Pine Lawn is one of the many small inner ring suburbs just outside the boundaries of the City of St. Louis along Natural Bridge Road and Jennings Station Road forms a north-south “spine,” so to speak. The name comes from the estate, one of many out this way, of Charles Clark, of which only the…
Tag: Vacant Lots
The Ruins, North Broadway, Far North Riverfront
I was heading up North Broadway when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye that made me make a U-turn and investigate. Through the lush undergrowth that had sprung up from the heavy rains we’ve seen this spring, I spotted the ruins of an old building peeking out. Through some research, I…
Zombie Subdivision, St. Charles County
It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at a zombie subdivision, so what luck it was to discover one while we were on our way to visit the small hamlet of St. Paul in St. Charles County, which we’ll look at tomorrow. The sun was shining and a nice breeze was gently blowing the…
Downtown Granite City, Early March 2025
I last stopped by downtown Granite City in Spring of 2024, and there has not been much happening other than at the Granite City Arts and Design District on the far side of the area. I did discover another Sinclair Dinosaur which had been put on display along with a bunch of other Route 66…
Angelrodt Street from North Twentieth Street to Blair Avenue, Revisited
Continuing around Hyde Park, I headed down Angelrodt Street east of Twentieth Street, which I looked at back in January of 2018. I first spotted this house, which is rapidly losing its vinyl siding. I’ve always been fascinated by these little houses, built a half century or more after Hyde Park was already a bustling…
Titonix Lead White Factory
I found an old book at the library about Carondelet, and while it was filled with the normal stuff about French Colonial history–which is really cool–what I really found interesting is the industry. I like to think about Carondelet not as a quaint little French town, but rather as a big, brawny Brooklyn on the…
Garfield Avenue Between North Newstead and Billups Avenue, The Ville
I somehow managed to randomly end up going down the same street I had detoured down back in back in late October of 2024, which was Garfield Avenue east of North Newstead Avenue. How this happened I don’t know, but it is interesting to see how the street changed in just two months. The light…
Green Board-Ups, JeffVanderLou, Part One
My friend Paul Hohman, a well known architect who specializes in renovations of historic buildings helped get Missouri Preservation to list the “JeffVanderLou Green Board Buildings” as one of their 2024 Places in Peril. JeffVanderLou, which I’ve featured many times over the years, in one of the more heavily demolished neighborhoods in the City, but…
In Search of Francis Saler and the Old St. Patrick’s
I’d been doing some research lately on the old St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, which was completed around 1845 (the parish was founded in 1843 and closed in 1973), making it the third in St. Louis after the Old Cathedral and St. Mary of Victories, a German language parish. A familiar name came up, the…
Around Grant’s Farm
At first, I was flabbergasted to find the site of the Joseph Sappington House to be an empty lot, but some quick Google research led me to discover that the log cabin has been disassembled and is going to be (has already been?) moved to a new location next to the Thomas Sappington House. I’ll…