07.27.24
Cementland, St. Louis, MO

‍

‍

Michael Allen is a Professor of History at West Virginia University who served as the Executive Director of the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois, from 2022 to 2024.

‍

‍Daniil:

Do you go to a lot of abandoned sites?

‍

Michael Allen:

It became more a part of my professional life. I don't do quite as much, but I still do a little bit. But from 2002 to 2010, I went a lot, and there were so many more opportunities. A lot of the buildings that have been converted into housing or schools, hospitals, office buildings downtown were abandoned in those days. It's kind of a golden era.

The Foundry was actually one of the abandoned buildings I could never figure out how to get into over the years it was abandoned. It was always locked way too tight. And it's one of those sites where they would weld metal over the openings, so you really couldn't pop in. Most sites are not very well secured in St. Louis. Buildings are really easy to get in.

Where I'm headed in the Appalachia, around Pittsburgh, there'll be plenty of abandoned factories. Starting a new chapter in my UrbEx.

‍

Daniil:

What are your thoughts on UrbEx generally?

‍

Michael Allen:

I've watched UrbEx be a gateway to getting more involved in positive change in the built environment. Not every UrbExer becomes an architect or an activist or a historian, but I do think it’s a gateway for a lot of people to take their casual interest in material connection with the past further. UrbEx strengthened my interest in becoming an architectural historian, which became my career path. I was already going to buildings because of that interest.

I think you have joy and wonder and emotional connection when you're exploring freely, and the sense that the whole city belongs to you. Because you don't have to pay; you don't have to do anything. You just pop through an open window, and you have a four story school or a hospital to explore, and all the records left behind and all this evidence of history. That feeling makes me super excited about history and being a historian. Me and my friend Kyle Lansing, we first met on the roof of an abandoned meat packing plant. He's now a demolition and salvage professional, who uses his knowledge of what's safe and what isn't when crawling around abandoned buildings to rescue pieces of buildings, and also to tear them down.

I think it's an activity that encourages curiosity about other people, invisible people, people who are gone, people you're not ever going to meet, who have left their marks in these places either through the built forms or the records. I think the world needs more curiosity.

I know a lot of preservationists are against it because they see it as a path toward vandalism, exploitation. They say UrbExers leave an open door that was once closed, or they break a window, and then other people with ill intentions come in, and the buildings get burned down, or something like that. But I think those concerns are overrated, and I think most abandoned buildings catch fire from fires set by homeless people who are trying to keep warm. I don't think UrbEx is really the root cause of destruction. I think it's actually quite the opposite.

‍

Daniil:

An architect we talked to said she feels that tagging specifically makes future restoration work tougher in these abandoned sites. And tagging might go hand in hand with UrbEx.

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah, the taggers are probably less interested in the wellbeing of places. They want a canvas to come in and do their work, and they're probably not as worried about somebody else using the hole they made to come in and set the place on fire.

But I also think graffiti draws attention to buildings. It's made me pay attention to buildings I might not have noticed. And sometimes, it's made me an advocate for preserving those buildings. So it's part of the underground economy of using these places. I may be leaning a little more in the anarchist direction here. In the absence of maintenance, care and any utility, I don't really see why us doing an interview here, or people popping in and taking pictures, or somebody coming in to tag—I don't see how any of this is harmful.

And the real harm is this company that bought this place with no plan for it and is letting it sit here to rot after Cassilly put all of his touches on it. And then their real intention is ultimately to destroy the place. So they actually wouldn't mind if we set it on fire. It would save them some money.

‍

Daniil:

Were you aware of the Cementland project when it was happening?

‍

Michael Allen:

I was. One of the reasons I never visited is that so many other people did. So I've seen photos over the years. It felt connective.

