Late and unlamented

I gotta admit.... I've always been awfully hard on that poor old Modernist building that used to sit in front of the State Hospital.



Looking back at it now, I can see it was actually kind of an interesting building, in that Mid-Century Modern kind of way which has come to intrigue me over the last few years. It had a pattern of various brightly colored tiling on its spandrel panels, and a bold grouping of bay windows on the top story. Stone-clad stair towers connected to the main building by bright blue metal panel corridors. The row of square windows on the one-story hallway wing, surrounded by stone lintels, surely made a beautiful pattern seen up close.

But 12 years ago I didn't really appreciate any of these relatively subtle gestures. All I saw was a big ugly orange thing blocking the intended view of a grand old Classical building. It really was put in the wrong spot, and maybe sheathed in the wrong color of brick for its location. But those were its only real crimes.

I don't regret the restoration of State Hospital's commanding front elevation... but I wish I had more photographs of the building that once obscured it. Would it have killed me to spare one negative to properly photograph the front elevation?

A New Orleans survey

On the Road in New Orleans

I grew up in Shreveport, just five hours up the road from New Orleans, but it was a completely different world -- suburban, bland, vaguely Southern, with only the most distant hint of the Creole culture at the opposite end of the state. I visited New Orleans probably four or five times in high school -- mostly for swim meets, which meant I didn't see a whole lot of the city.



It wasn't till years later, on a 2002 visit, that I came to realize what a great city it was. I went back in 2004, and photographed heavily... but not in the outlying neighborhoods, which we only passed through briefly. It was a fantastic trip, a great time, a wonderful experience. There's no place like New Orleans!

Then came the hurricanes. From Milwaukee, I watched with anxiety and fury as the city was pummelled, as the levees fell, as the news media took their damn sweet time to realize and expose the magnitude of the calamity.



And to this day, I find myself dissatisfied with the mass media coverage of the disaster. What state are the neighborhoods in? Where are the photographs? How is the recovery effort going? What are the plans for the city? The first question, at least, I could answer for myself. News media, even in the Internet age, are incredibly stingy with their photographs (I'm not -- there's over 500 on this tour.) I wanted to see what was left, what was damaged, to photograph the places of the city before some of them disappear forever.

Myself and three companions headed south the day after Christmas, and spent Wednesday and Thursday roaming the city. There were some restraints, of course; while my appetite and energy for urban exploration is virtually limitless, other people's is not. I didn't get to do everything I wanted.... but the same can be said of any trip to St. Louis.

I've always seen St. Louis as a kind of younger sister to New Orleans -- both river cities, both rooted in French history and Catholic culture, both with architecturally rich cores of red brick buildings, both with old souls, both with a history of jazz and blues music. Like St. Louis, it's a place that draws me back again and again -- a surprise around every corner, always something new to see. It's a city worth fighting for, a place that should be cherished and nurtured.

Up close and afar, I've fallen in love with this old, meandering city on the river; and having seen more of it than ever before, I've come to realize how much of it I still have yet to see.

Inside the Arcade Building

The ruins of a typesetting machine, which created the raised letters which pressed ink onto paper.

What will the equivalent ruins of our society be like? Will the shrouded shells of our inkjet printers be so stark and compelling when they lay as outdated ruins.

These decades-old machines are to today's printers what the steam locomotive was to the diesels that replaced it: an expensive, complex anachronism... but far more interesting to look at.

The Industrial City

It is with great satisfaction that I post The Industrial City. It's the first new tour on the site in almost two years, and brings together a lot of sites that I've been interested in for many years with some that are almost brand new to me. I first photographed the gasometers of Shrewbury in 1995; I did not discover Granite City Steel till last summer.

There was no strict criteria for inclusion; I simply documented the sites which impressed me most -- be it with scale, complexity, design, or state of decay. Many have historical value; most are many decades old. The golden age of St. Louis industry, as with most of the country, is long past.

The information on the tour is vastly incomplete, of course; I could make a small career out of digging up the full histories of these sites, the companies that built them, the persons who shaped them, their prospects for the future. I have culled what I could from my limited resources and the Web; perhaps some future trip will allow me time for more intensive research. For now, though, my greatest intent is to document -- to share my findings, to show what's there now and, in many cases, what may not be there much longer. Any additional information is a bonus.

