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…
Month: December 2024
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 Three
We moved upward in the building to upper floors that may have been more cold storage, but I’m not sure. We were now looking out over the tops of other buildings in the complex. Hunter had its own power plant, though its smokestack was not the most photogenic, made out of concrete, I believe and…
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…
United Bags Inc., Revisited
I looked at the United Bags buildings way back in May of 2008, which seems like a really long time ago! I also captured a fleeting glimpse back in November of 2011 and August of 2022. Let’s look at their histories more closely. First up is the Goodwin Brothers Printing Company, built in 1911. Goodwin…
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, Cotton Belt Depot
Fire struck the abandoned Cotton Belt Freight Depot on November 20, and since it is built out of reinforced concrete, there was probably not that much structural damage. But I don’t know, because I sure as heck wasn’t going to get close enough to look. Sadly, the whole area of the Near North Riverfront around…
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…