Broadway Archives

July 2, 2012

Broadway and Frederick Construction

The Broadway construction project is moving right along. It’s in the 500 and 600 blocks now. Here’s a view looking east.

Bricks and cobbles

I haven’t been lucky enough to have been around when the construction workers have unearthed the old trolley tracks, but I CAN see the bricks and cobblestones that made up the original street.

Looking west down Broadway

The three-story brick building on the left had been a coffee house, but Niece Laurie Everett of Annie Laurie’s Antiques, diagonally across the street, said it is closed now. The old Star service station used to be on the right.

Just beyond the coffee house was my old hangout, Nowell’s Camera Shop. The original cabinets are still visible through the windows. My elbow prints are probably still on some of them from the days when I drooled over new toys.

Old Broadway stories

Here’s a piece that has links to all of the Broadway stories I could remember writing.

Brother Mark took photos of the construction in the 200 block of Broadway.

May 14, 2012

Broadway Construction Project

Brother Mark was down in Cape for Mother’s Day. He’s got an advantage when it comes to jockeying for a favorable position in the will. He’s 125 miles away from Mother; I’m 1,100 miles away.

He jingled the keys and mother hopped in the car to go exploring. Mark stopped long enough to shoot these pictures of the 200 and 300 blocks of Broadway. The city’s embarked on what is either a very good or a very bad idea. They are enlarging the sidewalks on the north side of the street to make the area more attractive to pedestrians (at the expense of parking on that side). Here was the Broadway end-to-end piece I did recently, by the way.

Narrow lanes worry me

We had a West Palm Beach mayor (thankfully, gone) who went on a traffic-calming binge. There were a number of streets that were wide enough that a car could pass my bike without having to cross the centerline while still giving me the legal three feet of clearance. He started choking the lanes with traffic furniture where he didn’t narrow them and added speed humps willy-nilly. By doing that, he made it impossible for a car to pass without going over the centerline, which irritated folks if there was oncoming traffic.

So, if you see me cranking my way up the Broadway hill, just know that I’m going as fast as I can and that it wasn’t MY idea to make the lanes smaller. Oh, and the sidewalk isn’t an option. Bikes don’t belong on sidewalks.

It IS pretty, though.

Brother Mark’s photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery. I don’t know why he’s being so nice to me. There’s nothing to put in the will, it’s past his birthday and Christmas is a long time off.

May 2, 2012October 19, 2016

Broadway and Sprigg

Missourian Librarian Sharon Sanders runs an interesting blog on Thursdays called “From the Morgue.” Back in the less PC Good Old Days, that what we called the repository of yellowing clips carefully snipped out by the custodian of the newspaper’s history. Folks like Sharon and her predecessor, Judy Crow, really DO know where the bodies are buried and can find the skeletons in closets going back generations. You do NOT want to get on the wrong side of the newspaper librarian. They used to possess both sharp tongues and sharp scissors.

I’m not sure what Digital Sharon could do to a reporter who didn’t bring back a much-handled envelope of old clips, but I bet it wouldn’t be pretty. On one of our first meetings, I started to raise my camera to take her picture. I don’t normally take no for an answer – I’ve shot Popes and Presidents, rioters and guys with guns – but I put my camera down when she shook her head. I knew right away that she wasn’t somebody to mess with.

I felt fortunate to escape with my life and a photo of a stack of aging clips.

Broadway and Sprigg

Her blog Thursday said one of her most-requested photos is of the building that used to be at the northeast corner of Broadway and Sprigg Street. It’s a vacant lot next to the Last Call Bar today. She’s done all the historical heavy lifting about that block, so it’s worth heading over there.

I don’t have any photos going back that far, but I do have the area today.

This aerial from November 2010 shows a number of landmarks. The red building is the Last Call she mentions. The white building diagonally across the street is the infamous 633 – 635 – 637 Broadway trio of buildings that have been a source of controversy for a long time. One building was razed and the other two are being renovated. In the center of the picture is Trinity Lutheran Church. The brick building to its left is Shivelbines Music and the white building across the street is Annie Laurie’s Antiques.

Last Call

It’s hard to miss the Last Call if you’re eastbound on Broadway. Its red colors are set off by a blue sky.

Blue-sided building is gone

The blue-sided building with the iconic mural at the top center of the aerial and the ones next to it were torn down at the end of 2011. Walther’s Furniture, across the street, has turned into Discovery Playhouse.

Like a gap in a first-grader’s grin

The northwest corner of Broadway and Sprigg has another empty spot. That’s where the old Chris Cross Cafe used to be. This view is south on Sprigg toward Broadway somewhere around 1966 or 1967. The three-story building on the south side of Broadway was the Cape Hotel. It burned and the spot is occupied by a Subway today.

April 28, 2012

Beard’s Sport Shop, 818 Broadway

A reader was asking me about 818 Broadway. It’s been a whole lot of things, but it’ll always be Beard’s Sport Shop to me. When I photographed it in 2009, the sign on the front of building said Grace Cafe, but I think it had already closed its doors. I used to go to Grace Cafe when it was located in the old Vandeven’s Mercantile building at Pacific and Broadway because they had a fast internet connection.

Ornate decorations

I never noticed how ornate the trim was on the building until I looked at these photos. I thought that it might have been added recently, but Fred Lynch had a Frony photo of Beard’s and Wayne’s Grill that shows it clearly in 1961.

When Friend Shari and I shot the interior of the Broadway Theater in December, we retreated across the street for some coffee to thaw out. I couldn’t remember the name of the place, but a Missourian business column on April 18, 2011, said “Calix Coffee opened at 818 Broadway, at the former Grace Cafe location in Cape Girardeau. Owner Andrew Whaley, Jackson, previously worked at Grace Cafe as a barista. The shop sells coffee and fresh baked pastries, and Whaley hopes to add sandwiches and salads in the future.”

That must be it.

You can barely make out the Beard’s sign in a photo I ran the other day of a wreck at night on Broadway.

Interested in Pinterest?

I’m always a little slow in adopting new social media, but Son Matt added a new button to the front of the blog. You’ve been able to “Like” a page on Facebook and Google+ for some time. Starting last week, you could “pin” an image on Pinterest. It’s probably easier to show you some of my stuff that’s been “pinned” than to try to explain it. It’s sort of a nice way to get a high-level feel for the kind of stuff I shoot.