Cassilly had a few similar ideas. At one point, he wanted to convert the old St. Louis Arena south of Forest Park, which got demolished in '99 for office parking. It had a shell type roof, and he wanted to make it look like an anthropomorphic turtle and do some kind of a weird aquarium inside. And then there was an abandoned sugar refinery building on the North Riverfront, really tall. Actually, the tallest building in St. Louis until the Wainwright was built. It was built in the 1880s. It caught on fire, and the city was like, "We're going to knock it down immediately." And he said, "No, I want to keep it as a ruin and do something creative." Maybe put some housing in it, but leave the bottom holes the firefighters made in the walls. And so I think he was building up to something like this, to actually have the entire built site as the sculptural medium. City Museum, of course, embraces that. But I think City Museum had to adhere to certain standards of safety and usability, and I think he was always like, "I want to just play with a ruin."

So I was very, very excited. He picked the right place and the right location. And it's also a stand against wasting these places. Like okay, the cement plant is long closed. It's never going to be functional again. It's in the middle of this isolated area, but it still has aesthetic and social value. I think his long-term goal was to make it accessible, which I guess kind of worked because people come here, right? I love that even if Bob had finished it, it might not be actually much different than it is right now. So we're kind of fulfilling his vision by being here.

‍

Daniil:

I think some of the crew members we've talked to would disagree on that. But that's where we're coming from with the project too, that it still functions as an active public art site, essentially.

‍

Michael Allen:

Oh really? So they think the vision was never finished, and that coming here and hanging out isn't really honoring that?

‍

Daniil:

Right. And obviously they've invested so much labor into it, and seeing it in this entropy state is hard.

‍

Michael Allen:

True, and everyone has to be cognizant that this is where Cassilly died. It's a sacred site as well. I want to honor that.

‍

Daniil:

Do you know much about the Missouri Portland Cement factory itself?

‍

Michael Allen:

Just a bit. I know Portland cement wasn't widely used in construction in the US until after the 1870s, and not common in building construction until around 1902. So this plant, a lot of it dates to the 1920s, the earliest part. So it's at this really early stage of the industry where Portland cement becomes a miracle for cast concrete and reinforced concrete construction industry. And especially for bridges. Before 1905, most concrete lacked the durability and binding nature of Portland cement. And so the spans of bridges had to be short. We couldn't build the Poplar Street Bridge with that concrete and have it be safe. You couldn't build silos like that. So this was a revolution in construction, and this company was a major player in supplying that material to buildings and infrastructure projects in St. Louis. So a super important site in building history.

‍

Daniil:

Did you and Bob interact much through your National Building Arts Center work?

‍

Michael Allen:

Not really. Larry Giles and Bob Cassilly had a very strange history. They were best friends for a while. When Larry came back from Vietnam, he ended up settling in Soulard, and Bob was holding court over in Lafayette Square. He and his wife bought the Caroline Mission from a group of catholic sisters, and then he bought the bar at Park Avenue and 18th Street that's now Square One Brewery. It was Bob's bar, and he built that courtyard that's over there in the back of the bar. He was a champion of rehabbing and salvage, but he wasn't as skilled as Larry and as dedicated. So Larry was one of Bob's mentors. Bruce Gerrie was a third figure in all that. Bruce was friends with those two, and they were friendly until a couple of interpersonal dramatic situations that put considerable distance between Larry and both Bruce and Bob, who remained collaborators.

There had been a dispute over the transfer of the St. Louis Title Company facade and entrance to the Buder Building – both salvaged by Larry with funding from Landmarks Association of St. Louis. Landmarks directed Larry to release these artifacts to the City Museum around 1997, and the affair ended up in lawsuits. In the end, the artifacts made it to City Museum, although the Buder entrance never went on display.

In 2011, Bob Cassilly called Larry Giles for the first time since 1997 or '98 and left a voicemail on his answering machine, saying that he wanted to give Larry the Buder Building entrance back. Larry never called him back. He thought about it. He asked me if he should. I said, "You probably should." 

Two weeks after that, Bob died. So we have no real contact. We know Dave Jump a little bit. He's been to the National Building Arts Center, but he's not really willing to give us those materials back based on a voicemail from Bob from 2011.

I had met Cassilly about two or three times. One time when I worked for the Landmarks Association when I was young. I just moved back from Chicago, and he came and sat with me and my boss at a table, and he never said anything. He just listened and nodded and made facial gestures. He was so quiet. I was like, this guy's kind of weird.

