Built St. Louis: The Industrial City

North Broadway
North city, St. Louis

North of downtown, Broadway runs past a wide variety of industrial and warehousing buildings dating from the turn of the century.

Interspersed between them are increasingly rare surviving residential buildings, holdouts from this area's history as an integral part of the Old North St. Louis and Hyde Park neighborhoods. Interstate 70 effectively bisected these neighborhoods in the 1960s, to the point that the original boundaries of Old North are no longer commonly counted as part of the neighborhood.

I entered this area hardly realizing what I was in for. I discovered block after block of amazing industrial and warehousing buildings -- far too many to document thoroughly in the one afternoon I had alotted. Much like my initial 1999 survey of the city's north side, the results shown here are an initial foray. Future updates will delve more deeply into this area's architecture.

At the south end of this area stands a lengthy row of interconnected commercial buildings, recently home to various bars and restaurants (Fitzpatrick, Kat Klub, and nursery supplier Great Western Bag Company). When a fire gutted one bay of the building, biker bar Shady Jack's Cafe (1440 N. Broadway) simply cleaned out the space and now uses it as a patio.

A block north stands the former Mound City Buggy Company building (1500 N. Broadway), its southern face festooned with the faded remnants of painted signs and advertisements ("Halladay Automobiles", "Machine Tools, Jigs and Dies", "Mfrs of Inland One-Piece Piston Rings", "1,600,000 in use and going strong".)

Central Waste Material Company - 1510 N. Broadway - an active recycling concern.

The Gateway Refrigeration Company (later Gateway Cold Storage) occupies a massive, windowless refrigerated warehouse at 1800 North Broadway, a few blocks further north. The building is somewhat infamous as the site of two ammonia leaks that resulted in contaminated food making it into local school lunches.

The ornate building of the American Brake Company, at latest report in partial use as an art gallery named The Warehouse.

The Ford Hotel Supply Company occupies the brown brick building at right. I don't know the status of the two buildings at left, but the run of red bricked windows is spectacular.

Unknown building.

Condie-Neale Glass Company
This building and its immediate neighbors form a row rivaling the scale of Washington Avenue. The company that erected the building once produced stained glass windows.

Photo notes:
1 - Schaffer Moving and Storage Specialist, with a handsome neon sign in front.
2 - An empty twin house undergoing demolition.
3 - abandoned rail approaches to the McKinley Bridge.

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Mallincrkodt Tyco / Healthcare
Mallinckrodt is a massive pharmaceuticals manufacturer of international scope; the company was founded on this site 136 years ago and remains in operation there today, with additional branches elsewhere in the metro area.

Photo notes:
1 - Across the street, the Bremen Bank still operates a branch in this handsome Neoclassical building.
2 - Sonic Gasoline is an abandoned filling station, whose analog pumps, sleek angled light fixtures, and tiny office building mark it as a true relic of the golden age of auto culture.
3 - Further north is one of the oddest grocery stores ever constructed: the Saveway Food Co. is made up of a standard single-level store... inexplicably attached to a traditional brick St. Louis townhome.

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A few blocks east of Broadway, Hall Street contains more sprawling, lighter industry, as well as offloading from the river. Its straight, level, two-mile length has also been known to host the occasional drag race, an illegal but popular tradition going back at least to the 1960s.

Like the rest of the area, a thin scattering of houses still stands in the area, some occupied, many vacant. Hall Street, however, is entirely given over to industry.

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