Missouri’s lost streetscapes span more than one kind of memory. A former ballpark may still be vivid to someone who attended a game there, while a nineteenth-century hotel survives chiefly through photographs and family stories. A neighborhood’s disappearance carries a different weight again, involving homes and relationships rather than one admired facade.
These twelve selections focus on St. Louis and Kansas City. They include individual buildings, a former transit gateway, an erased neighborhood, and a department-store experience that vanished from a surviving structure. “Street corner sights” is used in that broad sense. The distinctions matter: a lost business is not automatically a demolished building, and an old name can belong to several places across time.
1. St. Louis’s Century Building Gave the Old Post Office District a Familiar Marble-Clad Neighbor…