South Ninth Street in 2011
Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
January, 2011
We are back on Columbia’s South Ninth Street again, during a January snowstorm in 2011. While some of my earlier images of South Ninth Street focused on the east side of the street, this photo gives us a view of the west side of the street, including several retail storefronts and two very prominent corner buildings. If we work our way north building by building, starting from the south (or left) end of the photo, our retail tenants on Ninth Street at the time included Tiger Spirit on the southwest corner of Ninth and Cherry, Kaldi’s Coffee on the northwest corner of Ninth and Cherry, Mustard Seed, Bubblecup Tea Zone, Sparky’s and Makes Scents. Of these six retail tenants, four are still thriving fourteen years later, while Mustard Seed and Kaldi’s are no longer with us on Ninth Street. The space occupied by Kaldi’s since 2007 is now inhabited by locally owned Shortwave Coffee, and the storefront once known as Mustard Seed is now occupied by Makes Scents. And those prominent corner buildings I referenced? Well, they both have more than one name, depending on who you ask, and they both occupy the respective corners of Ninth and Cherry.
On the southwest corner sits the stately, yellow-brick building known as the Virginia Building. An immense amount of work was done on this building in the early 2000s to restore its former architectural majesty. Built in 1911, the Virginia Building is, according to architectural historian Deb Sheals, the only Columbia building with bricks of this particular color and finish. For a brief period during the 1960s and 1970s this building was renamed Strollway Center after a remodeling altered the exterior, covering much of the original brick with metal siding and converting and consolidating the once autonomous storefronts into an urban mini mall connected by a central hallway, hence the epithet “Strollway.” The historic rehabilitation of the structure in 2000 and 2001 removed the changes wrought on the building forty years prior and restored the building to its original appearance. Across Cherry Street from the Virginia Building is the slightly older, slightly smaller, but equally historic Ballenger Building. I have heard this building referred to as the Ballenger Building, The Troxell Building, The Paramount Building, and the Kaldi’s Building. Built in 1892 this building has housed a variety of retail tenants on the ground floor, including Troxell Furniture and Caskets, Ballenger Stove and Implements, a realty company, a Safeway grocery store, a flower shop, Glenn’s Café (one of their several locations), and Kaldi’s Coffee. And the basement tenant of this location, the inspired French alchemist who once brewed and bottled delicious elixirs from spring waters once flowing freely on this site…well, Rene Butel is a story for another post, and another day.