An interesting relic of St. Louis County’s attempt to build a poor farm in the southwest corner of St. Louis County lies buried inside the innards of a hotel built in 1980. It is just north of the small hamlet of Allenton. Two stone barns, built as the next poor farm, are now conference center…
Tag: Redevelopment
Requiem for Shopping Malls?
The announcement that Macy’s will be closing the store at South County Center raised the specter that there will be another round of mall closures after an initial wave that struck the St. Louis region earlier this millennium. As Toby Weiss at B.E.L.T. St. Louis documented so well at Northland Shopping Center and River Roads…
Town and Country Mall
Tally ho! Just when I thought I knew of every defunct and demolished mall in the St. Louis region, life throws a curveball. I just learned about the existence of the Town and Country Mall, at the southeast corner of Woodson Road and Page Boulevard in Overland. Opening in November of 1960, two years before…
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…
Out of Blood (and Money)
Update: All eighty employees were terminated at the end of February. The hospital surrendered its licenses and will not reopen. Absolutely no one was surprised that the new three bed hospital opened by Paul McKee failed only a short time after it opened, and years, I mean years after it was first proposed. Property taxes,…
Former Garavaglia’s, Redevelopment Coming Soon
I last looked at the former Garavaglia’s back in March of 2008(!) and I have some great news to report: the building will finally see redevelopment in the coming year. The building has been abandoned since at least 1990, having fallen victim to the construction of I-44 severing its clientele from the store. Lots of…
Fox Park Warehouse Conversions
My, how things have changed since April of 2013 when I first photographed the former industrial area of Fox Park near the intersection of South Jefferson and Gravois. The huge warehouse at the northwest corner of Sidney and Texas has been renovated into apartments; it was once part of the Koken Barber Supply Company. I…