Photography courtesy of the Library of Congress Historic American Buildings Survey Collection, HAER MO, 96-SALU, 80-6
Dutch writer Wilfried Hou Je Bek uses the word “cryptoforest” to describe corners of a city grown over, in limbo. These spots, he writes, are “honey pots for creatures that have no other place to go.” Barn swallows don’t need barns—they’ll dart through any broken pane. Ants aren’t discerning—they’ll venture into a mostly empty can of malt liquor, or happily eat stale French fries tossed out a car window. And when there’s no maintenance guy to puff weedkiller on the lawn, it recedes to henbit, the first bee forage of spring. In the summer of 1968, the roads and highways of America were dotted with hitchhiking kids, some so dirty, they seemed like people made of dust. Surely some sought out cryptoforests for a midday snooze under the cover of a floppy leather hat, or leaned on a busted-up cinderblock wall reading J.R.R. Tolkien, temporary king of a postindustrial Middle Earth.
Maybe one stopped to sit on these front steps, pulled a smoke out of his patch pocket, and fiddled with his transistor, searching for the sonic-boom bass line of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” the radio’s antenna telescoped as if scanning the sky for a flying saucer. This is the St. Louis Union Station Power House on 18th Street, demolished in 1987, though the foundation remains, along with the 196-foot-tall smokestack. Its replacement is on the same footprint, but it looks very ’80s, with pinky-orange brick and green metal awnings. Now, it’s where 105.7 The Point’s broadcast tower beams out Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, grubby drug anthems replaced with serotonin-reuptake banjo riffs; it is a power station for power suits. The change is predictable. To most, this wouldn’t be a city mystery forest. It is real estate waiting to happen, not yet a honey pot—unless you are a crow, a ghetto palm, a human weirdo, or an actual honeybee.
