Park Avenue east of Missisippi Avenue has always had a mix of commercial activity since the 1870s, as Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis shows. Manufacturing was always a fact of life, as well, with industrial uses south of Park. The buildings lining the north side of Park Avenue in Lafayette Square are in excellent…
Tag: Lafayette Square
Park Avenue Between Benton Place and Mississippi Avenue
The block between Benton Place and Mississippi Avenue is well-preserved, with many of its original houses from the 1870s still standing, but with some interesting twists and in-fill, both from the late Nineteenth Century and early Twenty-First Century. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps reveal the block at what might be described at its “Platonic Ideal,”…
Park Avenue Between MacKay and Benton Places
The block between MacKay (formerly Armstrong) and Benton places might be short, but it is jam-packed with history and beautiful architecture. It has also changed very little since 1876, when Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis was published. Two of three buildings were already constructed, and the addition of a second house is the only…
Park Avenue Between Missouri Avenue and MacKay Place
Heading east of Missouri Avenue, we encounter one of those houses that I have a weakness for: the three story Italianate townhouse. It’s hard to see, but it has a hipped roof on top. It’s also missing its cornice, but it’s still a stunner, and anchors the northeast corner (the park lies to the south)….
Park Avenue Between Jefferson and Missouri Avenues, North Side
Lafayette Square certainly has clearly defined borders; on the west it is the traffic sewer that is South Jefferson Avenue. Automobiles hurtle along this stretch, rushing to get to the I-44 interchange since there is not a complete set of onramps from Highway 40/I-64 due to the aborted construction of 755 in the late 1980s….
St. Mary’s Assumption Roman Catholic Church
Update: This is in fact the old St. John’s Episcopal Church, and it originally possessed a very tall spire over twice as tall as the current tower on the right. The Society of St. Pius is still canonically in a state of flux with the Roman Catholic hierarchy as of 2018. Officially, in Church doctrine…
Missouri Avenue, Lafayette Square
I realized I had never photographed the western side of Lafayette Square, where there is a plethora of beautiful houses, such as what was the McLaughlin Funeral Home. Its third floor once had a Mansard roof, as was typical of the Second Empire style, but it was destroyed by the Great Cyclone of 1896, and…
Side Streets, Lafayette Square, July 2019
I’ve looked at the side streets of Lafayette Square before, and I returned to them again to look at the houses that are often forgotten in favor of the more famous one around the park. What fascinates me about the houses above is their similarity to a row of houses I have photographed on the…
Still in Ruins
Update: The house was still in ruins in the spring of 2022, even as redevelopment began around it. It seems like this old stone building is getting worse, based on my pictures going back through the years. Here it is from 2013 and from 2011. I hope there is some sort of solution planned for this…
Early Flounders, Lafayette Square
Lafayette Square is famous for its Italianate and Second Empire mansions, and rightfully so, but it already had many early settler houses by the time the wealthy and famous began to move in (and Compton and Dry shows there were more than a few industrial uses, as well). These two flounders, back to back, are…