Joplin’s historic past featured in slide show

May 16, 2008 06:44 pm

— From staff reports
news@joplinglobe.com
People who want to see a little of what Joplin looked like in ages gone by may want to attend Leslie Simpson’s program “Extreme Makeover: Joplin Edition.”
It’s a slide presentation she put together from old photos and postcards and recent photographs of sites around town.
“I was asked to do a program on some aspect of historic buildings and I thought it would be interesting to view the site now and then see what it looked like before. I didn’t think that had been done before. People mentioned to me it would be interesting,” Simpson said.
Simpson, of the Post Art Memorial Reference Library at the Joplin Public Library, presented the show last week and she’s going to show it again at 3 p.m. Sunday in the main meeting room at the library.
Some photos show elaborate buildings that don’t exist anymore.
She also took contemporary photos of the sites and worked on the presentation for about six months.
There is a photograph of the Shubert Theatre that once stood where the parking lot is now located in front of Memorial Hall. It was where stars from the 1920s entertained Joplinites.
There are photos of buildings such as the former Miners’ Bank Building, which once stood on Fourth Street between Joplin and Wall avenues. Vacant or nearly vacant in the latter part of the century, the building burned in the 1980s and had to be demolished.
Most slides show what buildings once stood in Joplin, including the former Keystone Hotel at the southeast corner of Fourth and Main streets. In the Keystone’s case, it was eventually replaced with one-story office buildings and parking lots.
Viewers also might enjoy seeing some of the Victorian houses built downtown when the city’s founders and magnates situated their homes close to their Main Street businesses and offices.
Shots of several of the city’s historic churches, then and now, are included in the show.

Library link
Leslie Simpson said she used reproductions of a number of postcards from the library’s digitized postcard collection. She researched the history of the postcards at the Virtual Missouri state library site. That collection can be accessed by using the library’s Web site at www.joplinpubliclibrary.org.