Daily Dose of Blairmont 81

• 2004 North Market Street (N & G Ventures LLC, May 2006, $20,000)

Looks pretty good, doesn't it? Looks inhabited, doesn't it? Unfortunately, this is six years ago, long before Blairmont came along.

June 2002 - photograph by Kevin Keiffer


May 2008

Nowadays, under Blairmont's ownership, it's going downhill rapidly. Copper thieves have stripped off a cornice gutter, someone left the third floor windows open, and the parapet wall is falling apart.



And that's a damn shame, because not only is it a lovely house on its own...



...it's also part of an absolutely magnificent lineup of three-story, mansard-roofed houses. Both sides of the block are essentially intact, buoyed perhaps by their adjacency to nearby Zion Lutheran Church just to the north. The neighborhood is quite solid; numerous renovated homes surround this location, St. Louis Place Park is just to the west, and to the south, the Falstaff Brewery apartments anchor several redeveloped residential blocks.

In short, this is yet another neighborhood that isn't going anywhere, and Blairmont's willfully negligent stewardship of this building in the middle of it is immoral and hostile to all the stakeholders.

Links:

• 2004 North Market at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?