Built in 1905 for John L. Miers, the house at the northwest corner of Midland Avenue and Smiley Road is now threatened with demolition. Miers was president of the United Railways streetcar company, and rather appropriately, a line ran right out front of the house (though obviously he could have afforded his own transportation). It…
Tag: North County
Pasadena Hills, Revisited
It’s been almost exactly sixteen years since I first visited Pasadena Hills, and judging from the extremely low quality of the photos I took of the beautiful North County suburb I took back then, it was well past due to revisit. Comprising 120 acres and developed starting in 1928, the initial investment of the Carter…
Ira Avenue, Northwoods
I turned off Pasadena Boulevard in Northwoods and found this pleasant and nice street named Ira Avenue It continues that theme of houses developing from the 1920s into the 1950s. I love how Northwoods bucks the stereotype that many people hold for North County; it’s a beautiful area with well kept homes with beautiful architecture.
Pasadena Boulevard, Northwoods
Pasadena Boulevard follows the old right-of-way of the streetcar line that comes up out of Pine Lawn to the east. Just to the north of the park above was Minoma, the Italianate country estate of Jefferson Kearny. It is no longer extant. We enter Northwoods, which was the giant Edgewood survey, which you can see…
Pine Lawn
Pine Lawn is one of the many small inner ring suburbs just outside the boundaries of the City of St. Louis along Natural Bridge Road and Jennings Station Road forms a north-south “spine,” so to speak. The name comes from the estate, one of many out this way, of Charles Clark, of which only the…
The Crossings at Northwest, Former Northwest Plaza
I thought I would swing by the “Crossings at Northwest,” or what I called Zombie Northwest Plaza, which apparently was the largest outdoor mall in the United State when it opened in January 24, 1966. Supposedly. The last time I was by was back in 2017. The Famous Barr, designed by Raymond Loewy and William…
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…
Town and Country Mall
Tally ho! Just when I thought I knew of every defunct and demolished mall in the St. Louis region, life throws a curveball. I just learned about the existence of the Town and Country Mall, at the southeast corner of Woodson Road and Page Boulevard in Overland. Opening in November of 1960, two years before…
Bethesda Lutheran Church, Pine Lawn
I stumbled across this interesting church on my way somewhere else, and I stopped to take a closer look at it. Constructed in 1949 for Bethesda Lutheran Church, it has now become the home of Faith Lutheran Church since 2019 when the latter congregation relocated from its original location at 3060 Lucas and Hunt Road….
Wagner Electric
I wrote an article about the tragic end of the manufacturing giant Wagner Electric in Wellston, just west of the St. Louis City limits back in May of 2019 in St. Louis Magazine, but I found some cool diagrams of the plant so I thought I would revisit the buildings on Plymouth Avenue. I always…