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…
Tag: North County
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…
Greendale
Heading up Normandy Avenue, I first glanced over at the historic Normandie Golf Club and noticed earth being moved around. Had it finally been purchased and subdivided for houses, as had been threatened so many times? No, in fact it is being renovated according to designs by Jack Nicklaus. But I was turning my attention…
Bel-Nor
As can be seen clearly labeled on the map above, the town of Bel-Nor began as a real estate development named the Country Club Addition of Normandy Park. In fact, the Normandie Golf Club, which sits to the south of the residential component of the town, lies within its city limits. The old Incarnate Word…
Normandy, Part Three
On the west side of Florissant Road, opposite St. Vincent Children’s Services, which is again another land donation of the Lucas-Hunt family, we have a row of houses from the 1920s and 30s. There is a broad mix of houses on what is the eastern edge of the Normandy Heights addition, with almost Arts and…
Normandy, Part Two
Crossing over Florissant Road, we are now on Bermuda Drive, which appears on the Normandy Park plat maps. We see the back of the house above which we saw back in May of 2019. Much like along Florissant Road that we saw back in May of 2019, there is a row of Gingerbread houses of…