As readers might suspect, I have been bedridden, overwhelmed with grief at the announcement that two of the oldest buildings on the former A.G. Edwards campus are marked for demolition in order to build two new hotels, a couple of blocks from the new soccer stadium. As many readers know, this was the heart of…
Tag: Mill Creek
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…
New Target Coming to the Mill Creek Valley
Update: I revisited the area in November of 2022. I’m sure readers have heard about proposed Target going in on the east side of Grand Boulevard just north of Chouteau Avenue. This has long been an industrial area, and the site of quarries. As can be seen in the above photograph and in the fire…
Union Station, Newly Opened
It’s hard to imagine Union Station as a new building, or to think of Market Street out front as a much narrower thoroughfare than it is today, but both were once true. The train shed was also full carriages, though of course the locomotives stayed outside, due to obvious reasons of not wanting to fill…
Under the Viaducts in the Mill Creek Valley, Part 3
Update: The building above was demolished in the fall of 2022. There are still some buildings just south of Highway 40 that were designed when Market Street still passed by their northern facades, such as the one above. But when the highway was built after World War II, they suddenly found themselves in limbo. See…
Under the Viaducts in the Mill Creek Valley, Part 2
I looked at some of the industrial areas under the bridges and viaducts that cross over the Mill Creek Valley and its extensions west previously. Now we will look at some redevelopment around Grand Boulevard. Some of the buildings that have been sitting abandoned for decades, or just a few years, around Highway 40’s western…
Under the Viaducts in the Mill Creek Valley
Update: See the second post in this series here and third post here. Historic photographs prove the valley between Chouteau and Forest Park Avenue was never some Lafayette Square-type neighborhood full of beautiful houses that deteriorated into a wasteland. No, it was always a gritty, industrial, traintrack-laced warren where coal dust and smoke scarred the…
Castle Ballroom Demolition
Update: See the ballroom before it suffered structural collapse here. I wasn’t going to bother driving by the rapidly disappearing Castle Ballroom, but I ended up driving by on Saturday and thought I would take a look. It’s sad to see, particularly because there is nothing happening along this stretch of Olive. There’s nothing but…
Railyards, Union Station
There’s still a fair bit of the remnants of the distant outbuildings of Union Station, down towards the Mill Creek railyards. This maintenance building, now roofless, once sat right where the tracks headed into the station from the main lines. This gigantic crane sits where it was left; I’m glad they chose to preserve it…