It finally happened, the Mullanphy Emigrant Home, which I last looked at back in June of this year, caught on fire and burned to the ground on the night of September 14th. There is certainly no grand conspiracy, but simply the fact that overnight lows reached 50 degrees, and a squatter’s fire probably spread out…
Tag: Midtown
Jefferson Avenue Pedestrian Bridge
Speaking of pedestrian bridges, there actually was at least one that I learned about from Vivian Gibson, author of The Last Children of Mill Creek. It’s been demolished, obviously, but it once took pedestrians over the Mill Creek railyards in the alignment of what was known as West Jefferson Avenue (really the original path of…
Suspicious Fire at Jamison Memorial Church
Update: A church burned in Soulard a week or so after this fire. Its cause was not determined to be suspicious. Something suspicious is going on in St. Louis, with back to back fires on Friday and Saturday nights over the Memorial Day weekend. The first casualty was the Jamison Memorial Church on Washington Boulevard…
Former St. John’s Hospital
I stumbled upon these photographs of the two former locations of St. John’s Hospital (now known as Mercy Hospital St. Louis, located at the northeast corner of I-270 and Highway 40), and I couldn’t help but want to share them. The image above shows the building at the southwest corner of Lucas and Jefferson avenues….
Rapid Changes, Mill Creek Around Grand Boulevard
Late on Saturday, I checked up on how the residential development of the former railyards of the western Mill Creek valley was going. This is west of the historic African American neighborhood, but is the actual valley, where roundhouses and light industry, as well as massive switching yards once lay. The building that was under…
Lindell Boulevard from Grand Boulevard to Vandeventer Avenue
Ah, Lindell Boulevard! I avoid the street like the plague because it is such a dysfunctional street. Once a residential street lined with mansions, sometime in the Twentieth Century it became the busiest street in the city. The mansions were demolished, and it became lined with businesses, while the through traffic jumped over to Highway…
Two Unique Buildings, Olive Street Just West of North Compton Avenue
Often while sitting at the light at Olive Street and North Compton Avenue, I’ve looked to the west and seen these two buildings. I finally decided to take a look at them more closely. The first building on the right was actually the location of a western outpost of the famous Tony Faust’s restaurant. The…
Urban Density Surviving on Grand Boulevard
While all those demolitions are going on down south, there are actually a fair number of really nice buildings still standing just to the north, particularly on the west side of Grand Boulevard. Justine Peterson has a presence in one building, nice rehabbed above. There’s this spectacular Art-Deco storefront above, which is a rarity in…
No Encore for the Palladium
Alerted by friends, I discovered the Palladium, also known as the Plantation Club, has been demolished by the Veterans’ Administration. There had been some hope that the demolition of some non-descript warehouses on the north side of the John Cochran Veterans’ Hospital would suffice, but apparently not. It had been suffering demolition by neglect for…
No Encore for the Culver House
Back in April of this year, I wrote of the prospects of saving the Culver House from imminent destruction at the hands of the Saint Louis Symphony and its planned expansion to the east: “Someone with deep pockets needs to step up, or it will almost certainly be demolished.” There are now increasingly fewer residential…