Built St. Louis
The North Side

The north side is vast -- a triangle of urban landscape measuring some five miles on each side. There are all kinds neighborhoods within its bounds, from perfectly healthy to totally destroyed. The tours here will range across many of them, both good and bad, and hopefully give a fairly balanced picture of their physical condition today.

This tour is about several things. It is meant to show an honest portrait of these neighborhoods, to raise awareness of what's happening to them, and to demonstrate their untapped potential. It is meant to illustrate the high quality of the surviving housing stock in the city of St. Louis. And it is meant to illustrate examples of the urban street in St. Louis, and show how the streetscape can influence the visual quality of a neighborhood -- how it can make the difference between a dreary neighborhood and a delightful one -- as well as the way that poorly-considered infill can damage it.

Many of the photographs here are bleak, harsh, even depressing. I do not apologize for them; rather I offer up that for every building that's on the verge of collapse, there is another building in the hands of a loving owner and restorationist. Previous versions of this tour gave short shrift to the good side of the equation; this one does not.