Photos around Cape Archives

March 19, 2013March 19, 2013

A & P Food Store

Did you know what the A & P in the A & P Food Store stood for? I didn’t either, but Terri Foley, who did The Missourian’s Lost and Saved column did all the work for me.

Here’s her information:

In 1941, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. constructed the building at 19 N. Spanish St. in Cape Girardeau to house the A&P Super-Market. Grand opening of the new store was held Oct. 14 of the same year. At that time, the store was the largest A&P store between St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn. With the opening of the new store, the company closed its other operations in town at 28 N. Main St. and 817 Broadway.

C.A. Juden was commissioned to build the new one-story brick building, measuring 70 feet by 150 feet. On the southeast corner was a three-story tower that featured interior lights and a large circular neon sign. Across the upper facade of the building was a 35-foot neon sign. The store featured a large package cheese and dairy department and a 50-foot meat case and counter. The store stocked more than 2,500 varieties of grocery items.

It was the first of the A&P stores in Missouri to have a collected group of fluorescent lights. There were five check-out stands. As cashiers checked out a customer, a receipt was printed with each item purchased and the cost. Customers could pay a penny for shopping bags.

Our family shopped there, but I think we went to Child’s on Broadway more often. I liked that store better because Mother would park me at the comic book rack just as you came in the store. I didn’t care how long she shopped as long as I had comics to read.

March 16, 2013

Cement Plant HQ and Other News

A story in the Nov. 29, 1926, Missourian said “High officials of the Marquette Cement Manufacturing Company and affiliated corporations, have arrived in Cape Girardeau for the dedication late today of the new $50,000 office building near the plant in South Cape Girardeau. The new building, one of the most ornate and substantial in Cape Girardeau, has been completed and is ready for occupation.”

Although the late afternoon sun makes the color much warmer than it really is, the building looks like it has been well-maintained. It IS ornate.

Abandoned oxbows of Cape LaCroix Creek

A view from atop the cement plant shows the headquarters building sitting near oxbows of Cape LaCroix Creek from the days when it used to join the Mississippi River close to the Diversion Channel instead of its present course north of the plant and south of what used to be Smelterville.

We Lost the Handball Court

It was appropriate that the first thing and the last thing you would see when you were coming into or leaving Cape by the Mississippi River Traffic Bridge was a religious institution, the St. Vincent’s College, a Catholic Seminary dating back to 1843. I suspect more prayers were said on that bridge than in all the churches in Cape on an Easter Sunday morning.

The first (or last) things you’d notice when looking at St. Vincents were the magnificent trees on the terrace to the east of the school and the curious brick structure in front of it – the handball court.

Goodbye handball court

Well, don’t look for the handball court in the future. The Missourian had a story today that dismantling the historic structure began March 12. The court, built in either 1843 or 1853 and possibly the oldest handball court in the country, is being torn apart so the green space where it has lived all these many years can be covered with academic and residential buildings.

Goodbye green space

The loss of the brick court is a disgrace. The loss of the open lawn that gave the College buildings its character is a crime. They could have stacked the buildings they are planning on top of the parking lot to the west and maintained the character of the River Campus.

The biggest joke

The biggest cruel joke is that the university and planners are going to honor the handball court by preserving “some” of the bricks and incorporating them into the facade of the new building. Follow the link to the Missourian and you can see the care Milam Masonry is taking in “preserving” the bricks. It looks to me like the workers are heaving them off a scaffolding to land in a truck. I doubt there are workers wearing catcher’s mitts standing down there to catch them.

When I made these photographs Feb. 12, 2013, I was astounded at how many had names and dates intricately scratched into them. There were some seminarians with a lot of time on their hands. What was fascinating was the different printing styles the students used over the years.

Did anyone document the bricks?

I wonder if anyone took the time to shoot individual closeups of the bricks before the wreckers got there? You’d think a university with an historic preservation program would have been all over that.

I shot a few of the bricks, but the lighting wasn’t coming from the best direction to capture detail. The 1920s and the 1940s were well-represented.

When I looked at the ones from the ’40s, I wondered how many of those boys were shipped overseas to fight in World War II and whose only markers are a white cross in a foreign land and a name scrawled on a brick in a handball court that is being torn down.

Will the terraces and trees be next?

It won’t do any good to cry over spilt bricks. We’ve lost that piece of Cape’s history. Now’s the time to head off turning the terraces and trees into parking lots.See how flat the ground is? Cut down those pesky trees and spread some asphalt and you could fit several hundred cars there.

I mean, after all, they could “preserve” the trees by turning them into commemorative toothpicks.

Earlier River Campus stories

River Campus celebrates 5th season

SEMO plans to erase Cape landmark

Photo gallery of handball court

Some day, someone doing research may come looking for photos of what Cape Girardeau looked like before Southeast Missouri State University bulldozed it. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

March 11, 2013

Buckner Brewing Closed in February

When most of us think of the building at 132 North Main Street in Cape, we think of the department store that was the Buckner-Ragsdale Co., home of great service and Tuf-Nut pocket knives. After the store closed in 1982, it housed a number of short-lived ventures. It became Buckner Brewing in 1998 and won local recognition for rehabilitating the landmark business.

The restaurant and microbrewery closed February 3. You can read the official version in The Missourian’s January 29 story by Shay Alderman, then you can scroll down to the comments to see why locals thought the business went under.

Category: Photos around Cape