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…
Category: Metro East
Across the river in Illinois
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…
Melvin Price Locks and Dam
Who doesn’t like a giant dam? Melvin Price Locks and Dam opened on October 10, 1989, replacing the aging Lock and Dam No. 26, which had major structural deficiencies. Dams have been getting the photographic treatment since at least Margaret Bourke White, which you can see here. The dam is so massive that it is…
Henry Street, Alton
Back to downtown, we see how Alton has beautiful Italianate houses of the merchants and other businessmen close to the river where riverboats and then the railroad flourished. Many are rehabbed and we even have an apartment building that would look at home in Southwest St. louis thrown in. This is a very green house….
Former Union Brewery and Environs, Alton
The former Union Brewery owned by the Yaekel Family, was built beginning the 1840s, before Pearl Street, which runs by the complex, was even laid out. The owner’s house, seen above and below, was one of the first buildings built in the complex. Later known as the Bluff City Brewery, the building below in the…
East Twelfth Street, Alton
The wealthy seemed to live on the flat plateau due north of downtown, while the working class lived in the curving ravines to the east. East Twelfth Street has some spectacular houses, along with some more middle class houses. This house below, Italianate to a certain degree, also has an over the top front portico,…
Public Square and Thereabouts, Alton
I made it back up to Alton for a little bit and checked out Public Square first. Easton Street, named after the founder of the city, intersects the square, and I suspect that originally it was planned to be a grand expanse surrounded by stores and whatnot. Instead, it is a quiet residential park, with…
Former Godfrey Congregational Church
For some reason, back in October of 2014 when we visited the former Monticello Women’s College, we totally missed the former Godfrey Congregationalist Church, just to the south of the of the main buildings. It’s a bit confusing but it seems to have also served Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed churches, as well. Built in…