Categories
Chicago Documentation Media People

Past the Margins of Chicago

by Michael R. Allen

Rob Powers (creator of Built St. Louis) has launched A Chicago Sojourn to chronicle the non-iconic corners of his new home. In his first post, Rob writes that “I’ve always gravitated to the forgotten: in St. Louis, in Milwaukee, everywhere I go. And so it shall be here.”

Beautifully-designed Forgotten Chicago features photo essays on those traces of Chicago’s past few celebrate, let alone investigate. Recent topics the Schoenhofen Brewery, pre-1909 street numbering system and Chicago’s largest vacant lot, the site of US Steel’s South Works. Jacob Kaplan and photographer Serhii Chrucky are the editors.

Categories
Abandonment Cleveland Urbanism

Foreclosure, Crime and Neighborhood Disintegration

by Michael R. Allen

According to an article on the CNN website entitled “Crime scene: foreclosure”, Cleveland’s historic Slavic Village neighborhood is in the nation’s top ZIP code for foreclosures. An estimated 800 buildings sit vacant there. The neighborhood has out-of-control crime, correlated to the foreclosure rate. Houses get stripped within 72 hours of being vacated, and aren’ty worth enough money to justify repair. Police are inattentive, and the city can’t afford to do much trash cleanup or demolition. People flee in droves, leaving those who remain in fear. Lenders continue to foreclose, with little concern about the effects.

This situation sounds a lot like conditions in north St. Louis in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The article’s eerie conclusion reads “as the number of empty lots and abandoned houses grows where houses and residents were once packed in a tight community, there are fewer and fewer neighbors to fight the battle.”

(Thanks to Barbara Manzara for the link.)

Categories
North St. Louis Northside Regeneration

LLCs and LCs Linked to McKee Change Agents

by Michael R. Allen

On October 24, several companies linked to developer Paul J. McKee’s north St. Louis real estate project switched registered agents.

Holding companies Babcock Resources LLC, Blairmont Associates LC, Dodier Investors LLC, MLK 3000 LLC, N & G Ventures LC, Noble Development Company LLC, PATH Enterprise Company LLC, Sheridan Place LC and VHS Partners LLC switched from anonymous third-party agency through CT Corporation System to PEM Agency Corporation (whose own registered agent is Glenn Mitchell, Director of Property for McEagle).

Holding company Allston Alliance LC switched agents to PEM Agency Corporation from developer John Steffen.

Three companies used for loans to the holding companies, Salvador Equity Management LLC, Rice Capital Group LLC and Parkburg Fund LC also switched agents from CT Corporation System to PEM Agency Corporation.

Categories
North St. Louis Old North

Old North St. Louis Restoration Group Receives $200,000 Bank of America Award

by Michael R. Allen

Last week, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation awarded the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group (ONSLRG) $200,000 grant at its fourth annual Neighborhood Excellence Initiative awards. The Restoration Group will use the money to renovate its new office and meeting space in the 14th Street Mall Redevelopment Area and to purchase properties that play strategic roles in stabilizing sections of the neighborhood. These are pressing needs for the group as it begins to operate as a high-profile community development corporation that handles a huge workload.

Currently, the ONSLRG staff does an amazing amount of work with only three full-time staffers operating out of modest rented space. The momentum that ONSLRG has created is impressive, but demanding — the harder the organization works, the more people inside and outside of the neighborhood want assistance with development, nuisance properties and community matters. This award gives ONSLRG capacity to keep up with accelerating interest in Old North.

Some Online Research Sources

by Michael R. Allen

The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection features cool color photos of St. Louis from 1949 & 1966, including shots of the Merchant’s Exchange, Garrick Theater, Woodbine Hotel and Plaza Square Apartments showing the original panel colors. Find these images by searching for Saint Louis. (Via Urban St. Louis.)

The University of Missouri has digitized their Sanborn fire insurance map collection for the entire state. For those unfamiliar with Sanborn maps, the maps were made to assess fire risk and include detailed maps of cities that include parcel lines, building footprints, locations of stairs and elevators within buildings, building materials used in construction and other facts. These maps are essential reference to architectural historians surveying large districts. Insurance and real estate companies typically owned sets and added paste-in updates mailed out by Sanborn. The St. Louis volumes in the university’s collection were not updated past 1908, a fairly early date. Look at the collection here. (Via Lindsey Derrington.)

