Penrose and Fairgrounds

Lee Avenue is for some reason a broad, open street, with a fascinating mix of architectural styles. You can almost see the development of the city decade by decade as you drive along it.

San Francisco Court

We discovered another amazing Modernist enclave in North St. Louis, just to the northeast of Natural Bridge and Kinghsighway.Originally a victory garden during World War II, it was purchased by a developer and turned into ranch houses in the 1960's.The western portion of the tract became the Carousel Motel, facing Kingshighway.

A Far Corner of North St. Louis

Nestled under the crushing embrace of I-70 to the north, and plotted out over relatively hilly terrain, this corner of North St. Louis doesn't get a lot of visitors.The house above looks like it could be out of the Brady Bunch, if it weren't boarded up. Perhaps what is most interesting about this board-up is that it has identical neighbors, fully inhabited, well-maintained and carrying on. What causes one house to become vacant and the other, identical houses to stay occupied?The architectural diversity of the neighborhood is stunning; one second you're driving down a street that looks like St. Louis Hills, and then you turn the corner, and there's one lone, Second Empire house sitting amongst 1950's ranch homes.Finally, these townhomes are some of the most intriguing that I've found in St. Louis. Certainly, they're not the most attractive, but they're interesting in their severe design. Some are occupied, some are not.

Vanished North Side and County Institutions

Famous St. Louis institutions are what make the city unique. Sadly, many of those institutions are fading, one by one. Rinderer's Drugs, long an institution in North City and North County, recently announced its sale to Shop N Save.The Top of the Tower Restaurant, long closed, still retains its sign atop the circular apartment building that it called home. Read more about it here.And finally, while many people might not consider it an institution since it was a national chain, Children's Palace still maintains a place in my heart as the purchasing location of most of my toys in my childhood. Sadly, just the like the one in Manchester, the one on Hall's Ferry is still sitting largely neglected and empty, over twenty years since the original store closed. Perhaps that was part of the problem: having stores no one could get to easily or were slightly off the beaten path.