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…
Tag: Factories
Wagner Electric
I wrote an article about the tragic end of the manufacturing giant Wagner Electric in Wellston, just west of the St. Louis City limits back in May of 2019 in St. Louis Magazine, but I found some cool diagrams of the plant so I thought I would revisit the buildings on Plymouth Avenue. I always…
American Can Company
The American Can Company really didn’t close that long ago; I have a friend who worked there when he was young. The New York-based company had locations around the United States, and during World War II, the factory, like so many around the country, pivoted to producing war materiel. As I think pretty much everyone…
Phelan Faust Paints
Moving away from the riverfront in Carondelet, we now move to the former Phelan-Faust Paint Manufacturing Company. It was acquired by Valspar Paints of Minnesota in 1973. Francis Phelan, the founder, was born in 1854 and founded the Phelan-Faust Company in 1902 in East St. Louis, where there was another plant. It matches up perfectly…
Titonix Lead White Factory
I found an old book at the library about Carondelet, and while it was filled with the normal stuff about French Colonial history–which is really cool–what I really found interesting is the industry. I like to think about Carondelet not as a quaint little French town, but rather as a big, brawny Brooklyn on the…
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…