And the other time was when my friend and I got to the City Museum late, and it was already closed. And he leaned out the window and was like, "You guys can figure out how to get in here. Tell them Bob says it's okay if you can jump the fence or whatever it takes. Play all night." And then he said, "Bye!"

So we never had close interactions. Bruce and I know each other pretty well though. I worked for Larry when I was 23 and then got involved in this project. So that created a little bit of a barrier because of the fault lines between those two. Hopefully they've worked it all out now in the heavens. But we're very friendly with the Cassilly Crew now. They've actually helped us a few times, and we've helped them. We're happy to bury any hatchet that existed and think about these legacies together rather than separately.

The two projects need each other. And they have very different kinds of energies, but they're very compatible. City Museum built a huge generational interest in preservation in the 1990s and the 2000s. It showed people what was possible with salvage. And National Building Arts Center is aiming for something more traditional, a little more of a scholarly approach than City Museum. But I think it's like yin and yang. It's one system in my mind. They send people our way, and we send people their way. And they are a model for us as we build out more of National Building Arts Center for how they've made that place approachable and fun. 

We can take a lot of lessons from how Bob did things, because Larry had all the knowledge, but Bob knew how to get people to let loose and have an unmediated encounter with something for the first time. And I think it's really necessary to get people excited. People drive by buildings and sites and don't even look at them. They walk by and they don't pay attention. Bob got people to pay attention. He made these forms and configurations that were uncanny and strange and got people to go, "What is that?" And made them take a closer look. So we want National Building Arts Center to be like that.

‍

‍

Daniil:

Can you speak a little more on the St. Louis salvage community at large, how it emerged and how it's looking like now?

‍

Michael Allen:

I think St. Louis is an unusually strong city when it comes to architectural salvage. For all the great losses and colossal failures of saving parts of Downtown, and the Northside continuing to slowly disappear without much of a care, St. Louis does have this preservation community really punching above its weight. Especially in the Central West End and Southside neighborhoods like Soulard or Benton Park, where a lot of the city reflects a passionate care for the past. 

And I think the salvage movement comes out of the neighborhood movements. If you can't save the houses and the places, there's this leap that people like Cassilly and Giles foster: that the actual parts themselves carry memories and are also important. So if the building is coming down, it's not the last chapter. There's still time to recover meanings and then repurpose the materials.

That salvage movement got really big. It was Larry and Bob and places like Fellenz Antiques and Riverside Antiques. And there were whole networks of private dealers in St. Louis that were very active in the seventies, eighties and nineties. A lot of them, including Larry and Bob, were reselling materials to people who were fixing up houses that were missing these parts or maybe just wanted to embellish a little and do something creative. There are other cities where this diversion of materials from the waste stream was happening, like Chicago, but the scale in St. Louis compared to the amount of depopulation forces acting against the city is pretty remarkable, pretty exciting, pretty inspiring.

And City Museum is a project that comes out of that ethos and builds this large case in the 90s. Bob moves beyond architecture to lab rat cages and funny bottles and airplane parts and school buses on the roof. It doesn't have to even have an aesthetic form or a historic association to be reusable and cool and creatively repurposed. And alongside is Larry's dream for a much more controlled and curated museum that would establish reverence for the labor input, the knowledge and skills to make the build environment. I think those are projects that wouldn't have happened without this groundswell of interest. St. Louis matters and every square inch of the city matters.

I think some of the salvage world has gotten more diffuse. There's nobody salvaging on the scale that Cassilly and Giles did. National Building Arts Center today is mostly accepting materials from other cities to fill in gaps in the national geography of its collection. Big shops like Fellenz in the Central West End have closed. Bruce Gerrie has been more focused on timber salvage recently.

