This might be considered sappy, but in all seriousness one of my first memories of downtown St. Louis is walking across the skybridge from the parking garage into the old Famous Barr in the Railway Exchange Building during our first visit to St. Louis Centre. Fast forward almost forty years and St. Louis Centre has…
Tag: Parking Garages
North First Street, Laclede’s Landing
We come up the steep incline and reach North First Street, where the above photograph captures the street in 1968, right before the grand plans for redevelopment had begun. Interestingly, old fashioned street lights had already appeared. Below, on the southwest corner, a plaza that appears to still be incomplete replaced the vacant lot where…
Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard, Laclede’s Landing
Not much is happening down along the Levee anymore. There are so many streets blocked off or closed permanently, as in the case of Washington Avenue, removed in the recent Arch renovations, that it is increasingly difficult to impossible to even reach the riverfront. But it is worth it to see the Eads Bridge and…
Demolition Progressing, Queeny Tower, Mid August, 2021
Update: Demolition was completed by October of 2021. Like many things in life, it takes more time to get going, but then once you get started, it starts going fast. Such is the case with the demolition of the Queeny Tower, which is now coming down quickly. They were working well into the evening last…
More Demolition, Queeny Tower
Update: See the progress of demolition in mid-August of 2021 and was complete by October. The demolition of the Queeny Tower is proceeding, and when I stopped by on the last Saturday of June, the Caterpillars were working away moving debris around. Part of the top of the tower is clearly gone, and they are working…
The Beauty of Dutchtown, Part 39: Virginia Avenue Between Eichelberger and Walsh Streets
Continuing north from Eichelberger, we see houses set back from the street, but then there are numerous businesses built right up to the sidewalk line, their front façades angled to match the orientation of Virginia Avenue. They show their continuous occupation up through the Twentieth Century, and while many of them now appear to be…
4,000th Post
3,999 posts ago, I started this website, back in May of 2007 (the twelfth anniversary is coming up in a couple of months), and while technically a few posts have been deleted for various reasons due to redundancy, or whatnot, I thought it might be interesting to check in on what has happened to the…
3,500th Post: Could We Please Just Stop Building Crap?
So it’s been over a decade since the Century Building has been torn down, and the 9th Street Garage, built in its place, has managed not to collapse in that time period. A friend of mine, who worked on the garage, said it was not built properly and had to be repaired during construction. They…
Family Photos
I found some old pictures my family took from the Arch back in 1986-7; in the upper left, you can see the Cupples Warehouses sitting vacant. The first Kiener Plaza, now demolished, was just starting construction. The ash trees are now gone, but they were relatively young thirty years ago. Below, the Metropolitan Square Building…
Crestwood Mall, Demolition, Late July 2016
Obviously there’s a huge amount of work going on inside Crestwood Plaza, but the parking garage for the old Stix, Baer and Fuller is coming down slowly. Stylistically, the Stix, later Dillard’s department store was the most aesthetically pleasing, but apparently the parking deck was structurally unstable, and it has to be demolished. The two…