If you’ve been following the news, you might be familiar with the trials and tribulations of the Sts. Peter and Paul homeless shelter housed in the historic church in Soulard, looking to find a larger building to serve more people. They first tried to buy the former Sts. Mary and Joseph in Carondelet, but faced insurmountable opposition from neighbors.

I immediately recognized the new building they were trying to buy in the Kosciusko area of the South Riverfront, east of Soulard, which was largely clearly in urban renewal; it is located several blocks away from Seventh Boulevard, the border between the two neighborhoods. I’ve looked at the building twice before, once in February of 2010, and then again in July of 2014. What’s intriguing is the similarity in design to the nearby Anheuser & Co.’s second brew house, built only a few years before and designed by Edmund von Jungenfeld.

It turns out this building, built at least by 1875, has an absolutely fascinating history. In 1875, it was the home of Thonssen & Pfirrmann, who built billiard tables. The factory was located conveniently on the Iron Mountain Railroad tracks that went straight down the middle of Main Street.

A young Ernst Schmidt, an immigrant from what is now Germany, began work at this location, but before long, he struck out on his own and founded his own billiard table company, known as A.E. Schmidt & Co. To make a long story short, and you can read the whole story here, things went full circle, and the company ended up buying the old building on the riverfront for their billiard table business, owning it until 1998 when they sold it to a catering company, which owns it to this day. What a great story! And they still make really cool billiard tables to this day.

To the east is a gigantic new trucking depot. As was stated in television news stories, there are no permanent residents anywhere near here. We’ll see what the future holds.