There is more loss of the smaller pieces when buildings come down. Maybe there's some perception that so much of it has been saved already at City Museum and National Building Arts Center that we already have a lot of it. But I think there are still some needs there. And that's where Kyle Lansing has stepped in, and he's one of the people along with his partner Wayne, and then also Refab. They are trying to regenerate a culture around diverting materials out of the waste stream. And Kyle's pretty good at reselling materials, and his warehouse where he lives isn't piled to the rafters. He's also not trying to create a museum, and he gives a few things to National Building Art Center. But he finds he'll take down a whole terracotta facade, one story, in some small town in Illinois, and he can find a buyer for it who's building a counter in a beer garden or something, some brewery where they want to have a cool opening for the bar.

So I think that world is being rekindled, but I do think there was a cresting around the 90s and 2000s. Then losing Larry was losing a lot of the memory of how to do that work. And Bob, it was a lot of the imagination for what can be done with these materials once they're saved. So I'm glad to see a new generation, but one dynamic in all of that is that the construction and development world has been so fickle and indifferent to this work. It was mostly individual building owners that responded to saving buildings or repurposing materials. Creative bar owners or coffee shop owners that would buy something from Cassilly, Giles and their peers. But most developers today are interested in the cheapest and fastest prefabricated panels for five story apartment blocks. Even projects that are supposed to be preservation projects, like City Foundry, aren't really bringing in and repurposing old industrial materials. They're just putting in the same old glass facades and storefronts and the generic look that could be anywhere. Larry didn't amass 200 cast iron storefronts because he thought all of them should be in the museums. He amassed those thinking a lot of them would be repurposed in building new buildings, and the developers just don't get it. They didn't get it when these guys started in the 70s, and they still don't get it.

On the other hand, the developers made all that material available. If they weren't tearing down gigantic beautiful office buildings and theaters, there'd probably be no National Building Arts Center or City Museum. It's a bizarre antagonistic relationship. But it is sad that even when something new is going up, nobody wants a storefront or even a column. It's just something to connect to the past. One thing we would love to do at National Building Arts Center is to repatriate some of these objects to neighborhoods they came from. Our storefronts, we don't need them all. Some of them are from different neighborhoods: LaSalle Park, the Ville, Wells/Goodfellow. If something is happening in that neighborhood, a park or a new building, why not repurpose some or all of that so the place memory can come back?

Developers just don't want to spend the money. They don't want to go the extra inch. This, to me, requires something that never really quite happened: a more public impetus. There was an effort in the 90s for the city, the Cultural Resources Office's predecessor, to create a city program where the city was going to work with people like Bob and Larry to salvage materials and then make them available. Or even create requirements that if you're going to get city money to build in Soulard, you're going to have to put some element from this collection into the design. That fizzled out without ever becoming a law.

But maybe it should be that if you're going to go back into this neighborhood and building in this historic site, and there's an artifact from that site or near that site available, you don't get your tax abatement unless you agree to work with one of these collections and try to do something that puts the culture back. I don't think these big collections should stay static forever. I think after National Building Arts Center builds exhibitions, there's still going to be a lot of material that could do some of that work out where people live, shop, play, work.

Sadly, some of the offers that have come in are from weird projects out in the suburbs, where they do have extra money and extra time. They’re like, “Can we put paving bricks in Chesterfield? Can we put a cast iron column in the middle of this park and Creve Coeur?” Yeah, you can. But it'd be more fun to put that back where it comes from.

I'm optimistic because I think Kyle and Refab and others are really sparking that again. But there's got to be some way to budge for-profit developers to get them to think about these materials as valuable, and to do things that actually speak back to the place. I feel like there's entire parts of the city, like if you go to the intersection of Forest Park and Vandeventer with the Ikea, where it doesn't even look like St. Louis anymore. It could be Dallas. It could be Denver.

‍

Daniil:

Where did you and Kyle meet again?

‍

Michael Allen:

The Armour Meat Packing plant, which is long gone. It was blown up in 2016, actually. It was one of those projects where I got hired in the end. I got hired professionally to evaluate it for a possible historic site after spending drunk and non-drunk times there over the years, fucking around. They were like, “We need your credentials to evaluate the Armour Packing barn.” 

