange Avenue, with its strong mix of different architectural styles predating the Civil War. This was actually the suburbs before the…
Clinton Peabody, Yesteryears, Part One
As I began to research the business community in pre-Civil War St. Louis, the addresses of some of the most important factory owners often seemed to come up in the later footprint of Clinton-Peabody. Certainly the Cracker Castle is a well-known example, but there are many more. It turns out that streets such as St….
Rock Island, Illinois, Part Two
We next headed down to what I think is the Old Chicago neighborhood of Rock Island, which has seen redevelopment and the construction of mixed-income public housing. The color blue has also been a popular choice for the older houses. Unlike Davenport, Rock Island has most definitely chosen to have a levee, which is straight…
Rock Island, Illinois, Part One
The original railroad bridge that first crossed the Mississippi River in 1856 between Rock Island and Davenport is long gone, but there are obviously new spans to replace it. The Government Bridge, which we drove across to Illinois to visit the two cities that make up half of the Quad Cities, is quite the hulking…
Prospect Park, Davenport, Iowa
Heading east of downtown Davenport, we reach Prospect Park and environs. Centered around an eponymous greenspace, the area grew up later than Hamburg upriver from older parts of Davenport. There is still no levee protecting the city, so there are excellent views of the Mississippi River from the neighborhood. There are relatively simple houses on…
North of Downtown, Davenport, Iowa
Leaving the Hamburg neighborhood, we wandered up Brady Street, I think, and looked at the Cork Hill area, I think, and other neighborhoods north of downtown Davenport. First up on the list of major landmarks we spotted is Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Cathedral, built in 1891 according to designs by architect James Egan. Mass was…
Hamburg, Davenport, Iowa, Part Two
Continuing our look at the Hamburg neighborhood in Davenport that we started yesterday, we look at another amazing Italianate house. What is interesting is that there does not seem to be much of a Second Empire phase in the city’s architecture, or on the other side of the river. There certainly is plenty of Second…