After another not terribly inspired 1950s or 60s long apartment building, we get to Hortus Court, a fascinating and unique development in St. Louis. Platted in 1921, Hortus Court is a row of Dutch Colonial houses arranged around a walkway perpendicular to Magnolia Avenue, creating a quaint, private community of homes facing each other across…
Tag: Modernism
Magnolia Avenue from Thurman Avenue to Klemm Street, Part One
Crossing Thurman, we see more apartment buildings and houses. This first one is perhaps more reminiscent of the U-shaped buildings of Chicago that are so prevalent, but not so much in St. Louis. But as I often remind readers, apartments in St. Louis, no mater how complicated they look, are usually just four- or six-family…
Magnolia Avenue from South 39th Street to Lawrence Street
Heading west on Magnolia Avenue past South 39th Street, we get to some of those exceptionally long lots. But these houses don’t have those long yards, because the backs were partitioned off to create houses facing South 39th Street, sitting perpendicular to Magnolia Avenue. They are typical houses from the early Twentieth Century. One house…
Magnolia Avenue from South Grand Boulevard to South 39th Street
The next couple of weeks I’m going to be looking at that strange, awkward strip of land that extends from South Grand Boulevard to Tower Grove Avenue between Magnolia Avenue and the north alley behind Botanical Avenue in the Shaw neighborhood. Why is the space between Magnolia and Botanical not wide enough for another street,…
Arsenal Street Between Arkansas and Louisiana Avenues
We cross over Arkansas Avenue in Tower Grove East where there are many corner storefronts such as the one you see above and below. There’s also Riley’s, famous for its pizza. Those front parapet walls below have obviously been truncated due to damage from the weather, which is common. We see more tracts houses below,…
West of Downtown Union, Franklin County
Heading west from the square and downtown, we come across St. Paul Lutheran Church, founded in 1921 and originally met in an older building. The current church is from 1952. Houses are relatively simple in town. But I did find this nice Queen Anne Style house back closer to the courthouse. Out southwest of town,…
Stix, Baer and Fuller, Crestwood Plaza
I thought the former Stix, Baer & Fuller department store at Crestwood Plaza deserved its own post, considering its shear size and accompanying enclosed mall which attached to the strip mall to the west of the original development from 1957. Opening on January 23, 1967, the new department store represented a substantial addition to the…
South County Center
Developed by the May Department Stores and originally anchored by a Famous Barr department store in Mehlville, the South County Shopping Center opened in the fall of 1963, spurring increased residential development around the intersection of what would become Interstates 55, 270 and 55, just west of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge. This was the fourth…
Requiem for Shopping Malls?
The announcement that Macy’s will be closing the store at South County Center raised the specter that there will be another round of mall closures after an initial wave that struck the St. Louis region earlier this millennium. As Toby Weiss at B.E.L.T. St. Louis documented so well at Northland Shopping Center and River Roads…
Ladue Middle School
Originally built as a junior high school for grades seven through nine, the gymnasium and lunchroom for Ladue Middle School has always impressed me. Designed by Murphy and Mackey, a notable St. Louis architecture firm, it opened in 1958 at a cost of $1,523,618. Designed for 1,000 students, the building has been altered over the…