Whiting Hall the Italianate style building above and below, was originally part of Knox College and functioned as a women’s seminary. The central core is from 1854-7, with the east wing added in 1885 and the west wing added in 1895, when it received its current name. It is now senior housing. The Knox County…
Tag: Skyscrapers
Main Street, Galesburg, Illinois
We’ll be looking at Galesburg, Illinois for the next six days, as part of my continued examination of the cities and towns within the sphere of St. Louis’s economy. Located along the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, there is still a giant railyard going through the town in a northeast-southwest orientation southeast of downtown. Main…
Downtown Springfield
Downtown Springfield is dominated by a public square at the intersection of two major cross streets. While for much of its history during the Twentieth Century it was a morass of open pavement, in what looks to be the 1970s it was converted into a park and traffic was routed into a single lane that…
Downtown from the McKinley Bridge
The views of downtown from the McKinley Bridge are also impressive. The vacant Southwestern Bell building can be seen below, with the boarded up windows that were shot out by stray bullets earlier this year clearly visible. The Eagleton Federal Courthouse is to the west. Then there is the iconic Civil Courts building. The Stan…
Lindell Boulevard from Grand Boulevard to Vandeventer Avenue
Ah, Lindell Boulevard! I avoid the street like the plague because it is such a dysfunctional street. Once a residential street lined with mansions, sometime in the Twentieth Century it became the busiest street in the city. The mansions were demolished, and it became lined with businesses, while the through traffic jumped over to Highway…
Looking Out the Windows of the Alverne
It’s hard to believe considering how long suffering the Alverne Building was, that I was able to stand on the top floor recently and deliver a lecture. It’s now renovated into some interesting apartments, including some two-story ones, and the problem with the building having some small windows that couldn’t be altered in order to…
Central Park, Downtown Jacksonville, Illinois
Jacksonville was founded by groups of “Yankees,” from New England, many of whom were graduates of Yale University. I can’t help but think the influence of the large town commons and greens of cities such as New Haven played a part in the design of Central Park, the outsized town square of Jacksonville. The center…
Queeny Tower Demolition Complete
The old Queeny Tower has been annihilated, and the site is cleared without even a water-filled hole left behind. The site is now being prepared for future construction. Some interesting remainders have been left; for example, up above the cantilevered remnant of the skybridge which connected the Queeny Tower to the main building of Barnes…
The Roebling Bridge, Between Cincinnati and Covington
One of the most important bridges in the history of architecture and engineering spans the Ohio River in between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. Opened in 1866, years before the revolutionary Eads Bridge in St. Louis, it served as the important prototypical step for the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Construction faced the same challenges:…
Chouteau Trust and Banking Building
The old Chouteau Trust and Banking Building is one of those landmarks that maybe gets taken for granted, sitting right at the eastern gateway to the Grove neighborhood. But it is significant for being such a large office building in what is otherwise a low-rise neighborhood. It is perhaps obvious that it once had a…