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For the month of August, we’ll visit independent businesses around St. Louis, specifically, ones that are new to us. Check back every Wednesday for a new edition.
The first two indie business features this month were safely hip, with trips to a used book shop and a coffee house. This week, we took a tip from some creative cats, the Vines brothers, who own the STL- Style apparel line, but wound up at a place comfortably removed from any sort of bohemian economy. They’ve got cousins in the automotive salvage game and said that their location, Brock Auto Parts & Recycling (1907 Kienlen, 314-371-4818), was worth a visit, if only for the pure visuals. Added in for extra fun, they said, was the cast of a characters working there, a “Seinfeld”-like troop of personalities.
A single afternoon’s visit can’t do justice to all the interpersonal relationships. It’d probably take a reality TV crew a few episodes to establish all the possible storylines, what with a 30-person payroll employed at Brock’s. But even in a timespan of just over an hour, the visuals do pop, again and again; all the senses are engaged, really. In one area of the business, Nickelback’s rocking, in another it’s hip-hop. When the Mexican workers in the scrapyard get control of the radio, it’s Norteno that fills the air. There’s a steady hum throughout the complex.
And part of the sound is the constant buzzing of Brent Brockman’s phone. Now the president of the company, he’s been working at the 51-year-old family business “his whole life,” with a full-time gig there for the past 13 years. When he walks through the five buildings and various yards, there’s usually someone questioning him, and what’s remarkable is that he’s got an answer for just about every question.
As the name suggests, a big part of the business is on the recycling side. Most City and urban-core residents have seen rickety pickup trucks, filled to the brim, rolling through alleys in search of anything metallic. These sorts of drivers make use of that part of the facility, waiting up to 20 minutes, or so, when the lines get thick. On Tuesday afternoon, they were less busy than other times and folks rolled up, got their trucks weighed, unloaded their wares, and weighed again. If you’ve not seen the process in action, it’s interesting to take in.
The rest of the yards were busy, too, with workers spilling out of every corner of the facility. (Interestingly, Brock is located in Hillsdale, Wellston and the City of St. Louis, so vast is their space.) Some were tearing apart engines, others were buzzing through seemingly endless stacks of windows, tires, steering wheels, mirrors and just about anything else that comes from or goes back onto a car.
As Brockman tells it, the emergence of online commerce has changed his industry just like any other, as he nows “sells to people around the country, even around the world.” Brock takes part in sales at carpart.com and can get orders at any moment, from auto body and repair shops throughout the US. Then, his team fans out and finds the part requested based on a numbering system that’s dizzying to the first-time visitor, but surely makes sense to those seasoned in the work.
That’s not to say that there’s not a healthy local trade. As we visited, people rolled into the office, either to pick up merchandise or make requests. Brock “isn’t a pick-and-pull” operation, which means that the crews go into the yards to find your parts, as opposed to customers who, at other yards, will literally pull pieces off of vehicles. Brock says that the business picks up 50-60 cars a week, some of them classics, though most built (and wrecked) in just the past few years.
When walking through the space, he points to one late-model Toyota, which he figured cost Brock’s about $3,500. Brockman said that the car “would pay for itself” quickly, as the doors, alone, can go for $1,000 apiece; and these doors were in pristine shape.
Other cars are less intact. Many have been in accidents and bear the damage obviously. Some just stopped running. If you ask, they can even point out a few that’ve been shot through with bullet holes. Within those cars, workers have found a little bit of everything; Brockman had a relative find $10,000 in one vehicle, which he turned back to the owner. Most common are CDs, which can be found pretty much everywhere, as they’re a near-certainty to be left in cars.
To protect all that inventory, Brockman’s staff go through all kinds of measures, from removing the gasoline, to isolating the tire jacks to just one vehicle, which is locked and sealed at night. There’s one dog on the premises, but it’s a stray that’s stuck around, not a guard dog. Instead of dogs, a 7,000 volt fence keeps the bad guys out; it’s a fence, he says, that “won’t melt them,” but will send anyone touching it flying. He says that he recalls a day when “you’d turn a light on in there and just see people everywhere.”
There are a million stories at Brock’s. And a history that dates back to the complex’s days a munitions factory, which explains the dramatic water/clock tower in the center of the main yard. In fact, a write-up based on a single visit is almost impossible to pull off, with so much to take in. But we tried.
And we’ll be back. After all, there’s that smashed turn light cover to take of...
For an added visual visit to Brock, take a look at this video, directed by Courtney Jackson for the 2010 edition of the 48 Hour Film Project, Tea Party at Gasket Casket