The first time I met Kyle, he was 16. I was 23. Neither of us thought we'd be considered upstanding men ever. Neither of us wanted a real job, and we were fucking around in abandoned buildings half the time. Now I'm a director of a museum, and he's on a panel at my museum.

‍

Daniil:

When the National Building Arts Center gets something donated, is it usually from demolition folks?

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah. Sometimes people like Ben [Mohrmann] will bring something over, or Kyle—"We think you should have this." Sometimes you gotta buy it from them, and sometimes you don't. But right now, we're not really ready, like Larry was, to go out and take a whole facade down or anything like that.

‍

Daniil:

Does a lot of salvage leave St. Louis?

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah. A lot of brick of course. And fancier items, like chandeliers and interior pieces, tend to get moved through big auction houses in places like Atlanta or in the West. One big collection of St. Louis memorabilia owned by a man named Greg Rhomberg is going to be auctioned this fall. He passed away a year ago unexpectedly. It's going to be auctioned in Las Vegas, because his family can get way more money out there than in St. Louis. They might get celebrity buyers to come in and buy one of the glitzy chandeliers.

There was once a salvage auction in St. Louis of the Ambassador Theater's interior in 1989. And most of the material stayed in St. Louis. It was actually a huge flop. The auctioneer thought he was a big shot, because he sent a personal invitation to Donald Trump at the Trump Tower. And Trump was a high flying developer. And they thought he would love all these gold chandeliers. Trump never showed up. But the Post had this article of like, "Will he or won't he?" And then when Trump didn't show up, everyone was really depressed. "St. Louis must not matter. He didn't even bother to come."

‍

Daniil:

I remember Kyle talking about them selling lumber from buildings that get demolished too.

‍

Michael Allen:

Lumber sometimes will go down the Mississippi by barge and get sold out of the port of New Orleans, or to Houston. Larry told me about one of the biggest lumber salvage projects in the 1970s, where all the lumber went to Japan to build new houses.

‍

Daniil:

Are those more one-off sales, or is there an established economy, where people make money selling lumber along the Mississippi?

‍

Michael Allen:

I think it is a pretty established economy. I think by the 2010s, Bruce Gerrie, who built the architecture museum at City Museum, was spending all of his effort on the timber, because the timber had the most economic value, and he stopped going after brick and terracotta and stone. He has a company called American Timber Salvage, and I think he makes really big bucks, and a lot of it goes into new construction. And his clients were in Colorado building ski lodges, and in LA building a big house in Beverly Hills. People wanting exposed beams or columns that looked rusticated. But then also planing mills just buy the longleaf yellow pine lumber. Some of these buildings from the 19th century were using virgin growth lumber, and you can't get wood that good anymore. So plain mills buy and cut it into other dimensions. There's still a life for all this material, but not enough of it stays local to fix our problems.

‍

Daniil:

As far as sourcing this kind of material and scrapping in particular, is there any sort of an ethics code for how folks can be doing that?

‍

Michael Allen:

Most of the salvagers that I know of operate with salvage rights they usually get from the demolition contractor. They don't go around harvesting abandoned buildings.

Whether or not there is anything unethical, I don't know. The brick theft issue is a big one. And I was involved in efforts to try to stop it from 2005 to 2012. And it was really, really bad in Near Northside neighborhoods like North St. Louis and St. Louis Place. And there were a lot of ethical debates. My primary reason was people were setting the buildings on fire to get the brick. People were doing offensive, crazy stuff that was causing potential harm to the next door neighbors of these houses.

But the idea of somebody stealing bricks from a building that Paul McKee wants to tear down anyway—I don't really blame the thieves anymore for what they were doing. I want to see the buildings saved, but if they're not going to be saved, some poor person in the neighborhood can get $250 a pallet. It takes hours to load up a pallet. It's grueling, backbreaking labor. And if a bank truck tipped over ,and a bunch of hundred dollar bills were laying on the ground, do you have the right to pick them up or not? Is it unethical?

The brick is a commodity. It has value in some of these neighborhoods. There's no meaningful work, no meaningful way to make that kind of money. So I don't know if that's unethical.

