Downtown St. Joseph is quite nice, with minimal amount of land turned over to pointless parking lots. There are many buildings being renovated, and there are many interesting businesses. There is this huge mural on the side of a wall where there is a parking lot. If there is cause for concern is that there…
Tag: Romanesque Revival
The Other Gateway to the West: St. Joseph
I was giving a lecture in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwestern corner of the state, and lo and behold, I found one of the most architecturally rich cities in the Midwest, if not in the whole United States. Powered by immense stockyards and industry that dwarfed Kansas City to the south for most of…
North Up Blair Avenue, North of Penrose Street, Hyde Park, March 2024
Heading north from Penrose Street and continuing our tour in Hyde Park, we see that Ferry Street is blocked off again, no doubt due to another problem with the sewer underneath in what was originally a deep chasm in the natural topography of the earth before the neighborhood’s development. We detour to the east down…
Victor Street Between South Grand Boulevard and Arkansas Avenue
Victor Street, just east of South Grand Boulevard in Tower Grove East, is another well-kept secret with beautiful houses and an interesting apartment building in the Roehampton Addition. The house below actually sat abandoned for decades before being taken in court and is now being renovated by a responsible woman-owned development company. Other houses look…
The Former Poor House Chronic Hospital
Color me shocked when I figured out that there are still buildings standing from the old County Poor House and Chronic Hospital just south of Arsenal and east of Hampton. The oldest building has its back to 59th Street, seen above. The building below looks to have originally faced Arsenal Street and attaches to the…
Norvell-Shapleigh, The Saturday After the Fire
I went back out the Saturday after the fire to check on the state of the demolition of the Norvell-Shapleigh warehouse after I had viewed it on Monday. A substantial amount of the building had been removed, particularly the former J. Kennard and Sons Carpet Co. portion on the north, including the part that had…
Norvell Shapleigh, Destroyed by Fire
Another warehouse on the Near North Riverfront has been destroyed by a suspicious fire. While certainly we can attribute some of the conflagrations to squatters accidentally allowing campfires to grow out of control, I was told that in some instances, including the one that hit the Norvell-Shapleigh Warehouse, that was most definitely not the case….
Louisiana Avenue Between Walsh Street and Taft Avenue, Part Two
Heading north, the houses reach back to the first decade of the Twentieth Century. The brick gets redder, if that’s a word. The round windows of the Romanesque begin to appear. Those stately four-square houses, as we call them, also are there. More complicate hipped roofs with projecting gables and intricate porches are also present….
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…
Hortense Place
Platted in May of 1900 by Jacob Goldman, a Jewish businessman and banker who was kept out of other private streets and designed by Julius Pitzman, Hortense Place is one of the more interesting of its kind in the Central West End. The lots are huge, and it is perhaps famous for #13 above, where…