Sometimes even my own information gathering is incomplete, limited by time, knowledge, and the frequency with which industrial sites are gated and fenced. No close approach to Cahokia is possible without passing a manned entry gate. Granite City Steel is only photographable by walking along a fairly busy two-lane highway with no sidwalks, with plant security cruising back and forth suspiciously looking at the guy with the camera. And entry to the extremely deteriorated Armour and Hunter plants is not for the faint of heart.

These sites are standouts to me; though some are among the city's most prominent landmarks, they barely scratch the surface of manufacturing and other industrial concerns throughout the city (most prominently, I have almost nothing related to the intensive barge traffic on the Mississippi River.) Much has already passed away; I barely caught the Belcher building as it came down in 2001.

So, there's a lot more I could have done, and more that will be done, but for now, I hope my readers will find some measure of illumination in seeing some of St. Louis's great industrial sites brought together in one place.

Photo dumping ground

http://www.flickr.com/photos/repowers/

I've become quite the Flickr.com addict in the last few months; it's an easy-to-use forum that allows quick organization of photographs. They can be sorted into sets and sent to group "pools" on an almost infinate number of topics. The last few times I've been in St. Louis, the first thing I do upon getting home is upload a trip sampler to Flickr. It also lets me show off the best of my photography, something that the subject-contrained nature of Built St. Louis doesn't always allow.

I've been setting up albums on a variety of topics that interest me:

- Milwaukee's industrial architecture, especially the Cream City brick variety;
- Mid-Century Modernism around Milwaukee;
- Louis Sullivan's buildings across the country;
- 1950s-era signs;
- the buildings of Philadelphia architect Frank Furness;
- the Milwaukee Art Museum;

...and whatever else grabs my eye. The easy-to-use format means I can update it quickly and frequently, without the painstaking effort that goes into a normal web page.

Come by and check it out!

Long St. Louis weekend

I just had a spectacular weekend in St. Louis...










...but then, I always do.


More shots on my Flickr account -- bear in mind that's just a sampler of my weekend, just the highlights.

This weekend marks my fifth trip to St. Louis since May. With the chaos of the holiday season, the onset of winter, various personal concerns, and the need to plow through several thousand photographs and many many site updates, I probably won't be back in town till the spring.

Heh. I say that now, but the town always pull me back. I start to go a little crazy if I'm away for more than a few months.

Wilmore Park revisited

Lately I have been sorting my old photos from south St. Louis, home of richly beautiful streets where my love for the city was first kindled over a decade ago.

It is with some amusement that I noticed how many photographs I took in Wilmore Park, which was a favorite biking destination of mine in college. I spent many sunny afternoons wandering its grassy fields and curving ponds, and apparently I found quite a bit of aesthetic interest in its trees, fields and waters.

I look at them now and my reaction is: jeez, it's just a park, isn't it? It's pretty ordinary compared to Tower Grove, Carondelet, Francis...

But it says a lot about where I was coming from. Before coming to St. Louis, I'd never been in such a lovely park, such a delightful and relaxing place. Yet by the standards of St. Louis, it's ordinary!

I wonder how many natives of the city realize what a collection of gems they have in their midst?

On reams of photographs

I've had occasion to dig through my enormous volumes of St. Louis photographs from the last decade or so this evening, searching for a few particular negatives. In doing so, I can trace certain paths of awareness back through the years.

I visited the Page Boulevard Police Station and Homer Phillips Hospital a few times in '96-'97 (the last year I lived in St. Louis), but I never really plunged deep into the city's northern half until 1999, when I made a New Years' trip there for that purpose. Even then it was a cursory survey; not till 2001 or so did I really begin exploring the region in depth, tracking buildings across time, coming to feel a personal brand of concern over particular blocks and houses. Not till about that time did I systematically catalogue portions of downtown. Not till several years later did I begin to notice all the fantastic churches in town.

My connection to the city has changed as well. Virtually all my college friends have moved away, yet I now know enough people in the city that I never get to see them all when I'm in town. Through St. Louis I've become acutely aware of the plight facing so much Mid-Century Modernism in America. I've visited more churches in St. Louis -- probably 40 or 50 by this point -- than in all the other cities I've lived in put together.

It's an ever-growing circle of information, concern and awareness. Once you find yourself in it, it's impossible to let any of it go.

