Update: A second, severe fire broke out inside the warehouse in October 2024; due to the unique construction of the building with cork insulation, it was demolished to extinguish the fire. Demolition began less than a week after the last fire was extinguished.

It wasn’t publicized in the news, but if you were watching the St. Louis Fire Department’s Twitter feed, you noticed a passing reference to a firefighter being injured fighting a fire in a warehouse on the Near North Riverfront. This is the former Federal Cold Storage Company, which was part of a general trend of produce warehouses moving north in the early Twentieth Century. I saw numerous points of entry, and not all of them could have been caused by the Fire Department entering to put out the fire. It raises the question: why was there a fire in this abandoned building on such a warm day? Another nearby warehouse burned in January of 2021, and another just flat out collapsed in February of 2023 (hard to imagine that was foul play). This of course is on the heels of the massive fire at Norvell Shapleigh, a mile or so to the south. Should we expect more warehouses to be destroyed by fire?