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…
Tag: National Stockyards
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…
Packers By-Products, National City
More land clearance is happening over by the old National Stockyards, where Armour, Swift and Hunter once slaughtered livestock by the millions for over a century. They’re all demolished now, but one business and its buildings is still standing, at least for now. That was the Packers’ By-Products building, with its infamous doors labeled “Blood”…
East St. Louis by the Old Stockyards
Just over a year ago, I checked in on the areas of East St. Louis just to the east of the old National Stockyards and the old meatpacking plants that used to employ thousands of workers. Crossing over the railroad tracks, and there are still many houses that are proudly occupied, but there are also…
Revisiting Northern East St. Louis
Update: I went back in the late fall of 2018. I went back over to Exchange Avenue to see what has been happening on the border between the old stockyards and East St. Louis. Much of what I photographed in the earlier post is now gone. I saw some houses that were still occupied, but…
National Stockyards, Late October 2016
Other than some concrete pillars, part of what I think were originally meat refrigeration, Armour Meat Packing is now gone. The transformation of the old National Stockyards is continuing, with the hope that the new bridge and flat land will become a new industrial hub. In the meantime, at least one plot has become storage…
Armour Meat Packing Plant, Slaughterhouse Coming Down, Late August 2016
Slowly but surely, the slaughterhouse, the last major building left at Armour, is coming down, brick by brick. It’s fascinating, in a sad way, in that the structure of the building is becoming apparent as the walls come down. There is some value in watching deconstruction.