Maffitt Avenue From the Greater Ville into The Ville

Hopping off St. Louis Avenue, I took a look at some of the houses on Maffitt Avenue, heading east through the Greater Ville and then The Ville. I spotted this unique one story hipped roof half flounder above. There is a wide variety of housing stock, from the earliest, wood frame houses that probably date…

The Ville, July 2022

I took a short look at The Ville on a bright and sweltering Saturday recently. Despite the frequent reports of doom and gloom, much of the neighborhood has a lot going for it. There are many streets that are lined with some nice in-fill, and I hope can be built in the future. I definitely…

North St. Louis, Late Summer, 2019

I met new people all over North St. Louis this summer, including members of the congregation of the Original Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in the Ville neighborhood, on St. Louis Avenue. Better Family Life had organized dozens of churches to host barbecues all summer long, and the Church had been one of the participants. I…

Carpenter Gothic House, The Ville

I almost didn’t spot it, but I discovered another Gothic Revival or Carpenter Gothic style house in the Ville neighborhood. These are extremely rare houses, and I wrote an article about them a couple of years back about them at St. Louis Magazine. You’ll see it in the second floor windows at the back of…

West on St. Louis Avenue, Summer 2019

I’ve been creating new tags for notable streets in St. Louis that I feel represent great cross sections of architecture and culture (such as North Broadway or Cherokee, and the newly introduced South Jefferson), and I’m now introducing a “St. Louis Avenue” tag, for what I believe is a street that best illustrates the North…

Simmons School

Simmons School, named after after Baptish preacher William Johnson Simmons, opened in 1899, and closed in 2009. It sits right on St. Louis Avenue in the Ville neighborhood. It has begun to show the effects of being abandoned for almost a decade now, with many windows smashed out, but yet there are still window air…

St. Louis Avenue, Cora to Grand

I’ve long documented St. Louis Avenue between N. Florissant and Parnell, and from Parnell to Grand, so now I will take a closer look at the secondary artery cobbled together from a series of streets that stretches the length of the Northside. Moving further east of Cora Avenue in The Ville and Greater Ville area,…

Redevelopment in the Ville

Large parts of the Ville are not in good shape, I will admit that. But as the man from yesterday across the street from Sara Lou’s told me, he had been busy working on new housing being built by Northside Community Housing at the intersection of Sarah and St. Ferdinand Avenues. It involves the renovation…