But in terms of commercial dealers, I think the ethical standard is to have rights, and not to come poach from another site, even if it's a demo site. Because really, you're taking money away from the demo contractors. And most of these demo contractors make almost nothing. It's the developers that they work for that make profit. The demo companies are breaking even on these jobs mostly. And a lot of their profit comes from reselling materials, especially brick. So the other end of the brick theft question is people were able to make some money that way, but maybe in the end they were depriving some of these family owned Black Northside wrecking companies of a legitimate income, tearing those same buildings down.

‍

Daniil:

At National Building Arts Center, I remember you talking about how in Sauget, on the Illinois side, the shipping logistics companies are expanding and replacing extractive and manufacturing industries. Do you see that as a trend on the Missouri side too?

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah, I do. I think these large sites are very attractive. The ones that are sitting vacant for warehousing and trucking. There's not a lot of manufacturing popping up in St. Louis, but St. Louis is still a very significant shipping connection point between rail, water, highway and airplane. But especially that water connection. We're a busy inland port, and so St. Louis, generally, has a lot happening on the river that most people don't pay attention to. And sites like this one, that are proximate to the river, are great sites for barge loaded commodities to be unloaded and distributed to trucking for inland delivery. So that's probably what this company thinks with this site.

I know that the company owns the property over on the other side of the river, but this is probably one of the more complicated sites to develop. The Workhouse would be easy to knock down and put up a warehouse building.

Some of these commodities don't even require dry storage, like coal or gravel or mulch. The big mulch piles and such just sit outdoors. So I still don't understand why they picked this site, other than it's close to the river. But the cost of redevelopment to me just seems really, really, really high. There are other sites on the Mississippi you could get your hands on for a lot less that don't require millions of dollars of demolition and environmental work.

Unless they're just doing so well and they bought it as more of a speculative investment. Maybe they're like, "We'll see what happens." It doesn't seem like they actually want to do anything to revive what Cassilly was doing though, right? It could just be a form of monopoly capitalism. Maybe they're just like, “We want all the possible sites along the river so that our competitors don't get their hands on them.” That could be the strategy. Somebody else could get this and have more money and do something with it. And if they hold it, nobody's getting to it. And it was only, what, seven hundred something thousand. So for a high profit company, that's probably not that much money to get to control this site. When it sold, I was surprised that Cassilly admirers didn't pull money together and try to buy it, because 700,000 is a lot of money, but it's also not a lot of money in real estate for a big site like this.

‍

Daniil:

This is a very different kind of industry coming into a previously already industrialized site. Compared to old manufacturing facilities, what sort of architectural traces do you think are shipping companies leaving now?

‍

Michael Allen:

It's just big fenced, paved lots. When you fly in and out of Lambert, you see a lot of that. Sometimes there's a warehouse, and sometimes there's not. It's very minimal end use. The lack of buildup of that kind of an operation shows that even though these companies are making a lot of money, the land holds low value, because something more productive isn't happening there. Something more capital intensive to build. It costs almost nothing to buy a flat piece of land, knock down old buildings and pave it and fence it.

If you remember the game SimCity, if you got that happening in your city, you knew your city was in trouble. Your hotel would get torn down, and then it would be just a parking lot. And that's a distress sign. In downtown St. Louis, there are so many parking lots. And that's a sign of unhealthiness. That's a sign that the land values have dropped, because something higher and better is not happening. So to me, it's not a desirable outcome. If I were a city leader, I wouldn't want to see what they're planning here to happen. I mean, it's not going to be Cementland ever again. But a cultural site, what Bob was trying to do, ultimately generates more value and more impact on the community than fencing this off and piling mulch and gravel and having trucks coming in and out all day to ship the stuff to St. Charles or Nebraska or Texas, or wherever it's headed.

‍

‍

Daniil:

Are there other examples of artistic architectural interventions in industrial spaces around the Rust Belt in the vein of Bob Cassilly's work that you're familiar with?

