Photograph by Thomas Crone
Let’s say that you’re presented with the opportunity to explore St. Louis, but not by using maps of the normal grid. And then you get to tell people the stories you’ve come across, through text, photography, and video. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Along the way, you’d be allowed access to places you couldn’t ordinarily go—you’re given permission to visit the kitchens of our town’s best chefs, or studios where musicians are cutting the first scratch takes of their new single. Even when there’s not an official introduction, you take it upon yourself to find a way into the underground locations that often exist right in front of us, yet remain unseen by most.
So many options. So many possibilities. Where to start?
Why not at the Mud House, the popular and charming coffeehouse and cafe in Benton Park? It’s a perfect place to meet friends on a wintry morning, and to order hot drinks before drifting off to the abandoned and forgotten places of the post-industrial East Side. And how far is it from the heart of the antiques district to the guts of urban exploration’s local underbelly? Only an efficient 10 minutes by car, while crossing one river and myriad social and civic boundaries.
Though a massive public works project is transforming the rough landscape of Route 3, the road is still a mixture of dead and alive businesses, alongside a pinch of low-income residential development. Trucking companies, empty train cars, burned-out strip clubs, and modest frame homes are all part of a crazy-quilt of Americana, with the downtown St. Louis skyline seldom far from sight.
Our debut entry takes us to two of the most massive, slow-crumbling structures in the metro East, the Hunter Packing Company and the Armour Meatpacking Plant. Both are easily accessible, with roads that would take you close to their front doors, if their front doors still existed. Few if any signs warn you against trespass.
The Hunter’s a strange vision. Demolition began there several years ago and then was halted. Walls cascade or are missing entirely. Windows are a long-ago memory. A trucking business has taken over a corner of the huge parking lot out front and two small churches hold Sunday morning services in the shadows of this aging, weather-beaten structure. Those signs of life are it. The multiple Hunter structures have outlasted their industry’s use for them and, with their indoors now outdoors, they provide scant protection from the December chill.
A few minutes away, just past the recently demolished National City Stockyards, the Armour plant rises out of the floodplain even more mysteriously, tucked behind a jungle of winter-beaten trees and brush. Here, things have changed somewhat since our group’s last visit: barriers are set up all through the complex’s most picturesque, center areas; nearby, a pile of discarded cleaning products and dog food bags indicates the possible recent presence of a cooking lab.
These aren’t the places on anyone’s visitor’s guide but ours. Every Wednesday, we’ll let curiosity take us to places that St. Louisans don’t usually get to experience. Sometimes, they’re places we probably shouldn’t experience.
Curiosity’s our best friend, but solid tips are always welcome, too.
