The Majestic Theatre‘s next-door neighbor, the Murphy Building, is also an eerie edifice, built right around the same time in the late 1920s. Again, there are trees growing out of it, broken windows, and missing keystones in the arches. But, like the theatre, you can glimpse its beauty, and what it must have looked like “back in the day.”

The front entrance, even with its cracks and dirt and unintended foliage is a gorgeous example of the amount of detail that went into the design of this building, as are the once-grand arches above the windows:

These buildings along Collinsville Avenue are haunting. Attacked by time and vandals, and reclaimed by nature, they’re almost beyond the point of repair, and yet they offer a rare glimpse into the past, and a shopping district that was once frequented by happy shoppers, optimistic about the future of their city.