Interior, St. Mary’s of the Barrens, Perryville

The interior of St. Mary of the Barrens can easily rank as one of the most beautiful church interiors in the United States, and I’ve seen a lot of churches in my life. If you don’t remember my post on Il Gesù from back in November, go back and read it, and then come back…

Late Summer Odds and Ends

I have some leftover photos from the summer that I needed to clear out. Above, this house has collapsed on West Florissant Avenue just north of Grand Boulevard in the College Hill neighborhood, unfortunately. The house below is in Hyde Park, and I originally looked at it back in August of 2018. The infamous gas…

Downtown St. Joseph

Downtown St. Joseph is quite nice, with minimal amount of land turned over to pointless parking lots. There are many buildings being renovated, and there are many interesting businesses. There is this huge mural on the side of a wall where there is a parking lot. If there is cause for concern is that there…

Matisse at the Saint Louis Art Museum

St. Louisans might not realize it, but one of the most important paintings of the early Twentieth Century is right here at the St. Louis Art Museum. Henri Matisse’s 1907-9 Bathers with a Turtle set a new standard in modern art in the decade before World War I, in a period of artistic exploration and…

Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Interior, Detroit

The staff graciously turned on the lights for me so I could photograph the interior of the cathedral, which was completed in 1930, several years after the church was consecrated. There were some renovations in the early millennium that are apparent as they look different than in a typical Gothic Revival cathedral. The stained glass…

Woodward Avenue, Churches and Other Buildings, Detroit

We’ll leave Brush Park behind and turn on to Woodward Avenue at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and head north. Woodward Avenue is perhaps one of the most iconic streets in Detroit, and stretches all the way from the Detroit River all the way past Eight Mile Road, the city limits, all the way to the…

Two Churches, Mount Adams, Cincinnati, Ohio

We’ll look at the two Catholic churches on Mount Adams in more detail today; they perhaps could not have more prime locations on the heights of the promontory, securing sites long before the development of the neighborhood around them. First up is the former Passionist monastery of the Holy Cross which served the Irish population…

Notre Dame of Chartres, Interior

Well then, they’ve been doing a bit of interior decorating on the inside of Chartres Cathedral, and generating quite a bit of controversy in the process. Needless to say, the newly cleaned and painted walls are a dramatic change to what generations of particularly older art historians were accustomed. Of course, it has not been…