I don’t have much to report on this twelfth anniversary of St. Louis Patina, other than to thank you all for coming back every week and all of your comments and stories. I really do appreciate it. For your viewing pleasure are some historic photos I found from the Missouri History Museum of West Cabanne Place, which I visited way back in August of 2009, almost a whole decade ago. I recently found a bunch of photos from the street in the St. Louis Patina vaults, and have added them to the original post. See also a recent article about the West End, and the unique Shingle Style Houses that make it one of the most intriguing neighborhoods in the City. I also have a couple of updates to the site, adding some new neighborhoods and towns to St. Louis County, as well as substantially updating the Special Topics Page. Remember, every week I have a new article at St. Louis Magazine.

For ease of use and clarity, I have removed the word “historic” from all tags except “historic buildings.” I’d spoken of doing so in the past, and I finally did so for the twelfth anniversary. It was redundant, since 99% of the time I’m writing about historic houses, churches, factories, etc, and it was also awkward in the 1% of the time when I was writing about non-historic examples of the built environment. It seemed even more silly to have “house” and “historic house” tags, as well.

Also, I’ve removed the Central category from all Downtown posts. I thought it was artificially inflating the number of posts in the Central category, and it was the only instance where a building could be in two categories at the same time. Now all buildings in downtown will appear only in the Downtown category. It just seems more streamlined.