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…
Tag: Warehouses
Around the Family Farm, Spring 2024
I checked up on the family farm east of Peoria in Central Illinois the last weekend of April, and things were looking good even if the fields were very wet, delaying spring planting. It was very windy, and it was alternating sunny and cloudy all day long. No longhorns could be spotted at the neighbor’s…
The Stockyards and Industry Today, St. Joseph
Opening in 1887, the St. Joseph Stockyards was just one indication of the importance of the city to the burgeoning trade in the West. It once stretched to 413 acres and moved a half million animals a year in the 1920s. A beautiful exchange building sat at the front door, and according to my research,…
The Other Gateway to the West: St. Joseph
I was giving a lecture in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwestern corner of the state, and lo and behold, I found one of the most architecturally rich cities in the Midwest, if not in the whole United States. Powered by immense stockyards and industry that dwarfed Kansas City to the south for most of…
Another Lamella Roof Discovered
I know I’ve read and heard it passed around as common knowledge (and even repeated it myself) that the two lamella roofs in St. Louis were the now-demolished Arena and the gymnasium of the former St. Elizabeth’s Academy-now-International Institute. So I got excited when I learned that a warehouse on Manchester Avenue just west of…
Kinloch Park, Berkeley
I recently stumbled upon the plat map of Kinloch Park, which as its name suggests, has to do with the street grid of Kinloch, the historically middle class African American suburb in North County. But it is not so simple. Kinloch Park formed only the northwest portion of Kinloch, and that part has actually been…
Novelty Theater Under Demolition
Due to more failure of Paul McKee’s Northside Regeneration to properly maintain its buildings, the historic Novelty Theater is being torn down. The two-screen theater, designed by Charles Deitring in 1910 possessed a capacity of over one thousand. It has sat empty for a long time. As far as whether the structure to the east’s…
Norvell-Shapleigh, The Saturday After the Fire
I went back out the Saturday after the fire to check on the state of the demolition of the Norvell-Shapleigh warehouse after I had viewed it on Monday. A substantial amount of the building had been removed, particularly the former J. Kennard and Sons Carpet Co. portion on the north, including the part that had…
Norvell Shapleigh, Destroyed by Fire
Another warehouse on the Near North Riverfront has been destroyed by a suspicious fire. While certainly we can attribute some of the conflagrations to squatters accidentally allowing campfires to grow out of control, I was told that in some instances, including the one that hit the Norvell-Shapleigh Warehouse, that was most definitely not the case….
Deer Creek Township, Late January 2024
A dense fog blanketed the area around my family farm in late January as snow and ice persisted on the ground. January in the country is a time of hibernation and preparation, as the spring is closer than you think. If you look closely, you can see the neighbor’s longhorns, an ubiquitous presence now for…