Now owned by the City of Belleville, Mount Hope Cemetery is a perfect example of how Protestant burial grounds owned by Lutheran or Evangelical congregations were not part of a larger entity such as a Roman Catholic diocese, so when the church associated with the cemetery folded, the accompanying graveyard suffered as well. In this…
Category: Metro East
Across the river in Illinois
Downtown Granite City, Early March 2025
I last stopped by downtown Granite City in Spring of 2024, and there has not been much happening other than at the Granite City Arts and Design District on the far side of the area. I did discover another Sinclair Dinosaur which had been put on display along with a bunch of other Route 66…
Amsted Rail, Granite City
I’d driven by this complex on Niedringhaus Avenue on the way into downtown Granite City dozens of times and I finally looked up what it is. Now part of Amsted Company, which has many different branches, it apparently has had an electric-arc furnace for melting down scrap iron and forging into what eventually becomes railroad…
Cahokia Power Plant, December 2024
Well, the smokestacks have all but disappeared from the venerable Cahokia Power Plant, and the future of the building is looking grim. But on a brighter note, years ago a reader generously shared with me a brochure that Union Electric published about the plant, and I present it to you here on the occasion of…
National City Sanborn Maps
I stumbled across these fascinating Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the three major packing houses in National City that surrounded the stockyards. Armour, above, still had a substantial portion of its plant still standing when I first saw it back in 2008, though of course it was gone by 2016. Hunter, which was demolished in…
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 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…