Continental and Life

It's funny... I used to photograph the Continental Building every chance I got. I have a several-inch-high stack of photos of it as it stood in abandonment in the late 1990s. I was driven by the conviction that it wouldn't always be there, that its days were numbered and the numbers were getting very small.

But now that it's renovated and brought back to life? I hardly have any shots at all. Maybe a dozen or so -- and only one or two that could really serve as a good before and after comparison.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, about not taking for granted what you see everyday...

Mother of Good Counsel Church, Lisbon at 70th, Milwaukee Wisconsin. Built 1966-68.

How have I never seen this place before???

It's a beautiful massing of a curved brick screen wall, capped with limestone and studded with protruding bricks, behind which stands a diamond-shaped sanctuary with narrow bands of stained glass.



Next to it is a small parish office building, which brings together a number of fairly typical Mid-Century design elements (the vertical pier intersecting the horizontal plane, the rectangular cutouts, the limestone surrounds), but in an unusually high density -- and with a couple of elements I've never seen before.

Most flabergasting is this original doorway:



I can't believe they designed this -- let alone that it's still here 40 years later. Magnificent!!

Click the images for more photos.

No apologies for the Century Building

Circa 8:30pm, Sunday evening -- the night before Memorial Day, a holiday weekend. My lovely ladyfriend and I are strolling back to our hotel after a visit to the Gateway Arch grounds (during which I ranted at length about the physical disconnect between the Arch and the city it symbolizes). It's getting late, and we're getting hungry.

TGIFriday's, the first place we come upon, is mobbed, seemingly with Arch tourists -- a 20-30 minute wait. The new place on the other end of the block is the same way. We're hungry, don't want to wait. We keep going.

The rest of the way, we don't see a soul on the streets. We don't pass a single bar or open restaurant. We hardly see a light anywhere. Downtown was deserted. I had a hard time explaining to my companion how this could be.

We ended up driving down to Soulard, where we promptly found a local bar that seated us immediately and served us a tasty meal.

Monday morning, 7:30am, I wandered the same downtown streets. In 20 minutes, I saw a total of 7 people. Then I came across a lone Starbuck's, open for business and doing quite well, with a dozen or so customers coming, going, and sitting.

My points?

- There's still untapped potential downtown. The businesses that were open were doing well.
- Downtown still has a long way to go to become a working urban environment, and therefore
- Downtown cannot afford wastes of urban potential, and therefore
- Tearing down the Century Building and all the office, residential, and retail space it could have held was a huge mistake, and putting up a garage in their place is an even bigger one.

Goodbye and good riddance to the Whaling Wall

Milwaukee lost an iconic landmark this week, and I couldn't really care less.



The "Whaling Wall", a mural by an artist known as Wyland, adorned the Milwaukee County Courthouse Annex since 1997. It was well-known due to its position above the heavily-traveled lanes of I-43 southbound. There's been some hemming and hawing about losing the mural, which was demolished this week along with the last remnants of the aging, decaying Annex, a 1960s parking garage with a level of offices on top.

Frankly, I say screw the wall.

There are no whales in Milwaukee. In the wild, there are no whales within a thousand miles of Milwaukee. There is no aquarium here (well, that's due to change this year with the opening of the new Discovery World building, which will feature a modest aquarium.) The whale mural, basically, has jack all to do with this town.

It is simply an advertisement for Wyland's art business, and a rather kitchy one at that.

The mural is hardly unique; Wyland has plastered them on buildings all over the country. And Wyland is hardly some starving artist struggling to find an audience; his web site is a slick commercial venture that looks primed for commerce on a fairly massive scale. For once, I agree with County Executive Scott Walker -- make the guy pony up to plaster his ad on the side of a public building. And for love of all that is holy, keep it off the pristinely Modernist building of the Milwaukee Public Museum, which Wyland has apparently been slavering over for ten years.

So, let the commuters lament the loss of the whale wall. I'll celebrate the now unobstructed County Courthouse, an impressively massive Classical building that looms over the freeway like a mountain. There are causes far more worth fighting for in Milwaukee than preservation of a lowbrow mural.

Modernist Churches in Milwaukee

Milwaukee has a nice collection of 1950s-1960s era Modernist churches, which make for a nice around-the-town tour as they're scattered across the inner suburbs and newer areas of the old city.

