This could be a snapshot pulled out of someone’s bad dream—a room full of holes, a room full of places to fall into, maybe even hell. Though it didn’t lead to sulfury caverns, this piping was made to be installed underground. The funny thing is, it’s terra cotta—it used to be the ground. And true to its name, terra cotta’s historically been fired into earthy objects like cooking pots, Venus of Willendorfs, and sewer pipes like these. At the turn of the century, when Irish and Italian immigrants mined the giant bed of clay under St. Louis, the city supported hundreds of mines, brickyards, and terra-cotta works. The kiln of the period was round, and looked like a gnome’s hut; it was built out of the same tough, vitrified brick it produced, its furnace fed with coal mined not far from the clay beds. Inside, it was filled with shelves, which gave the impression of a weird little library filled with petrified books. As the new century progressed, the holes got deeper as guys dug and pickaxed veins of clay and mined coal and carted wheelbarrows of fired or unfired bricks in and out of sweltering kilns. St. Louis got taller as architects married steel frames with bricks, and the terra-cotta ornaments grew fancier, with Celtic knots and basket weaves and interlocking vegetal patterns. Then, sometime in the 1940s when the clay mines closed, Le Corbusier hit the Midwest. Next to all of those white boxes, it seemed all the more apparent the Edwardians had built these buildings out of dirt. All the better to let the Sanborn fire maps remember the sites of the clay mines for us, with the Arrow No. 1 mine and the Gittens Mine and the Coffin Mine marked out in clean, scored lines, painted canary yellow and bismuth pink, and no hint of sweaty miners, brown dirt, or black coal smoke whuffing out a chimney stack.
Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-57683.