‍

Michael Allen:

There's nothing on this level. There are some historic sites that have tried to provide access and preserve industrial ruins. One of the closest ones is actually a public park, the Iron Works in Joliet, Illinois, where the county park district acquired the site. And there's a trail that goes through the footings of a 19th century ironworks, which are pretty ruinous, and some of them are kind of hazardous.

There's another, an old steel foundry site on South Shore of Chicago. There've been many ideas floated in places like Cleveland and Detroit, but nothing seems to have ever come to fruition. There's Silo City in Buffalo, New York, that has some ruins. There's a grain silo where you can play a piano at the base of it. But all these are really small compared to Cementland.

There's a lot of precedents in other parts of the country or the world. Gas Works Park in Seattle, designed in the 70s by the landscape architect Richard Haag, is a big deal. And then Duisburg-Nord in the Ruhr valley, the steel working valley in Germany, became this big park very similar to Cementland with concrete ruins and recreational spaces and even sports fields stuck into it. But that was paid for by the government of Germany, a multimillion dollar project. I'm not aware of anything where somebody just personally started doing it on something of this size. Smaller things, like churches or schools. But this is unprecedented.

‍

Daniil:

Are there other practical ways to reuse this kind of industrial infrastructure in St. Louis?

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah. I really hate to give any real credit to City Foundry. But it shows people that you can take an industrial site, and I would argue one not even very scenic or very pretty compared to Cementland or National Building Arts Center, and you can make it accessible in a very generic way. It's a mall. Here's your mall; it's doable.

There's the Foundry in St. Charles, the art space on Main Street. That's really cool. They've just kept open the space of this railroad car foundry, and people can have access. There's going to need to be big imagination because it looks like US Steel is going to potentially close the entire Granite City Works. And that's a site to work on. Bob Cassilly would've loved a challenge like that.

‍

Daniil:

And what's your issue with the City Foundry?

‍

Michael Allen:

To me, it's a very unjust way of development. 55% of the budget came from taxpayer subsidies. It's a money transfer into the hands of developers. The actual use is fine with me, although it's a little too clean, sanitized for my taste. And their food hall, they poach local businesses out of storefronts. Businesses moved off of Cherokee and out of the Central West End to be there. So to me, it's like the government gave them a giant magnet, and they pulled vitality and activity out of other neighborhoods and put it all in one place. It's a fortress with a parking lot. And suburbanites can come into the city and say, "We went to this industrial foundry."

But it's fine. It shows that the building didn't need to be torn down. It has value. So I'm okay with that principle. And they kept some of the foundry aspects, some of the machinery and some of the grit. But it's pretty clean. It doesn't really show you what happened there. It actually obscures the real past, because it's too perfect and too functional. It doesn't raise any questions. It's a foundry, but it doesn't really get you to ask, "Well, what did they make? What kind of foundry is it? What is a foundry?" No, it's just this old industrial building full of expensive popsicles and Indian food, and you take your grandkids there on a Sunday.

I think a site that's a little more raw and ruinous gets people more curious. It leaves things. It doesn't really have a seamless image. It's broken. It's literally broken. And I think that gets people to ask questions and start thinking a little more deeply than polishing it up.

‍

Daniil:

An architect we talked to recently spoke about trying to work with nonprofits on housing development projects for some industrial buildings in St. Louis. That didn't seem to go anywhere, but what do you think about the potential for housing in these former industrial facilities?

‍

Michael Allen:

There's definitely a lot of potential there. Housing is always a good use in my book, if it's affordable to people. There are multi-story warehouses, but there are also small industrial buildings, like ones on the North Riverfront if you go east of Crown Candy. There are ones that aren't quite this big that are sitting there, that could be demolished.

The big buildings could be multifamily apartments, and the little buildings could be a single family home. There's a little steel foundry on 9th Street. There's old warehouses and machine works. It doesn't need to be a big building to be part of our industrial history. And a lot of the companies that really built St. Louis' building trades industries were small suppliers that would supply a certain kind of a part to a bigger company like this one. And that's part of the heritage too. But the developers tend to be more excited by the bigger scale, because the bigger the building, the more profit, the more return they're going to get. But most small scale sites are important too.