Click on any of the photos to view lots more of them on my Flickr.com account.


St. Stephen Martyr Church (now Chapel), N. 51st Street - 1969
A symphony of piercing angles and lapping shadows.




St. Matthias, 9300 W. Beloit Road - 1967
It features a finely detailed roof more powerful than a ship's prow, and a commanding corner wall of stained glass that glows spectacularly in the afternoon sun.



St. Rita, S. 60th Street
A glowing lantern of a building, with half the walls washed away by stained glass. The original architect returned to oversee a restoration in 2003, shortly before his death. It suffers from it city context; it's clearly an object, meant to be sitting like a crown on a hilltop.



Walther Memorial Lutheran Church, 4000 W. Fon du Lac - 1954
Fairly stock low Modernism -- right down to the characteristic orange brick.



Sacred Heart Academy and Monastary, 7300 S. Highway 100, s. of Hales Corners
Robert Venturi would call it a duck -- it's a building in the shape of the object it represents, in this case a giant crown. But within the bounds of the kitchy overall design are a number of enamoring details, including a wonderful arcade.

Thoughts on the Philadelphia Skyline

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, a wonderful, amazing city where I spent three very happy years living and working. It's a second or third home for me, and I very likely will end up back there some day.

So, after getting back home, I'm browing PhillySkyline.com, and I see that the city's getting a new tallest building: the Comcast Center.

Alright, now, people, help me out here. Is this thing not the ugliest thing to go up since the Mellon Bank Center?

I mean, okay, some background here for our non-Philly readers. See, way back when, City Hall went up, and it was the tallest thing around. And a "gentleman's agreement" kept every building thereafter lower than the top of William Penn's hat. To this day, people harp on and on about what a wonderful arrangement that was. But, dear reader, I challenge you: go rent the first Rocky movie. Pay attention when he's on the Art Museum steps. The camera pans around, and you get a great view of the Philadelphia skyline, circa 1975. One thing is immediately obvious: it's dull. It's flat-topped, dominated by uninspired, monotonous, ugly boxes, all of which are chopped off flat just below the top of that hat. And the statue atop City Hall, not to mention City Hall itself, is buried under all of it. The "gentleman's agreement" -- kind of stupid to begin with -- was a mockery by that point, a mere technicality. Billy Penn was already lost in the forest of deathly dull skyscrapers.

Enter Liberty Place. In 1987, developers finally threw tradition to the wind, and put up this magnificent glass high rise, designed by Helmut Jahn. It's a masterpiece, a symphony of multi-shaded blue glass climbing fervently to the sky, one setback emerging after the next, reaching its peak in a soaring pinnacle. I love it; it's undeniable proof that a modern glass building doesn't have to be horrible or anti-human. It can be beautiful; it can be inspiring. With the limit thus broken, half a dozen more tall towers followed in as many years. And while I don't approve of all of them, the fact remains: Philadelphia's skyline was remade, carried out of the 1950s at last and given the scale a city of its size deserves.

Now, Philly's getting this awful thing. It's the World F***ing Trade Center (which, I'm unashamed to say, were really ugly, awful buildings), with a couple of minor notches cut out, rendered in endless sheets of glass. With its massive flat roof, it meets the sky with all the grace of a sledgehammer meeting a wine glass. The renderings show nothing to give it any sense of scale; it appears to have been blow up directly from a 1/100th scale model.

I have no problem with a building surpassing Liberty Place, but can't it be done with the slightest bit of grace?

Also, I don't think much of the Circa Center, either. Monolithic, abstract forms belong in a sculpture garden, not a skyline.



(Also, man, this site is distracting. Look!! That was where I lived in Philly! Our front porch is on the very left edge of the photo.)

Updated the old Other Cities link page this evening, a page I've hardly touched in years. It just warms my heart to see how many of the sites have gone legit, migrating from the likes of AOL and Geocities to their own custom addresses.

At the same time, I wonder how I ever even found Victorian Secrets of Washington, a like-minded DC-based site. I tried searching for it on Google with some common terms (Washington DC abandoned, buildings, architecture) and didn't find it.

That could mean there's some site out there about Philadelphia, something I'd just kill to see. If any reader knows of such a thing, please let me know!