Located down a concrete walkway at the end of a promontory, the statue of Our Lady of the Rivers is a short distance from the town of Portage des Sioux. Past the front entry, there are a series of steel panels commemorating various river-related events, such the one below. The statue itself, designed by Norma…
Tag: Modernism
Two Churches in the Land Between the Rivers
We looked at two churches in that flat bottomland sandwiched between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers that forms an almost peninsula-like eastern tail of St. Charles County. The first one, Trinity Lutheran Church at the intersection of Highway 94 and Church Road, dates from 1876, when it was calved off from Emmanuel Lutheran. The church…
The North Side from the McKinley Bridge
Looking north up the river, we see the old warehouses and factories of the Near North Riverfront. You can see the City Museum off in the distance. Next up are the warehouses of the United Bags Company along North Broadway. St. Liborius is in view in the St. Louis Place neighborhood. There is the old…
Downtown from the McKinley Bridge
The views of downtown from the McKinley Bridge are also impressive. The vacant Southwestern Bell building can be seen below, with the boarded up windows that were shot out by stray bullets earlier this year clearly visible. The Eagleton Federal Courthouse is to the west. Then there is the iconic Civil Courts building. The Stan…
The Edge of Tower Grove East, Nebraska Avenue Between Pestalozzi Street and Magnolia Avenue
Tower Grove East is a strange neighborhood. In the eyes of many people, it is a junior version of Tower Grove South, or should I say, Tower Grove Heights, with its rows of early Twentieth Century suburban houses. But in reality, the eastern portion the neighborhood has roots going back to the mid-Nineteenth Century, when…
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…
Schiller’s Grove and the Former St. Elizabeth’s Academy
I had long known that the former St. Elizabeth’s High School and convent, now the International Institute, had once had a larger chapel that had been partially demolished when its new Modernist wing had been built in the 1960s in Tower Grove East. Christopher Schiller, owner of the Swan Tavern on the Levee, had bought…
John F. Kennedy High School, Interior and Today
I dug up some old photos of John F. Kennedy High School from when it had just opened back in 1971. As I covered back in March of this year, it has been completely demolished for new houses named Celtic Meadows. As can be seen below, there has been some major grading work going on…
Lindell Boulevard from North Boyle Avenue to Kingshighway
Proceeding further west on Lindell Boulevard, we see both well-preserved stretches of historic architecture and utterly obliterated streetscape. There are those stunning townhouses, which I would love to own if I didn’t have to worry about a car driven by a man-child flying into my living room every day. And then there’s the former of…
Lindell Boulevard Between Vandeventer and North Boyle Avenues
Heading west of Vandeventer, this stretch of Lindell Boulevard is perhaps the most devastated of the entire street in the Central West End. There is hardly anything left from the Nineteenth Century left on the north side. Even the AAA was once threatened with demolition for a drug store several years. Perhaps the most notable…