Now we come to the Cass Avenue Bank location that has been in the news, which was built in 1927, showing how quickly the institution had grown in twenty-one years. A severe, late Beaux-Arts building, it served as the headquarters of Cass Bank until 1974. This was near the Carr Square and Old North neighborhoods,…
Tag: Near North Side
History of Cass Bank, Part One
Perhaps you’ve been watching the news and heard a lot of coverage of the old Cass Bank building being in the crosshairs of demolition, and then at the last second it had been been saved. I thought it would be helpful to readers to explain what is going on. Cass Bank is still in business…
Carr School, Before Demolition
Well, I heard in the news that the old Carr Elementary School, which has been abandoned since in 1983, is being demolished. By then, the neighborhood it served had largely been annihilated by urban renewal. I detailed the historically rich story of the Carr Square article in two parts, here and here, for St. Louis…
Jefferson Elementary School
We’ll start looking at the schools slated for potential closure in order of age and working out from downtown, more or less. That means we’ll begin with Jefferson Elementary School, which as evidenced from these historic photos, has a long and rich pedigree in St. Louis. Judging from the two photographs above, I suspect the…
Carr Square, May 2026
I realized that while I investigated the Carr Square neighborhood in two pieces at St. Louis Magazine several years ago (you can read the first part here, and the second part here), I had neglected to take a look at what the area looks like now. To put it mildly, you would never imagine that…
Cass Avenue Between Elliott Avenue and North Grand Boulevard, South Side
I took a look at the south side of Cass Avenue, after having looked at the north side of the street on several occasions over the years, including January of 2013, again in January of 2017, and one more time in December of 2022. While clearly once and still a somewhat trafficked thoroughfare, I never…
Former Biddle Street Market
Designed by Albert Osburg, the City of St. Louis staff architect and opening in 1932, the Biddle Street Market was once the hub of a now vanished neighborhood. It replaced an earlier market of the same name, seen below. As can be seen below, originally the sides were open and not bricked in on the…
Sligo Steel Fire
Update: Everything on this block has now been demolished. A catastrophic fire struck the buildings of what I understand to be the old Sligo Steel buildings on the Near North Side along North Broadway just north of Downtown. This is not the first time these buildings have been hit by fire; I covered a previous…
Out of Blood (and Money)
Update: All eighty employees were terminated at the end of February. The hospital surrendered its licenses and will not reopen. Absolutely no one was surprised that the new three bed hospital opened by Paul McKee failed only a short time after it opened, and years, I mean years after it was first proposed. Property taxes,…
Green Board-Ups, JeffVanderLou, Part Two: Dayton Street
As I mentioned yesterday, Missouri Preservation listed the “JeffVanderLou Green Board Buildings” as one of their 2024 Places in Peril. South of Cass Avenue, which I have erroneously included in my Near North Side neighborhood for years, is actually also part of JeffVanderLou, and the following photos are from the well-preserved (for now) 2800 block…