The third weekend of July was rough in North St. Louis. First off, we lost a beautiful corner store at West Florissant and De Soto avenues, which I swear I’ve photographed and I also could swear was occupied with a second-hand appliance store if I remember correctly. It was destroyed by fire Saturday morning in College Hill.
Then, and I couldn’t believe it in hindsight, after walking out of the new Target at South Grand Boulevard and Chouteau Avenue, I spotted a giant black plume of smoke to the north. I headed north and checking the Fire Department’s Twitter account, discovered it was in the 8200 block of Hall Street! That is a long ways from Target!
Hall Street has a bunch of crumby industry, much of it increasingly abandoned, and it drives me crazy when I think about all of the historic neighborhoods demolished by the City of St. Louis and then repackaged as superblocks back in the 1960s, such as Kosciusko, and here we have all this blight that should have been demolished and eminent domained instead!
Look at this junk, that goes up in black smoke and flames every so often, and think about how we demolished Kosciusko, a neighborhood as beautiful as Soulard instead!
There were so many fire trucks flying by as I checked out the fire. This one below was screaming by at about 60mph when I snapped this photo. I don’t remember seeing that piece of metal on the pavement by the back tire–did it fall off or did the firetruck run over it? I didn’t see it at the time.
