St. Mary’s of the Barrens takes its name from the prairie early settlers could not plow; instead, they turned to the loamy soil of the bottomlands along the river to farm. Established in 1818, the church also served alongside the oldest seminary west of the Mississippi. The Vincentians have long been associated with the church…
Tag: Rehabilitation
American Car and Foundry Company, Today
After reading in the news media that several buildings in the old American Car and Foundry Company were threatened with demolition, I traveled out to St. Charles to take a look. One building the Foundry Arts Center, is at the front of the complex at Clark and North Main Street. It’s a huge complex, and…
Missouri Avenue Between Albion Place and Park Avenue, Lafayette Square, Revisited
Crossing over Albion Place, we are still in the large Funkhauser Addition, at least until the last few houses before we reach Park Avenue. As can be seen above, there was nothing built yet in 1875, and the only features present was what looks to be a farmhouse and a small grove of trees and…
Missouri Avenue Between Lafayette Avenue and Albion Place, Lafayette Square, Revisited
I looked at Missouri Avenue on the west side of Lafayette Square back in September of 2019, but I felt like it was such an interesting stretch of street that I’ve split it up into two posts. Up first is a house I looked at all the way back in April of 2008.; it was…
Montgomery Street Fire, Old North
Only hours after I had posted on January 22 the good news that these houses were being rehabbed, a fire broke out and severely damaged this row of houses. I do not know what the future holds for these houses. Sometimes it feels like North St. Louis just cannot catch a break.
Old North, January 2026
As Charles Dickens said in one of my favorite books, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Let’s get the worst of times out of the way first up in Old North. This act of deprivation committed against what was and could be a beautiful building on Hebert Street (I…
Oakherst and Oakley Places, West End
I thought I would take some more photographs of the Oakherst Concrete Block National Historic District while I was up in the West End. Platted in 1906 as the Woodland Park Addition, as we’ve seen before back in October of 2017, concrete blocks were manufactured on site for what was considered a new exciting building…
Cabanne Avenue Between Goodfellow Boulevard and Hamilton Avenue, West End, Revisited
The fire insurance map above from 1909 captures an important moment in history for the West End; the neighborhood was still suburban in nature and it was a time before the apartment buildings would be built, taking advantage of the large parcels that once held stately wood frame houses built in the previous decades when…
Clemens Avenue Between Hamilton Avenue and Porter Park, West End
We head down Goodfellow Boulevard from Walnut Park to reach the West End, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the City. It was incredibly rural, as Pictorial St. Louis shows, in 1876. But by the early Twentieth Century, it had filled in with posh wood frame and brick houses of St. Louis’s professional and managerial…
Second Empire, Reborn
Well, I’ll be darned! That Second Empire beauty at the southeast corner of South Jefferson Avenue and Miami Street wasn’t actually a hazardous building in imminent danger of collapse after all! It’s been reopened as a space for a non-for-profit that provides housing for people in need. Looks like it’s structurally sound!