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Sheldon

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Rising thin and tall at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street is the Sheldon Bank building (1888). The walls of this two-story commercial block on a raised basement are of warmly colored but sharp and brittle quartzite laid in an irregular pattern. Exterior steps lead up to a pair of arched doorways, between which is a single glass window with a transom. On the second floor, two pairs of arched windows have been remodeled into two tripartite windows with flat lintels.

If Saint Patrick's Roman Catholic Church (1911) were stuccoed instead of being of brick, we would most likely respond to it as an example of the Mission Revival. Its entrance facade, facing onto the southeast corner of Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street, centers on a pediment with a scalloped parapet between towers with domes and lanterns. The flanks of the building have a repeated pattern of shallow buttresses and small arched windows. The church is covered with a gable roof.

In early 1906 a Carnegie grant of $10,000 was made to the community for a library building. The architect P. O. Moratz of Saint Louis was engaged to design the building, which was completed in 1908. The scale of the structure fits in well with its residential location at the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street. Its public nature is declared by its Beaux-Arts Classical entrance, by a one-and-a-half-story porch defined by horizontally grooved piers at the corners, and by a pair of Tuscan columns between the piers. The Carnegie Public Library building is now used as a museum.

Near the library is the United States Post Office building (1935), designed in the Washington office of Louis A. Simon. Built of red brick and trimmed with buff-colored terracotta, it is a Beaux-Arts product that has been highly abstracted. The slightly projecting center entrance pavilion presents a linear pattern of pilasters, cornice bands, and medallions.

Proof that the Queen Anne mode could and did go off in various directions is offered in the two-and-a-half-story house at 602 Sixth Avenue. This dwelling (c. 1890) brings together a Moorish cusped arch, a classical pediment, and stubby Tuscan columns. To the side, a rounded stair bay projects from the corner of the house; within the third-floor gables and dormers are pairs of round-headed windows.

Writing Credits

Author: 
David Gebhard and Gerald Mansheim

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