Category: Photos around Cape

When I first saw this photo, I thought it made have been the razing of the St. Charles Hotel on Main Street. I’m going to let you tell me what building is in the foreground, because I’m not sure. Here are some clues, though.

Criss Cross Cafe?

This photo, shot from a little more to the east shows a tantalizing amount of info. There’s a Pepsi sign advertising what looks like Criss or Cris Cross Cafe on the side of the building.

Like the movie Blowup

A 1966 British movie about a photographer who photographed what might have been a murder scene came to mind here. The photographer took the negative into the darkroom and made increasingly larger blowups of it trying to figure out if he really saw what he thought he saw. Of course, the bigger the enlargement, the more the image degrades, and the less sure he was.

Playing the British photographer, I blew up just a portion of the frame above, enhanced the contrast and applied some sharpening filters to bring out maximum detail. That provided a few more hints.

Clues to the location

• There is a street sign that looks like it says Broadway.
• There’s a Rt. 34 marker
• There’s a Conoco Station sign.
• There’s a three-story building with a doorway on the corner. It looks like it might be Finney’s Rexall Drug Store.
• There’s some kind of parking, maybe for a hotel and / or cafe.

Did Subway shop replaced Finney’s?

This October 2009 photo looks like a Subway shop may have replaced Finney’s. A Google Earth aerial of the intersection shows a vacant lot at the northwest corner of Sprigg and Broadway today. That might mean that these workers razed the whole building, or it might have been taken down later.

Any idea what was in the building being torn down?

Some photos are more interesting because of the background than the subject. I noticed the Colonial Restaurant in these photos of a crash at Kingshighway and Broadway. I always think of the establishment as being the Colonial TAVERN, but the name must have changed sometime toward the end of the 1950s, based on newspaper stories.

Sports car plows into building

I couldn’t find any newspaper stories about the wreck, nor do I know when the pictures were taken. The car doesn’t look like it sustained much damage. It doesn’t have the typical dimples in the windshield caused by an unbelted driver.

Cape police and a state trooper

I count at least six police officers and a State Trooper working the wreck. It must have been a slow, if cold, night

One of the first lessons I learned as a news photographer that everything goes smoothly until you get one more cop on the scene than they need to work the incident. He looks around and decides that his job is to hassle the photographer. These guys must not have hit that point, because I don’t remember any conflicts.

Colonial Restaurant being remodeled

It looks like the building was being remodeled. There’s fresh lumber and framing visible, and the car knocked down one of the temporary supports.

In 1936, Albert Haman and Harley Estes spoke in favor of incorporating an area west of the city limits, as the first step in bringing the area into the Cape Girardeau city limits. Haman owned a restaurant at the intersection of Cape Rock Dr. and Highway 61. Estes represented the Simpson Oil Co., which owns the Colonial Tavern. There are five gasoline stations in the area, but no schools or churches.

Missourian advocates expanding city

A Missourian editorial in 1946 advocated extending the city limits to take in the entire stretch of Hwy 61 to enable the city to zone the property and “thus prevent it from becoming covered with undesirable structures….Pigpens and beer joints … have long infested the Alvarado-Colonial Tavern intersection…. Unless this is done Hwy 61 from the southern city limits to the northern limits may be expected to become a hodgepodge of shacks and dumps…”

Coroner Don Kremer

Coroner Don Kremer is the fellow next to the car. In addition to being the coroner, he was also a commercial photographer who made a sideline of shooting wrecks for insurance companies, so his presence doesn’t necessarily mean this was a fatality.

Kremer made the news himself in 1970, when he gunned down a young woman, then committed suicide by driving into a bridge abutment at high speed. (If you follow the link, you’ll have to zoom out and turn your head sideways to read the story. Google has the microfilm rotated to the left.) Investigators say that tire tracks indicated that he aimed his car so that the driver’s side would take the brunt of the impact.

Kremer’s wife said that he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and had been given  two months to live.