There’s nothing but industrial wasteland to see now where the Polish parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa once stood from 1907 to 1957, swept away by the failed urban renewal plan for the Kosciusko neighborhood. But for a half century, the scrappy church thrived among the tenements and factories that filled the rough and tumble…
Tag: South Riverfront
Enclaves of St. Louis #5: River Bluff Place
I learned about this short, one block long street a couple of years ago just east of South Broadway a couple of years ago from some residents. Taking its name from Chouteau’s Bluff, which rises just north of Carondelet and then continues for over a mile or so, there are dramatic views of the Mississippi…
Historic Photographs of the Workhouse
It never ceases to amaze me that there was once a gigantic quarry along the riverfront just to the east of South Broadway, more or less where Interstate 55 now cuts through. It was the Workhouse Quarry, and for around a century inmates broke up rock for use in the roads around St. Louis just…
Lemp Brewery from the Air, 1930s
I really love this amazing aerial photograph of the Lemp Brewery, a decade after International Shoe had taken over. You can see how the shoe company had already added several floors onto a couple of buildings and altered the smokestack of the third boiler house or power plant to say ISCO. The railyard is still…
Kosciusko, September 2024
I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I thought I would try to find anything I missed in Kosciusko, the only neighborhood in St. Louis with an official population of zero. As I’ve written about in a popular St. Louis Magazine article, the whole area was almost completely annihilated by urban renewal…
Demolition, Garbage Incinerators
It’s maybe not the most consequential demolition in St. Louis history, but it is one that is worth documenting, as it represents the passing of a major civic building in the city. For generations, two large incinerators burned garbage in St. Louis (I don’t know what’s done with our garbage now), one up north on…
Billiards and St. Louis
If you’ve been following the news, you might be familiar with the trials and tribulations of the Sts. Peter and Paul homeless shelter housed in the historic church in Soulard, looking to find a larger building to serve more people. They first tried to buy the former Sts. Mary and Joseph in Carondelet, but faced…
Odds and Ends from the Winter of 2022
Occasionally I build up some photos that don’t really go with anything else, and I present them to you here. Above is a nice house on Lemp Avenue across from the brewery that is now an AirBnB. For the longest time, it was a band practice space. Moving across the old St. Louis Commons to…
South Riverfront Near the Wreck of the Intrepid, October 2021
I went down to the South Riverfront bright and early on Saturday and cut through the flood wall. The sun was shining across the Mississippi River. The water level is still low, but I think it has been rising a bit since the last time I looked. I had come to see if I could…
The Old Marine Quarry
Just beyond the lanes of Interstate 55 but west of the South Riverfront are the remnants of a very old quarry, whose original purpose has been lost. It zigzags back and forth, and even appears in Pictorial St. Louis. I originally thought these cliffs were caused by prehistoric water erosion in this post from August…