I’ve officially lost count of the number of times this remaining warehouse from the St. Louis Refrigeration and Cold Storage Company complex has caught fire. I think it’s at three. Here’s from the last time I documented a fire from January of 2017. As you can see, some nice new plywood, that has probably already…
Tag: Power Plants
American Car and Foundry Company, Today
After reading in the news media that several buildings in the old American Car and Foundry Company were threatened with demolition, I traveled out to St. Charles to take a look. One building the Foundry Arts Center, is at the front of the complex at Clark and North Main Street. It’s a huge complex, and…
Muscatine, Iowa, Part One
Continuing our end of the month series of Iowa river towns upriver from St. Louis, we next arrive in Muscatine. We first pass by a power plant, taking advantage of rail lines along the flat floodplains to receive its bounty of coal. Muscatine was founded in 1833 by George Davenport and was originally known as…
The Union Electric Hydroelectric Dam, Keokuk, Iowa
We’ll get started with the major landmark in Keokuk. The Cahokia Power Plant was just one cog in a much larger machine that Union Electric didn’t build but purchased shortly after its completion at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Keokuk and St. Louis have more than one link, and the first we will talk…
Municipal Services Building
Opened in 1927-8 to designed by the firm Study & Farrar, the Municipal Services Building is diagonally across Clark Street and Tucker Boulevard from City Hall. It is perhaps a building that is missed by many people, but is still used in part by the City of St. Louis. It is actually a collection of…
Cahokia Power Plant, December 2024
Well, the smokestacks have all but disappeared from the venerable Cahokia Power Plant, and the future of the building is looking grim. But on a brighter note, years ago a reader generously shared with me a brochure that Union Electric published about the plant, and I present it to you here on the occasion of…
Lemp Brewery from the Air, 1930s
I really love this amazing aerial photograph of the Lemp Brewery, a decade after International Shoe had taken over. You can see how the shoe company had already added several floors onto a couple of buildings and altered the smokestack of the third boiler house or power plant to say ISCO. The railyard is still…
Demoliton, Cahokia Power Plant
I realized the smokestacks of the old Cahokia Power Plant are being demolished. Judging from the care in which the demolition is occurring, I suspect that the building below the stacks is being preserved and continuing in its use as a bulk transfer station, primarily for coal. But nonetheless, an iconic view from St. Louis…
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…
In Search of the Sidaway Bridge and John D. Rockefeller, Cleveland
Sometimes I go searching for something and I don’t find it, but the journey becomes interesting (and a little scary) in of itself. In this case, I went looking for the Sidaway Bridge, further up one of the tributaries of the Cuyahoga River, after reading about it online, and besides being fascinated by its structure,…