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…
Tag: Hunter Meat Packing Plant
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…
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…
Hunter Meat Packing Plant, Demolished at Last
I’ve watched the slow death of the Hunter Meat Packing Plant for close to four years now, and it’s finally coming down into a pile of rubble, replaced at least for the time-being with a tanker truck lot. I never liked Hunter as much as Armour, but it still had its charms, from the paper-like…
National City Slaughter Houses
Image courtesy of Andrew Faulkner. Update: Everything in this postcard is now demolished.
Hunter Meat Packing Plant #2
Update: The entire plant was demolished in 2012. Here is the Hunter Meatpacking Plant, hiding in plain view, so to speak. It is in a state of partial demolition, in which it has remained for many years. You might think I am a complete idiot for stepping inside this building, but it is remarkably stable–and…