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Hirstein Cemetery, Morton Township, Illinois, August 2019
I went by Hirstein Cemetery, where many of my oldest ancestors in America are buried, in the first weekend of August. It was a hot day, but the clouds in the sky made for beautiful light. This obelisk...
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Central Peoria
It’s hard to explain, but all of central Peoria to the northwest of downtown but below the bluffs has at some point been completely annihilated by urban renewal and replaced by public housing and...
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St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Peoria
As I mentioned yesterday, most of the historic residential core of Peoria northwest of downtown was destroyed, but one of the few buildings that survived was St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church. It...
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West High Street, Peoria, Revisited
More precisely, this should be West High Street revisited, and in the first several pictures, an introduction to Moss Avenue, which continues further west along the bluff line above downtown Peoria....
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West Main Street and Nearby, Peoria
West Main Street shoots up the bluffs from downtown Peoria towards Bradley University, and there is a line of college-related businesses and other amenities. It is sort of a strange mix of buildings,...
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Northeast Peoria, August 2019
Perhaps I was being too optimistic when I first documented Peoria northeast of downtown back in 2013. I have been back, and while there is a wonderful group of houses that have been carefully restored...
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Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Illinois, August 2019
Horses have come to my family’s farm in Illinois, and they are enjoying the wide open space of the pasture on the west side of the road. The cattle peacefully coexist at the southern end of the...
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Medallion, Peoria
I came across this fascinating terracotta detail on the top of a commercial building in downtown Peoria. I’m not sure who it’s supposed to represent–maybe Andromeda–but it would be interesting to find...
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The Elms Restaurant, El Paso, Revisited
Perhaps one of my most popular posts of all time, especially for one outside of St. Louis, is my original look at the Elms Restaurant in El Paso, Illinois, right on U.S. Highway 24. The obvious...
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West Market Street, Bloomington, Illinois
The fortunes of many a street in America is determined by the assigning of numbers on a shield. In this case, for West Market Street in Bloomington, Illinois, it was assigned US Highway 150, probably...
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Moses Montefiore Synagogue, Revisited
I knew in my short visit to Bloomington-Normal that there was one place that I had to check up on, and I was pleasantly surprised! The former Moses Montefiore Synagogue has been purchased and...
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Pleasantview Road, July 2021
It seems like a lot has changed on Pleasantview Road in the two years since I last visited. Besides the house I’d been photographing for over a decade having vanished, I feel like there are other...
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Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Tazewell County, Early July 2021, Friday...
As the sun began to set on Friday evening before the Fourth of July, I captured these photographs of my family’s farm in Deer Creek Township, east of Peoria.
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Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Tazewell County, Early July 2021, Saturday...
The next day early in the morning I headed out into the eastern fields of my family’s farm to see how the soybeans were doing, and looked out to the west down into the valley. While it might not look...
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Hayloft, Horse Barn, July 2021
I climbed up in the hayloft of the horse barn and took some photos. It’s actually much older than the 1901 date that someone painted on the outside. The barn is held together with wooden pegs, not...
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East Peoria
I could probably convince a lot of people that the photo above was taken “at the bottom of the hill” in St. Clair County, where the bluffs come down to the floodplains that stretch to the Mississippi....
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Down by the River, Peoria, July 2021
I revisited the area of Peoria down by the river northeast of downtown on Saturday afternoon the weekend before the Fourth of July. Many businesses were closed for the holiday, including this...
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Moss Avenue Between Western Avenue and North MacArthur Highway, Peoria
Moss Avenue is a historic district that stretches along the bluffs near Bradley University northwest of downtown Peoria. I’ve broken up the street into two sections, first from Western Avenue to North...
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Moss Avenue Between North MacArthur Highway and North Sheridan Road, Peoria
Heading east on Moss Avenue past North MacArthur Highway, the houses become even more stout, and even more heavy in their structure. But there are newer houses that are built after their Nineteenth...
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