The slaughterhouse at Armour was collapsing, not dramatically, but inexorably. It was going to be a pile of rubble in a decade, probably, even without the demolition that came in the summer of 2016. Probably because it didn’t have the technical problems of two smokestacks like the refrigeration plant, wreckers took their time, pallatizing bricks for resale. The Chicago-based Armour had the audacity to import bricks from outside of St. Louis. Like breweries, industry in the 19th Century brought raw materials (in this instance, livestock) up to the top floor, regardless of expense, and then used free gravity to slowly work the processed product down to the first floor to railroad tracks, where it departed the plant.