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A Totally Preventable Fire
3113 Arsenal Street in the Tower Grove East neighborhood was gutted by fire on the night of November 12. It’s the usual story: the owner of an abandoned house who’s owned the building for decades...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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From the Vault: Hunter Meat Packing Plant, November 2008, Part Five
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...
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Green Board-Ups, JeffVanderLou, Part One
My friend Paul Hohman, a well known architect who specializes in renovations of historic buildings helped get Missouri Preservation to list the “JeffVanderLou Green Board Buildings” as one of their...
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Former Friedens German Evangelical Church, In Ruins
Well, I guess there’s not much to say but St. Louis has lost another beautiful church to fire, most likely set by squatters trying to keep warm on one of the coldest nights of the winter so far. In...
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Tragic Fire, Quinn AME Chapel
Tragic, terrible news arrived on February 23, when fire severely damaged the historic Quinn AME Chapel in Carondelet. I looked at the African American church back in December of 2020. As others have...
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The Staircase and the Swimming Pool
It was warming up so we went back out in the area that was cleared for the Weldon Spring Munitions Plant during World War II in St. Charles County. After exploring this staircase, we came across this...
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