We saw some other interesting buildings in New Harmony, including the Working Man’s Institute, founded by William Maclure in 1838. The current building is from 1894 and is still open to the public. Besides serving as a library, it also contains a museum of artifacts from the earliest period of New Harmony, as well as…
Tag: Romanesque Revival
Washington Place Between Lake Avenue and Kingshighway
Moving east on Washington Place we past by the first houses and then we are greeted with a surprise. We are presented with a manse much larger than other houses on the block, and I wonder if this subdivision was originally intended for more expansive residences. It was owned by Allen Harwood Collins and his…
Washington Place Between Union Boulevard and Lake Avenue
The days of spraying oil on bricks or dirt are thankfully over, but the beautiful houses that line Washington Place are still here just east of Union Boulevard (you can see the gatehouse of Washington Terrace off in the distance). The style of these houses are hard to give a real name for. Perhaps we…
Dodier Street Between North Garrison Avenue and North Grand Boulevard
Let’s look at these houses along Dodier Street more closely. It turns out that some, such as the one above, are actually two family buildings, and quite large ones at that. Single and two family houses are mixed together, without any stigma of multi-family living existing. I’ve been told that judges and doctors often lived…
Dodier Street Between Glasgow and North Garrison Avenues
I might have mentioned this before, but if you ever wonder why there are a bunch of houses that are in way better shape and a couple of decades older in the blocks to the northeast of the intersection of North Grand Boulevard and St. Louis Avenue, I can explain. In 1893, Julius Pitzman was…
Adams Elementary School
Adams Elementary has a history that stretches back to 1878, when the school above was constructed in what at the time was a relatively isolated but not unpopulated part of the city. The current building was designed by William Ittner in 1899, which is fascinating because the school is not in any way a “traditional”…
Jefferson Elementary School
We’ll start looking at the schools slated for potential closure in order of age and working out from downtown, more or less. That means we’ll begin with Jefferson Elementary School, which as evidenced from these historic photos, has a long and rich pedigree in St. Louis. Judging from the two photographs above, I suspect the…
Birthplace of Blessed Fulton Sheen and Good News at The Pines, El Paso, Illinois
Update: Title updated to reflect Fulton Sheen’s Beatification in September of 2026. First of all, there’s great news for the old Elms Restaurant in El Paso, Illinois. I spotted two people working on the roof, so it seems its long-awaited rehabilitation has begun. I first looked at the historic house and restaurant back in July…
End of Spring 2026 Odds and Ends
It’s that time of year, so it’s time for odds and ends! Above is a spandrel from a storefront in downtown Belleville, looking suspiciously like something Louis Sullivan would design. Below is just another house we found while driving around town. Cleveland High School is looking really, really bad compared to earlier visits; I first…
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Our final stop in Birmingham was the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is still in operation just outside of downtown. This was the site of the horrific bombing that killed four girls in 1963, which you can read about here. Here is the location on the side of the church where it happened, below. Across…