I am still trying to understand the so-called Gate District, which I still stridently refer to as Compton Hill, its historic name. I wrote an article about it back in 2020, but one thing I can’t do is go back in time and see the area before redevelopment began. Was it as bad as claimed,…
Tag: Post-Modernism
Lockerbie Square, Indianapolis, Indiana
Moving on on our tour of Midwestern neighborhoods and their relation to downtowns, we next come to the Lockerbie community of Indianapolis, Indiana. First of all, I had never realized that Indianapolis had a planned street grid, with radiating arteries coming out from a central roundabout (we’ll look at that sometime in the future). Lockerbie…
Streets of St. Charles
I was out visiting a friend two Saturdays ago, and I was intrigued by the “new urbanism” development of the Streets of St. Charles. It’s becoming increasingly common for wealthier suburbs of major cities to build these mixed-use developments, where there are ground floor restaurants and stores below apartments or condos. There’s usually a hotel…
TopGolf and the District, Chesterfield
In case readers living outside of a metropolitan region where there is currently no TopGolf, I thought I would take a couple of photos to show what such facilities look like. This is the one out in Chesterfield. Perhaps the most prominent feature is the giant net which wraps around the field where players seek…
Massive Redevelopment, The Grove
Ah yeah, so Vista Avenue has changed a bit since I first looked at it back in August of 2014 when the Grove was still at the cusp of a major redevelopment explosion. The affordable housing above was just about complete in June of 2018, but things sure have changed. Basically all of the old…
The South Side, Peoria
My trip up to Central Illinois in mid June took me to all sorts of random surprises, including several new churches and other sights, and that is why I enjoy doing what I do. It is often totally random. But sometimes my totally random path takes me through neighborhoods that tell stories that I don’t…
Sisters of the Most Precious Blood and O’Fallon City Hall
I had never seen the Convent of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of O’Fallon, and it is an impressive presence on Main Street in the historic area of town. Portions of the complex were sold to the City of O’Fallon for conversion into the rapidly growing suburb for its new city hall, whose…
New Target Coming to the Mill Creek Valley
Update: I revisited the area in November of 2022. I’m sure readers have heard about proposed Target going in on the east side of Grand Boulevard just north of Chouteau Avenue. This has long been an industrial area, and the site of quarries. As can be seen in the above photograph and in the fire…
The Roebling Bridge, Between Cincinnati and Covington
One of the most important bridges in the history of architecture and engineering spans the Ohio River in between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. Opened in 1866, years before the revolutionary Eads Bridge in St. Louis, it served as the important prototypical step for the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Construction faced the same challenges:…
Resurrection of the Zombie Subdivision, Wildwood
We returned to the zombie subdivision in Wildwood that was one of the victims of the housing crash back in 2008 (remember that–it seems a million years ago now). It’s actually sort of interesting to see how the real estate market dealt with this problem. Off Crescent Road, individual homeowners have simply bought the adjacent…