Moving along to the west, the streetscape past a short row of storefronts is more of the same for what we would expect in the Greater Ville, expect we are along a major street. For whatever reason, the grassy median has now transformed to a broad swath of concrete, and it is bare and white….
Tag: The Greater Ville
Natural Bridge Avenue Between Paris and North Taylor Avenues, South Side
When we last left off on our examination of the south side of Natural Bridge Avenue heading west, we had stopped at Clay Avenue. Much of the urban fabric west of there until Paris Avenue has been ruined for autocentric development, so let’s pick up there. The housing stock, even though it’s on a major…
Marcus Avenue Between Greer and Ashland Avenues, West Side, The Greater Ville
I was glancing at these apartments above when I turned to the right, looking up Marcus Avenue. It soon became obvious that just about every single house on the west side of the street (I’d captured these houses in the corner of the last photo of this post in September of 2021) has had its…
Ashland Avenue Between Clay Avenue and Whittier Street, South Side, The Greater Ville
After we pass by Farragut School on Ashland Avenue, things start to look a little more rough, with heavy abandonment and dilapidation. Four-family flats, built together, now sit abandoned in the weeds together. The short streets which give the north central Greater Ville its character are often filled with vacant lots and overgrowth. This corner…
Ashland Avenue Between Vandeventer and Warne Avenues, South Side, The Greater Ville
A quick note: I realized this weekend it was a bad idea to lump the The Ville and The Greater Ville neighborhoods into one giant tag, so I went through and relabeled all of those posts into those two respective neighborhoods. Anyway, I digress, and I decided visit the 3900 block of Ashland Avenue, on…
The Intersection of St. Louis and Marcus Avenues, July 2022
I decided to check in on the corner of Marcus and St. Louis Avenues, which I first looked at way back in August of 2009. You can actually see the building above in the last photo of that post, and the trim was painted white at the time, and the building on the left had…
Vine Grove Avenue, The Greater Ville, Spring 2022
After I featured Vine Grove Avenue in two posts (here and here) back in January of 2019, the City began to demolish a large number of the abandoned houses on the one block long street in autumn of the same year. I wondered what had been going on since that time in this isolated corner…
Mount Airy Missionary Baptist Church
I learned an interesting story about this church and its parking lot at the southwest corner of Marcus and Maffitt in the Greater Ville neighborhood. If you look closely, it becomes obvious that the large white rectangle on the brick wall is in fact an old movie screen, and the parking lot is a former…
In the Footsteps of Lillian Handlan Lemp
Many readers are no doubt familiar with Lillian Handlan, who would marry William Lemp, Jr., the heir to the Lemp Brewery. Later, their acrimonious divorce would make headlines around the country. But she also lived in many places around St. Louis, and I’ve identified several places she called home. There may be more, but for…
The Greater Ville and Western Lutheran Cemetery, Late Summer 2021
I decided to check up on the Western Lutheran Cemetery, which I had not visited January of 2021, and had not really looked at closely nor walked the grounds since January of 2019. I came down Ashland Avenue, and to my dismay, I discovered in the 4500 block one of those unique one story bungalows…