Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
I’ve been setting aside photos I shot in Trail of Tears State Park in the 1960s, but they’re back in Florida. Here’s a gallery of photos I took this weekend in about an hour.
We’ll do some serious reporting down the road. This is just to give you a taste of what the park looks like coming out of the winter.
Click on any photo to make it larger,then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.
We might as well stay on Frederick Street one more day. We explored the back of Fire Department No. 1 two days ago, and the bus station at 16 North Frederick yesterday. While shooting the old bus depot, I parked in front of Cape-Kil, which has been there since 1949. That made me think of another building on that street.
Here is a photo I shot looking south from the bell tower of the Trinity Lutheran Church in the summer of 1978, before the church was torn down. It shows Themis running from left to right and Frederick running from top to bottom. It was taken with a 16mm Nikon fisheye lens, which explains the curvature. The lines are from a mesh screen covering the opening in the steeple.
On the southwest corner is a small red brick building that always fascinated me for some reason. Maybe because it “looked” old. It had been vacant – or looked vacant – for as long as I could remember.
The white Cape-Kil building is still there, but the brick building is gone.
Pallets and stacks of stone from what I suppose was the foundation are one of the few traces that remain of the little building. Since I didn’t know the exact street address, nor the name of any owners, I don’t have much information about the property. I’m sure one of you will set me straight.
This view is almost the mirror opposite of my bell tower photo. It’s looking back toward the new Trinity Lutheran Church from the lot where the brick building stood.
You can’t go through a Fine Arts in Photography program without being drawn to shooting rocks and roots and peeling paint from time to time.
A few wooden window frames lean against the Cape-Kil building.
This photo of me with my suitcase getting ready to board a bus (probably to Advance to see my Grandparents) was taken about the same time as the photos behind Fire Department No. 1 that ran yesterday.
That set me off on a quest to find the old bus station. For some reason, I thought it was on South Spanish between Independence and Merriwether.
The place where the Bel Air Grill is now “felt” right. I heard some women on the outside patio talking and laughing, so I walked up and said, “I KNOW that none of you are old enough to answer this question, but do you happen to know if this was once a bus station?”
One of them thought it might have been, but they all thought the building south of it looked more like a bus station because it was bigger and had a garage on the back.
I took a few photos and drove off. I hadn’t gone two blocks when my cellphone rang with an unfamiliar number from the Cape Area Code. It was one of the women calling to say that their waitress had asked her boss, who confirmed that the Bel Air WAS the place.
I circled back to take a photo of my new friends, first giving them my standard bar warning, “If there are any folks here who shouldn’t be here or who are here with something they shouldn’t be, now’s the time to let me know.”
I went home and started to write up the story. The more I looked at the old and new photos, the more things didn’t add up. There weren’t enough doors on the Bel Air, even if it HAD been remodeled over the years. And, there’s no overhang to keep passengers dry while boarding the buses.
When I looked in the 1968 City Directory under Bus Stations, it gave an address of 16 North Frederick and Continental Southern Lines, Great Southern Coaches and St. Louis-Cape Bus Line were all listed as being there.
That’s how you ended up reading about the Fire Department lily pond instead of the bus station. I needed to do more homework.
The bus station turned out to be at 16 North Frederick. That’s Fire Department No. 1 on the right. I PARKED next to the darned bus station when I was shooting the lily pond photo yesterday. (You can see the little bridge if you look closely.) This photo also has the new federal courthouse in the background.
Jesse James provided a clue when he posted this comment on the Fire Department story (I think he may have some street names mixed up, though):
We used to play there when we were little, Jim West, Mike Randal and others. We had a lot of fun trying to catch the gold fish and then the Firemen would yell at us and make us leave. We then “grew up” and went to the Bus station next door and played the pinball machines for a number of years. I remember my brother Charles and Jimmy Vogelsang teaching me to ride a bicycle. I was doing well so they said let’s ride down to the Bus station and play the pinball machines.
Well I didn’t know that the bike they had put me on didn’t have any brakes, We went down Fredrick St from Merriwether, there is a hill when you reach Independence St, I flew through the intersections just missing a car and the only way to stop the bike was to hit the large pole that served as the sign for the Bus station. That was a sudden jolt. We sure had fun as kids even if your brother and his friends tried to kill you a couple of times.
If you look between the two front windows, you can see the pole that Jesse crashed into.
There was a fence around the side of the building and I got there when the business was closed, so I had to hold my camera over my head to shoot the north side of the building where the buses pulled in. You can see the doors, brick columns and overhang that show up in the old black & white prints.
I bet that big speaker hanging from the ceiling near the back of the photo dates back to when bus announcements were made to passengers.
For you folks who complain that I never show up in my current photos, I’ll point out my shadow on the left.
Why do I still think there was a bus station in the block of Spanish where the Bel Air Grill is today? I’m sure one of you has the answer.
I must have been about five or six when this photo was taken behind Fire Dept. No. 1 at Frederick and Independence. That would have made it about 1952 or 53. I’m standing on the stone and concrete bridge over a fountain or lily pond.
First off, they were firemen. Women weren’t added into the mix until decades later. Secondly, the old stereotype of firemen sitting around waiting for the alarm bell to ring was probably true. These guys didn’t do hazmat drills, run medical calls or worry about much other than squirting wet stuff on red stuff.
That’s not to knock what they did when the bell DID go off. I’ve always said that I didn’t care if a firefighter spent his or her whole career playing checkers. The first time they went running into a smoking building other folks were running out of, they earned every penny they’d been paid. Burning buildings are scary places.
Departments didn’t have fancy breathing gear. In fact, REAL firemen were proud of how much smoke they could suck and who could hawk up the biggest globule of black soot when the flames were out.
I’m assuming this overgrown marker listing everyone in the department goes back to when the mini-park was dedicated. It says June 1944 on it.
Cape firefighters have moved on to fancier digs, better training, more sophisticated equipment and more complicated duties. Putting water on fires is probably the smallest percentage of what they do.
The old Fire Dept. No. 1 building has been converted into the Cape River Heritage Museum.
The old lily pond and bridge are still there, looking much like they did when I was wearing my shorts and Buster Brown shoes. I wish I had held up as well as the little park. Note the size of the tree that isn’t even in the old photos.