The Missouri Crematory was completed in 1888 according to designs by Otto Wilhelmi, and supposedly is the first one west of the Mississippi River, but I could not verify that. To be honest, much of the information out there on the crematory is not great, contradicts itself, and is also demonstrably wrong. I was able…
Tag: Renaissance Revival
The Long Lost Landreth Building
The Landreth Building, sitting at the southeast corner of 4th and Locust streets, was a historic skyscraper that had missed my attention before and I only discovered it by accident recently. At eighteen stories, it may be the tallest building demolished in downtown St. Louis, beating out the lost Third National Bank Building, which was…
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…
North Florissant Avenue North of Salisbury, Hyde Park, July 2024
On my way somewhere, I passed by these old Second Empire houses, which have long intrigued me for many years. See older posts October of 2017 and August of 2018. Amazingly, six years later, they are all still here, both abandoned and occupied. This one below is the really rare one: a wood frame Second…
Downtown Baden, July 2024
Responding to a reader critique, I headed back up to Baden recently, and in particular looked at the downtown area along North Broadway. The house above with its attached lot had not changed much. Many of the buildings north of there were still boarded up. This church was still looking good. The building below was…
West End of Chamberlain Place
I’ve looked at the Chamberlin Addition (Bartmer Avenue between Union and Clara) numerous times over the years, first when Toby Weiss of BeltSTL and I discovered it way back in April of 2012.and found the amazing Union Memorial United Methodist Church, which was then featured in this post by Toby. I also revisited the street…
University Hills
Laid out in 1923 by Cyrus Willmore, University Hills was another of the large early automobile age subdivisions platted just to the west of the lions in University City. University Heights is just adjacent to the east. As is typical of the time the Tudor Revival predominates, and likewise in University City subdivisions, the larger…
Stabilization Continuing, Malt Kilns, Lemp Brewery
We last looked at the controlled demolition of the unstable malt kilns at the Lemp Brewery back in December of 2023. As I’ve been arguing for a while now, the owner’s decision to stabilize the building in this way is the best course of action, and I fully support it. Remember, this was originally a…
Don’t Fence Me In, St. Louis Edition
I want to tell you about a man you’ve never heard of outside of a news story last week, who died anonymously for unknown reasons less than a block from the center of our city’s government. My coworkers and I never knew the name his mother named him, but his nickname around City Hall was…
Former Most Holy Name, Attacked
Update: See historic photos of the interior here. Well, this is not good. I was coming from somewhere and when I drove by the former Most Holy Name Roman Catholic Church, I was startled to discover a very bad development. Much like what doomed St. Augustine’s and what has also happened at St. Mark’s, someone…