I originally looked at the Kingswa Building at the northwest corner of Chippewa Street and Kingshighway all the way back in June of 2009. Then, as now, it is the last urban, walkable building at the intersection, at what is a largely autocentric part of the city. Thankfully, there has been extensive rehabilitation and redevelopment…
Tag: Kingshighway Southwest
The Trophy Room
South St. Louis institution the Trophy Room, featured in such preeminent television shows such as World Wide Magazine by Pete Parisi, also has another claim to fame; examination of the eastern wall of the Second Empire saloon reveals much older roots. First, Sanborn maps reveal something interesting: there used to be a row of houses…
Missouri Crematory
The Missouri Crematory was completed in 1888 according to designs by Otto Wilhelmi, and supposedly is the first one west of the Mississippi River, but I could not verify that. To be honest, much of the information out there on the crematory is not great, contradicts itself, and is also demonstrably wrong. I was able…
Sulphur Avenue South of St. Joan of Arc
I was traveling up to St. Joan of Arc to visit their annual flea market and I spotted these houses just to the south. I think that house on the right might be a duplex.
The Houses Around the County Hospitals
Having just looked at all those “county” institutions, I want to briefly look at this interesting cluster of very old wood frame houses that sit on the streets to the north of the former Lunatic Asylum. As mentioned before, in 1875, Pictorial St. Louis shows few if any houses around. But clearly right after that,…
The Former Social Evils or Female Hospital
If the grass of Sublette Park could talk, it would have stories to tell. Most people don’t know this, but at one time in the 1870s, St. Louis dabbled in legalized prostitution. It didn’t last long, but one relic of that period was the Social Evils Hospital, or what later became known as the Female…
The Former Poor House Chronic Hospital
Color me shocked when I figured out that there are still buildings standing from the old County Poor House and Chronic Hospital just south of Arsenal and east of Hampton. The oldest building has its back to 59th Street, seen above. The building below looks to have originally faced Arsenal Street and attaches to the…
Former Lunatic Asylum, Revisited
Out west on Arsenal Street Road, even further west than Kingshighway, was a cluster of buildings that any county with a sizeable population would have possessed in the Nineteenth Century: a poor house and “lunatic asylum.” St. Louis also had a home for prostitutes which morphed into an institution where society interned “difficult women.” The…
Fyler Avenue, Northampton
The huge Hampton Gardens apartment complex was built on the old Potters’ Field at the corner of Hampton and Fyler. I found the apartment complex mentioned in all sorts of government hearings, perhaps involved in some sort of corruption having to do with public housing. It is not clear. It mentions some sort of 608…
Gethsemene Lutheran Church
I recently attended a musical performance at Gethsemene Lutheran Church, and I found the architecture interesting. During the Middle Ages, it was perfectly normal for churches and cathedrals to be the centers of the community, where music, meetings, theological discussions and other non-ceremonial events would have occurred simply because they were the only large buildings…