Lastly, the 1876 volume by J. A. Dacus and James Buel entitled A Tour of St. Louis has been published by Google in its entirety. (Via Andrew Weil.)

Categories
Historic Preservation

CRO Seeking Applicants for Preservation Planner Position

The Cultural Resources Office of the City of St. Louis has opened the position of Historic Preservation Planner I to applications. Deadline is November 21.

Categories
Abandonment Architecture Historic Preservation Illinois Southern Illinois Theaters

Massac Theater Crumbles in Metropolis, Illinois

by Michael R. Allen


The charming art deco Massac Theater graces Main Street in Metropolis, Illinois, a small town at the southern tip of Illinois well-known for DC Comics’ designation of the town as “Hometown of Superman” in 1972. Although the front elevation appears well-maintained, the theater has been completely abandoned since the late 1980s, when a radio station using the front section of the building moved out. The theater screened its last film, Superman, in 1978.

The Massac Theater opened in 1938 with 537 seats, a large size for a town the size of Metropolis. The front and side elevations were laid in buff brick; polychrome cream and blue terra cotta disrupt the front elevation with vertical finial-topped piers to each side of the entrance joined a ribbon of portal windows. A jazzy marquee, still intact, further enhances the exterior. Entrances on each side of a box office lead to a low-ceilinged front lobby which expands into a larger lobby space. Although the partition between the lobby and the auditorium is now gone, twin staircases with fine metal rail detailing, probably leading to a missing balcony, indicate some sort of atrium in the lobby. Past the staircases is the bow-trussed auditorium, now cordoned off with a plywood wall.

Here is a view of the lobby.


The view below looks toward the front entrance from inside of the theater. Note the staircases.


The auditorium is shocking — the walls are stripped down to backing block, the seats and flooring missing, and the roof is largely collapsed. Weather-beaten sections of roof deck cover the floor of the auditorium.


Condemned by the city government, the theater sits forlorn. The radio station left behind myriad record, files, desks and other furnishings. No one knows what the future will bring here. Metropolis has not had a movie theater since the Massac closed, but with access to nearby Paducah and its multiplex theater on sprawling Hinkleville Road, the demand for reopening a single-screen downtown movie theater is low. Most of the entertainment in Metropolis nowadays takes place at the giant Harrah’s casino that blocks the downtown area from its riverfront on the Ohio River.

Categories
Historic Boats Historic Preservation National Historic Landmark Rivers Salvage

Goldenrod Showboat May Be Safe — For Now

by Michael R. Allen

For the last few weeks, local preservationists have been trading rumors of the impending salvage sale of St. Louis’ long lost floating National Historic Landmark Goldenrod Showboat. According to an article in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the sale may be averted and the old show boat moved from its dry dock in Kampsville, Illinois. Whether or not the boat heads back to St. Louis is uncertain.

Categories
Architecture Downtown

Sky Lobby

by Michael R. Allen

From a press release on the hotel at Lumiere Place (via MayorSlay.com):

The Hotel features a “sky lobby” on the eighth floor that overlooks a lushly landscaped rooftop pool area with the city’s best view of the Arch and skyline.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the phrase “sky lobby.” “Sky lobby” seems to be marketing-speak for “the first seven levels of this hotel comprise a parking garage.”

Categories
Demolition Downtown Ghost Signs

Blink of an Eye

by Michael R. Allen

Yesterday morning I walked past the building at the southwest corner of 14th and Washington that once housed Ehrlich’s Cleaners. The two-story commercial building is undergoing demolition, and by yesterday morning was reduced to little more than a cast iron storefront and some first floor walls. A one-story building that stood to the west was already demolished. The buildings are being razed for the 22-story SkyHouse residential building.

Something on the remains of the western wall caught my eye. There was a ghost sign! Actually, the sign was too pristine to be a proper ghost. The building next door must have gone up when the sign was still new, and its wall then protected the sign for the next eighty years.

The sign advertised beer, with some words evident — beer, [dr]aught, bottled. Maybe the beer advertised was from the Lemp or Hyde Park breweries.

After work, I walked past again. However, by 5:15 p.m. there was no sign to walk past, no cast iron front to admire. The western wall and most of the storefront had fallen in the course of the day. I did not take any photograph earlier.

For me, the only extant traces of the sign were the song lyrics in my head, from Neutral Milk Hotel:

What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

I also carried the hope that someone else took a photograph while the sign was exposed.