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…
Tag: Lafayette Square
Lafayette Avenue Between Mississippi Avenue and Nicholson Place
The block of Lafayette Avenue across from the park between Mississippi Avenue (formerly Park Place) and Nicholson Place is short, but it is packed with history. Sadly, Number 2 on Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis, the house of John P. Meyer, was lost for a parking lot, which remains its function to this day….
Lafayette Avenue Between Eighteenth Street and Mississippi Avenue, North Side
Moving west of Eighteenth Street, except for the loss of a couple houses just to the left of these two Second Empire storefronts, the north side of Lafayette Avenue is intact all the way to the alley behind Mississippi Avenue. Interestingly, little was built by 1876 except for a couple of houses that are now…
Lafayette Avenue Between Dolman and Eighteenth Streets
We’ll first take a look at these nice houses on Dolman above, which would fit in well in Soulard, but then we turn right onto Lafayette Avenue, which has changed dramatically in the time when it was first settled before the Civil War. I’ve looked at the block to the east before, with its distinctive…
Carroll Street Between Eighteenth and Grattan Streets, North Side
Heading east on Carroll Street from Eighteenth Street, we realize that the area east of the park was largely undeveloped by 1876, most likely to the presence of karst topography (there were caves in the vicinity, as well). In fact, Eighteenth was still known as Second Carondelet Avenue, a planned but ultimately terminated attempt at…
Vail Place, South of Park Avenue, East Side
The northeastern end of Vail Place originally held a large building labeled as “Car Stables” in Compton and Dry’s 1876 Pictorial St. Louis. I assume it was where residents either parked their carriages, or perhaps where early horse-drawn streetcars were stored. I do not know. But by the early Twentieth Century, it was a bed…
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 Kennett Place and Park Avenue, Part One
Moving north of Kennett Place on Mississippi Avenue, we approach one of the most well-preserved stretches of Second Empire houses in St. Louis, and in Lafayette Square in general. But glancing at Compton and Dry above, we see that very few houses had even been built yet in 1876 when Pictorial St. Louis had been…
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…
Jefferson Avenue at Interstate 44
Here we go again; more crumbling infrastructure has to be torn down and replaced; in Baby Boomers’ lifetimes we are now going on the third bridge in some parts of St. Louis, such as the Grand Viaduct. Interstate 44 has caused irreparable damage to South St. Louis; the Barr Branch of the St. Louis Public…