Photograph by Thomas Crone
A year ago, we declared September to be National Urban Exploration Month, a designation we hoped would catch on nationally—even globally! Regardless of whether that’s too ambitious, we’ll spend this month’s Wednesdays exploring abandoned, underutilized, or interesting sites around town. Check back each week for new installments.
On Wednesday, December 8, 2010, I logged my initial post for SLM Daily, with an idea that the coming weeks and months would be dedicated to exploring the region, in lots of different forms. For that first outing, dubbed “Post-Industrial Sightseeing,” I headed across the river to a pair of the area’s most impressive, hulking, abandoned spaces: the Hunter and Armour meat-packing facilities in East St. Louis-slash-National City. The duo are found on outer roads just west of the well-traveled Route 3, each of them accessible by car and then foot.
Along with a long-gone Swift packing plant, the Hunter and Armour sites were part of a massive slaughtering-to-shipping industrial pod, which included the old National City Stockyards. The remains of that complex were the first to be stricken down, part of the construction of a new Mississippi River bridge and the accompanying roads being rebuilt to support it. After the stockyards went down, archaeological digs took place onsite, at which point some neighboring buildings started coming down, including several warehouses and an observation tower, which a friend and I once visited late at night, minus a camera. Oh, well, these things happen in the UE hobby.
Lately, changes have been rapid off of Route 3. The stockyards have been replaced by huge earthern berms, smaller bridges, and off-ramps popping up along their lengths. The Hunter Meat Packing Plant, after years of intermittent demolition, has been all but knocked to the ground; piles of brick, concrete, and metal debris are scattered around its footprint, with only the large smoke-stack still standing. (Metal, in this kind of environment, doesn’t last long before unofficial crews descend.) The access road to the abandoned plant’s been blocked on one end, and cut trees have been laid across smaller roads into the complex, which has now been largely taken over by a trucking company’s rides.
Up the block, the Armour Meatpacking Plant still sits, its interior visible through many parts of the crumbling walls. This building’s seen some strange lifeforms in recent years, including a local artist taking up a sort of residence in the old boiler rooms; she eventually took on a sort of curatorial role and didn’t much care for unaffiliated travelers to pass through, to the point of hiring an ill-tempered “security guard.” On a half-dozen or more trips into the space, including one memorable, shoes-into-holes jaunt in the pitch-dark, the Armour always impressed, with a certain visual pop not present in the nearby Hunter. While the buildings and smoke stacks crumble just a bit with every passing season, no bulldozers, earth movers, and wrecking balls have yet to move on the site. Matter of time, right?
Popping by the sites also lets you view the smaller things that occupy the space around these old plants. Churches sit empty, after being active even two years ago. A basketball court, complete with nets and rims, seems seldom used. An old tavern’s been repainted, despite having no roof. A small school’s been granted new windows and a fence, though there’s not much neighborhood around it these days; with no kids around, you wonder about this one’s viability as a fuller rehab. Isolated, single-family residences are scattered throughout this largely forgotten space, and they bring a certain degree of sadness, each building hinting at the densely packed neighborhood that once existed around it.
About a week back, the skies turned dark (many shades of dark, actually), and the rains would fall for the next two days. I was on the highway and popped across the river in rush-hour traffic, wondering if this would be the day that some Biblical winds would knock down the walls of the Armour. So, yeah, they didn’t fall, and afterward I couldn’t bring myself to walk into the old facility, past the closed-off access roads and deep woods. Not with that sky. So I watched from the newly paved and painted street, annoyed at myself for getting that far and not seeing the little mission through.
A few days later, I dropped by and got stopped by a Fairmount City police officer, understandably curious about my own curiosity.
There’s one more Armour trip left in my traveling bag. September, National Urban Exploration Month, still has a few weeks to go. There’s time. And there are a couple of other interesting targets to address before it ends. See you next week.
