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…
Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker at St. Louis Dance Theater
As longtime readers know, I’ve been following and featuring the work of the Big Muddy Dance Company, which has recently been rechristened St. Louis Dance Theater. I had the opportunity to preview of their next performance, Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker, which features the work of Duke Ellington and a lesser known but critically important composer, Billy Strayhorn,…
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…
Lemp Brewery from the Air, 1930s
I really love this amazing aerial photograph of the Lemp Brewery, a decade after International Shoe had taken over. You can see how the shoe company had already added several floors onto a couple of buildings and altered the smokestack of the third boiler house or power plant to say ISCO. The railyard is still…