I’ve been looking at the mansions north of Highway 40 in Richmond Heights, but I recently traveled down West Bruno Avenue just west of Big Bend Boulevard and caught these houses. Richmond Heights really has some great architecture, and if you travel as the crow flies, it is as close to downtown St. Louis as…
Tag: Richmond Heights
Second Baptist Church
Second Baptist is a congregation with roots going back deep into St. Louis history. Their current location at the southeast corner of Clayton and McKnight roads was on the grounds of the Barron-Childress Mansion, which they demolished back in 2002. The current church, which received a new vestibule a few years back, was originally designed…
The Galleria, Former Westroads Shopping Center
It’s increasingly forgotten, but the Galleria originally was the Westroads Shopping Center, and like many other early shopping centers, it was more of strip mall with a single anchor, in this case a Stix, Baer and Fuller, and several other stores arranged in behind a parking lot. Built in 1955, Westroads was Stix, Baer and…
Tropicana Lanes
Tropicana Lanes opened in 1960, with a face-off between Olga Gloor and Johnny King defeating Sonny Fitter and Mildred Stauder. It’s still a landmark all these years later, with 52 lanes between its two sides. It has some interesting features, such as this concrete block screen wall below that helps shield the porte cochere from…
Ridgetop and Berkshire
Albert T. Terry and A.R. Schollmeyer Real Estate Co. laid out Ridgetop in 1927 and began selling lots the same year. Maritz and Young designed houses in the subdivision, just south of Clayton Road near McKnight Road. Like most of these subdivisions laid out in the years around World War I when commutes to the…
Hampton Park
Oops, I accidentally wandered into Hampton Park, which is southeast of the intersection of Hanley and Clayton roads. This is a later design of Julius Pitzman, platted in 1897, and one of his most important outside of the City of St. Louis. The earliest home dates from 1909. Like Lake Forest, across Hanley, this area…
St. Mary’s Hospital, Winter 2024
Wow, just look at what St. Mary’s Hospital used to look like almost one hundred years ago when they had moved from their Near South Side location. The wing on the left was demolished back in 2010, which seems like a million years ago. There is a little bit of a wing, perhaps built in…
Lake Forest
Once part of an estate known as the Gay Villa, Lake Forest is that famous subdivision that has its own traffic light at the southwest corner of Hampton and Clayton roads. It was exciting, while exiting, to finally be able to use it! Lake Forest was platted in 1929 when a later owner of the…
The Immacolata
I’m surprised I’ve never photographed the Roman Catholic Church of The Immacolata, which is just a fancy word for the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Built in 1967 according to designs of architect Bernard McMahon, it represents one of many innovative designs constructed by the Archdiocese around the mid-Twentieth Century. Its vast, reinforced concrete roof that…
Demolition of St. Mary of the Angels Convent
“As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” Luke 21:6 As some readers have helpfully informed me, I am far too stupid to understand the wisdom of the sages of the great American religion of Capitalism,…