From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Five

The roof featured sawtooth clerestory windows, which let natural light down on to the slaughter floor. But the upper floors were offices and the storage of promotional materials, which had been left in giant piles of boxes and reams of papers. As a post script, I think it goes without saying that it’s not a…

From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Four

On the upper floors, view of the nearby Armour Meat Packing Plant and downtown St. Louis are afforded. Now it becomes obvious, from similar rooms in Armour, that this is where beef carcasses were wheeled along overhead tracks through different parts of the slaughtering process, as can be seen below. The tile walls made the…

From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Two

Moving along in our tour from 2008, we see more demolition debris; I am not certain what part of the building we are in, but I suspect it was more of the cold storage. What you’re looking at below are floors above that collapsed after the support columns in front of them were demolished, causing…

From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part One

I discovered a cache of old photos from sixteen years ago of the Hunter Meat Packing Plant in National City taken in November of 2008. Wow, what a place. It opened sometime around 1900 and at its height employed 1,500 workers, and when it closed in 1982, around 1,100 people were laid off. Demolition began…

Chesterfield Mall, Under Demolition

While demolition officially commenced on October 15, exterior signs of the deconstruction of the almost fifty year old Chesterfield Mall have only just begun to show on the exterior. Completion is set for an ambitious deadline of April of 2025. Much of the material is marked for recycling, including grinding up the concrete, etc. Two…

Kingman and John Deere Buildings, North Broadway

In 1907, the F.H. Smith Lumber Co.’s trustees sold the property at the northeast corner of North Broadway and Warren Street to the Kingman Plow Company of Peoria for $18,000. Recently relocated from East St. Louis, the new Kingman St. Louis Implement Company, was part of a wave of new factories that had relocated to…

Fire, Former DePaul Hospital

There was a fire at the old DePaul Hospital/closed Northview Village on December 2, and the Fire Department described the damage as “severe.” This is a major development, as right after the failed nursing home closed, security seemed to be fairly tight, as at least one man was arrested for burglary within a week or…

Mullanphy Tenement, Revisited November 2024

It has been over a decade since I last visited the Mullanphy Tenement back in September of 2013 (I first visited back in the winter of 2009), and I was wondering what was happening with the historic building. The answer? Absolutely nothing! The famous “Buy/Sell/Trade” sign has disappeared, but other than that, it looks largely…

Bob Reuter’s Boyhood Home, Abandoned

I was scanning around on Google Satellite View and happened to go over Bob Reuter’s boyhood home on Bailey Avenue just east of Fairground Park. Even from the air, it was looking awfully “lush,” so to speak, which was a change from the time I went by back in August of 2013, shortly after my…