South of the Arch and hard by the Mississippi sits and old industrial area, mostly vacant now. There were well-advanced plans for a multi-use redevelopment using some of the buildings in the background. Something over a year ago intense fire swept through the structures with the now-blank windows. The future is unknown.
This modern building in downtown St. Louis is in an approximate tie for the tallest in town and has by far the greatest amount of floor space of any in Missouri. It was once the world headquarters of AT&T. It has been completely vacant since 2014.
The anti-trust break-up of the original AT&T years ago led to the creation of regional "Baby Bells" (as in Bell Telephone). St. Louis was headquarters of Southwestern Bell. The Baby Bells started to merge with and acquire one another, with Southwestern Bell in the lead. It then bought the rights to the AT&T name and eventually moved the headquarters to San Antonio.
The building sold in 2006 for $205 million with a leaseback to the phone company. I have read that it is hard to redevelop because it was built for a single tenant. It resold last spring for $4.1 million to an ambitious but much smaller developer. There is a proposed plan to turn it into a "vertical city" with apartments, office space and a hotel. I haven't heard anything further.
As I say here from time to time, we used to be somebody.
Sometimes we all experience photographic brain drain and have to go back to old themes. This is an example. Click here to see where this image first appeared on STL DPB. The building you see in the two-year old photo has been visually spoiled. Someone was going to redevelop it and put up a big sign. The plan crashed with the recession but the sign remains. The painting on the left door has been defaced with graffiti scrawl. Yet this beatific hippy still blesses the White Castle across the street, the one in yesterday's post. The White Castle has been remodeled and there is always a line at the drive-thru. It's a little meditation on the fate of ordinary American cities.
