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…
Tag: The Ville
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…
Sarah and St. Louis Avenues, Revisited September 2018
I’ve long said the intersection of North Sarah Street and St. Louis Avenue in the historic Ville (or technically Greater Ville on the north side of the street) neighborhood has one of the most cohesive and beautiful ensemble of corner storefronts in the city. But as I’ve been documenting for years, the most famous corner, the…
Checking Up On The Ville
I checked in on The Ville, the historic middle class African American neighborhood in the North Side. Unfortunately, there is still more abandonment, and this strange collapse, which looks like the house is falling into the basement. It is too bad, as it is a rare example of a wood frame house from the early…
Marcus Avenue and Environs, The Western Greater Ville
The Greater Ville is the horseshoe-shaped neighborhood that wraps around the Ville. Update: Actually, now I do. I don’t have a separate tag for the Greater Ville, but originally it was the white area, and the Ville “proper” was African American. But the old shotguns shacks of Elleardsville continue out on the side streets. There…