World Trip 2002 - St Louis
Day 6
Saint
Louis was a great town to explore in. West Nile Virus be damned! This city
had lots of old buildings to explore in it, some with real class.
I met Tipple Fatal at the airport, or she met me. One or the other. We drove out of the airport and on to a road, stopped to fill up on gas and ask directions. I was a bit worried about her navigational skills, and I have to say she did have to consult a lot of maps. But we got to where we were going and had a lot of fun.
Our first stop of the day was a massive old abandoned stele works. This place was huge! As it was just disused rather than abandoned there were a few caretakers minding the place. One of them was quite happy to show us around. We could not take photos though. Well we could have, the guy who Tipple Fatal had originally asked to show us around was not there and when she asked the guy Tipple Fatal was told no photos. But when we met up with him after the tour he said photos would have been okay. Such is life.
The guided tour though was great. I love big chunky machinery and you could not get bigger and chunkier stuff than what we saw. It was massive. Machines that took up whole sheds. Giant buckets that could lift eight hundred tonne of molten steel at a time. Huge presses and cooling beds. Machines that walked. Machines that pressed. Machines that rolled. It was in incredibly impressive complex.
It was also kind of sad. Our guide for the unofficial tour told us of how years ago his best friend had died when an ingot of hot metal dropped on him and killed him. How another guy had been fried to death by hot metal. How many more men had been left without work when the mills closed down. But one of the more modern mills in the plant was being re-opened to deal with recycled metal. It would mean jobs for St Louis.
After leaving the stele works we drove down the river to the abandoned Armor paking works. This is where we met up with David from Forgotten Detroit who was down for a couple of days visiting. He was later to pick me up in Chicago and drive me across to Detroit.
The abandoned buildings in StLouis are some of the very best I have seen. The Armor building in particular impressed me. The building was literally covered in vines and trees. There were trees growing on the roof! The machinery inside was both massive and stunningly impressive! The place was awe inspiring. I was well and truly impressed. I particularly loved the light in the place. Rarely do you get such good lighting conditions in abandoned buildings. They are usually dark places where it is hard to take good photos.
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