We’ll look at Neosho Street over the next several days, starting in the west at Hampton Avenue and going east and back in time, so to speak. Of course, first we seen rows and rows of Gingergbread style houses, which is what we sort of describe as Neo-Gothic Revival architecture, and is very special and…
Tag: Streamline Moderne
Avenue G, Part One, Fort Madison, Iowa
As part of our continued series of looking at Iowa river towns north up the Mississippi River from St. Louis at the end of the month this summer, we next head to Fort Madison, crossing over a massive bridge combining both rail and road. Fort Madison’s street grid is laid out with numbered streets starting…
Dutchtown West of Grand Boulevard, Part Six
We’ll now head into the 1930s and 40s, when the World War II era came to St. Louis (yes, I know that the United States entered World War II in 1941), and Modernism via Streamline Moderne became common in the city’s architecture. While we normally associate these styles of four-family flats with St. Louis Hills,…
Four Historic Districts, Bloomington, Illinois, Part Two: East Grove Street
East Grove Street is the next historic district, which extends out east from downtown Bloomington. It is primarily populated with Queen Anne style houses from the 1880s. There has been extensive rehabbing of the houses, and it is really an impressive group of homes from the period. There are one or two Italianate style houses…
Washington Boulevard Between North Compton and Garrison Avenues
Stretching out to the west of Jefferson Avenue was the massive Daniel D. Page Addition, which encompassed thousands of parcels, largely platted between 1858 and 1871. Page was the second mayor of St. Louis and he also was heavily involved in real estate. A substantial portion of what we now call Midtown was once owned…
Downtown Baden, July 2024
Responding to a reader critique, I headed back up to Baden recently, and in particular looked at the downtown area along North Broadway. The house above with its attached lot had not changed much. Many of the buildings north of there were still boarded up. This church was still looking good. The building below was…
Urban Renewal and Historic Preservation, Mason City
I mentioned yesterday when discussing the City National Bank and Park Inn that South Federal Street was a pedestrian mall, but that is not even telling half of the story! In one of the more bizarre urban renewal machinations I have ever seen, the pedestrian mall then turns into an actual shopping mall, known as…
Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa
Buddy Holly played the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis on April 15, 1958. Less than a year later, he, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens would be crisscrossing the Upper Midwest in the dead of winter, hitting small ballrooms such as the Surf Ballroom in the small town of Clear Lake on the shore of…
Winona Avenue, West of Kingshighway
I’ve become a little more interested in the streets just to the west of Kingshighway, where the blocks start to the west with houses, and then become more dense as they get closer to the major north-south thoroughfare. There’s sort of the standard houses you would expect, as well as your usual two-family flats. And…
Two Downtown Movie Theaters, St. Joseph
St. Joseph possesses two fantastic historic theaters in its downtown from two different eras. The first, the Missouri Theater, was built in a sort of Moorish Revival in 1927. Waylande Gregory was the architect. I can’t help but see the resemblance to the Majestic Theater in East St. Louis. Now owned by the City of…