Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
If you go looking for T.S. Eliot’s boyhood home on the 2600 block of Locust Street, well, it’s not there anymore. But Hydraulic Press Brick Company, the company owned by the poet’s father, still exists—kind of.
“They’re based in Indianapolis now,” says filmmaker Bill Streeter. “They develop aggregate stuff that makes concrete stronger.”
In 1900, Hydraulic was the city’s biggest brick manufacturer. Look at an old city-county map, marked with X’s, O’s, and dashes indicating the presence of quarries, clay mines, and brick factories, and you realize what a big deal they were—and what a big deal bricks were in St. Louis. In his soon-to-be-released documentary, Brick by Chance and Fortune: A Saint Louis Story, Streeter traces the city’s relationship with clay, bricks, and terra cotta back to Hydraulic’s heyday and even earlier, interviewing local preservationists and historians about St. Louis’ most abundant—and perhaps underappreciated—resource.
“The buildings I shot for the trailer,” he says, “before we even had any B-roll, was just two blocks of Soulard. And you can really do that on any residential street in St. Louis, and see fantastic, beautiful brick buildings. I think that is probably one of the reasons people don’t appreciate it here. It’s like, ‘Oh—another brick building.’ But if you look, each one is almost totally unique. Even the ones built from templates have unique features to them.”
Streeter (who’s best known for his rock ’n’ roll video podcast channel, Lo-Fi Saint Louis) goes as far to say that St. Louis’ brick architecture is superior to what he saw in his hometown of Chicago. In the trailer, preservationist Michael Allen sums up the reason why: It “all ties back to our place, our rootedness in the Mississippi Valley, and the soil that we have that is so rich in the red and the yellow clay that you see here.”
Streeter says he wanted the film to begin with “an appreciation of the brick that we have now, that exists, that is. Which sort of begs the question why and how; and then explores the why and how, and then comes back to preserving it. That whole third act will be all about what we’re doing right about preservation and what we’re not doing right about preservation.”
In fact, one of Streeter’s early inspirations for this film was a 2007 YouTube video produced by Antonio French, producer of PubDef.net. In it, he interviews 4th Ward Alderman Sam Moore, who has become a self-appointed watchdog against illegitimate brick harvesting in his North Side ward, about how rustlers take down buildings and sell the bricks on the black market. Brick rustling is only a small part of Brick by Chance or Fortune, Streeter says, but French—now the alderman of the 21st Ward—and Moore both appear on camera to talk about the challenges of trying to preserve the historic building stock on the city’s North Side. (The interview was conducted in the aldermanic chambers: “It looked really beautiful,” Streeter says. “It was a Sunday, so no one was there, and it’s a public place. Sam Moore was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it here.’)
Streeter also talked to writer and photographer Toby Weiss of the St. Louis architecture blog B.E.L.T. (Built Environment in Layman’s Terms, beltstl.com); Larry Giles, a historic preservationist with the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation; historians NiNi and Sheila Harris and Bob Corbett; architect Paul Hohmann, writer of the blog Vanishing STL (vanishingstl.blogspot.com); and Mimi Garstang, a geologist with the state of Missouri.
“We asked everyone what their favorite brick building is,” Streeter says. “Larry Giles really loves the big downtown buildings, like the Wainwright Building. Michael Allen just loves the fine detail of every little thing; he can spout addresses off the top of his head. And NiNi Harris loves Dutchtown. That’s where she grew up, and that’s where she lives. There’s an entire block in Dutchtown—every single house for probably two blocks is glazed brick.”
The film is ahead of schedule, even though it was shot on weekends, out of necessity. The soundtrack, Streeter says, was the easiest thing to put together: “I have such a great rapport with so many musicians now, I can just call them up.” Mat Wilson of the Rum Drum Ramblers has written a song, and so has Pokey LaFarge. Jason Hutto is doing the incidental music. Streeter also credits his team—Virginia Lee Hunter, Bowls MacLean, Greer Lange, and Jeannette Hoss—with keeping the film on schedule. Hoss, for the record, was not initially a fan of the title, which comes from a Plutarch quote: “No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.” She noted on the film’s Facebook page, though, that Streeter almost immediately changed her mind “by elaborating that it was chance that St. Louis had such an abundance of clay, chance that brought so many skilled immigrants to St. Louis where they were allowed to do such amazing brickwork, and now we have a chance to save what we still have. Many fortunes were built in brick, St. Louis brick is our underappreciated fortune, and the brick thieves use bricks as their fortune—by stealing from us.”
Salt-glazed, brown-glazed, stamped, pressed, extruded—it’s weird to think that no one makes bricks around here at all anymore. Well, Streeter says, that’s not entirely true: Richards Brick Company in Edwardsville, Ill., does, and it even still mines its own clay. “They run a wet clay mixture into this tube, and it’s pressurized, and then they take it out and bake it,” he says. “But it’s an extrusion process; the old bricks didn’t have holes in them.” And holes or no holes, there’s just no beating a good old-fashioned, dusty, rust-red St. Louis brick.
For more information, go to stlbrickfilm.com; at press time, October 15 was the projected completion date, in time for the St. Louis International Film Festival.
