Another house and building tour. Took these yesterday at Soulard Market, and a hot and more humid than it’s been recently summer Saturday morning at crowded Soulard was really fun. But now you know, these are the fresh fruits and vegetables that people in Soulard supposedly don’t have access to.
My general path is Soulard Market -> A-B -> St. Agatha -> Lemp Mansion -> Gus’s Pretzels. Notice the dual lion statues in front of both the Lemp Mansion and a house near it. You see a lot of that in St. Louis. The photo set of my mother’s I showed in my first house tour showed St. Agatha, the Lemp Mansion and the ISCO smokestack from a distance, and I wanted to get them close-up.
Pay special attention to the final photo in this tour, after the Gus’s Pretzels and before it starts back at the beginning at Soulard Market. That relatively dowdy looking structure is 1938 Arsenal Street. It was recently renovated, and I guess they’ll sell it as either a residence, business or mixed. But I wanted to make special light of that particular building in this blog, because a long time ago, it was a tavern frequented by James Earl Ray. In fact, an MLK assassination conspiracy theory that the FBI actually investigated involves this former tavern, but the problem with it is that the theory involved two people cavorting with each other at this ex-tavern that in real life never met each other until years after MLK was assassinated.
Picture 9: I think WEW radio’s studios were once in the building in the background right.
Picture 32: Definitely A-B, but I’m thinking it was the business headquarters before the new HQ building just north of that was built. I know that “Pestalozzi Street” in this town is a metonym for A-B, and that building does sit around what would be the alignment of Pestalozzi Street if it still existed at that point.
Pics 37-40: A WBTS battle was fought in that park. Behind the park was the old Federal arsenal (hence Arsenal Street), and the Feds still own it, the large structure in the background is the Defense Mapping Agency.
Pics 46, 47, 57, 58: Lafayette Square style houses in Benton Park. 58 is the rear of 57, and that one needs work on its front sills.
Pics 56 and 61 are the same house, whose owner likes Fred Wessels for City Treasurer. I vaguely remember this house having double lion statues, too.
I’ll provide context to any of the other pictures, just ask in the comment section below.
Countenance Blog 
Good pictures. Too good. Make inner-city St Louis seem too nice. Clean building, streets, and sidewalks. Wide, not busy streets. Lots of parking, especially that diagonal parking. An almost completely homogeneous population at the market. Nice old homes with sizable yards. A nice old market being used as it was meant with trucks backed-in to unload.
Reality check. It’s not all that nice and homogeneous, even in the white parts of the city. Not every residential structure in St. Louis City looks as fancy and ornate as the ones you’ve seen in my photo galleries so far — that’s the point of pictures, I take and post the pictures I want.
But, there is no way in hell I can ever believe that St. Louis is as bad as or worse than Detroit in terms of crime stats. St. Louis is secretly doing what Chicago is doing, trying to lure thug ghetto blacks out of the city proper and into historically black suburbs (south suburban Cook in your case, north St. Louis County in mine), to make things safe in the inner cities safe for yuppie gentrifiers. Public municipal budgets are a good indicator: St. Louis’s is strained for sure, and there are issues. But Detroit is days away from out and out right insolvency. Big big big difference.
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