National Building Arts Center is big, but for a foundry it's actually small and tucked away. It's not exactly a site that preservationists were interested in. And so for Larry to pick it and decide to work with it is really cool to me, because he saved a type of foundry that there used to be a lot of, and now there's only a few. It caught his eye, and he saw that the mundane, the ordinary is really the big story. You don't have a giant country of 300+ million people and these big industries with a single big company. It's a whole ecosystem. And it's a lot of the same kind of foundry. If you go through the Pittsburgh area, you'll see the same configuration of steel foundry times twenty.

That's what it takes to build a big nation and keep it going. So each one of those foundries is integral to that story. Unfortunately, in the end, most of them will probably be lost. So anything like what we see at Cementland or National Building Arts Center, even the City Foundry, is keeping one more of those sites from disappearing forever. And as America's economy is headed toward this AI hellscape post-labor future, manufacturing is disappearing. Not even these kinds of facilities are disappearing, but manufacturing as an American activity is disappearing. And these sites can teach people that we're actually capable of providing for ourselves. And maybe we should be making more things here in the US and employing more people, and maybe turning everything over to robots and AI is not a healthy direction for the future. Unless we all have universal basic income.

And of course, all the AI requires so much carbon. It's going to kill the planet. We're going to kill all the jobs, and nobody's going to have any money, and the planet is going to die. You couldn't ask for a better doomsday. Hopefully, the AI stuff is not the future. I hope people see through that. New people in charge too. New consciousness.

‍

Daniil:

With making something like this into affordable housing, do you think cleaning up hazardous materials would be a cost barrier? You've talked about there being materials at National Buildings Arts Center containing asbestos.

‍

Michael Allen:

Yeah. That material could stay, but as you know from coming over here, it tends to crack and fall, and then the asbestos content could be breathed. So ideally, we would reclad all of those buildings.

‍

Daniil:

Having seen Cementland now, what’s your impression?

‍

Michael Allen:

I should have done this sooner. Maybe it's even better I waited right before I left, to keep St. Louis in my heart. But it also gets me ready for the post-industrial world out there that I'm going to start exploring. Maybe I'll see a site like this that will capture my imagination. Or maybe I'll find some weirdo out there working with an abandoned plant. Not unlikely. Maybe there's a cousin to this project. The land out there is even cheaper than it is here. I'm like, maybe I'll buy one of these abandoned factories.

Daniil:

Part of the appeal of Cementland that we've heard some people express is a nostalgia for both the American industrial age, but also for handmade craftsmanship at the same time. And I don't think I completely get how those two coexist. Because I would imagine the sort of manufacturing Missouri Portland Cement was doing would replace a lot of that craftsmanship.

‍

Michael Allen:

And they're making bulk product. They're not making pieces of bridges here. They're making the bags that go out to the people who are making that. I think that kind of nostalgia is cute, but it misses the real history. Which is that a lot of this history actually is ordinary people making the same bag of cement over and over again here, that then goes out to the people who are doing things with their hands and making more of the form based and shape based work, and building buildings and sidewalks and infrastructure. So behind the romance of the hand is a lot of other hands.

In our narrative of labor, sometimes we overglorify this idea of craft. A lot of people just came in here and clocked in eight hours a day. And there were the ones who pressed the button that opened the bag, and somebody else pressed the button that filled it, and somebody else sealed it, and somebody drove the truck. You can't have a society without all of those people. So to me, maybe our romantic vision needs to be more egalitarian. And maybe this idea of the mundane or ordinary labor is also okay. It's okay to be one person who does something 20 million other people do. You're not that special, but collectively you are keeping the wheels on society. From this one plant came thousands of buildings, bridges, airport runways. So much of modern society could be generated from one place.

And the handcraft is cute. It's a lovely image. But I think of just how much of the world was changed by this one place, and how big that scale is. And that's way beyond the hand. That's way beyond the eye. American history has often got an individualist frame on it and I push against it. I like the collective.