UrbEx: St. Louis

Most cases of urban exploration are regarded as illegal activity in the U.S., as they violate various laws that differ across the states. For Missouri, as of 2017, the maximum penalty for trespassing in the first degree is a fine of $500 or six months in prison.

The manner in which a person chooses to carry out exploration can also increase the severity of penalties: for instance, carrying illegal substances, wielding weapons, exhibiting uncooperative behavior if caught, or damaging property may intensify the consequences for any urbexer. Property damage in particular can be broadly applied to many situations. Moreover, urban exploration is not risky just for legal reasons. A wide range of outcomes can damage the health of any urbexer. Broken glass, rabid animals, asbestos, lead, rotted wood, falling debris, and countless other conditions may quickly end an exploration.

We recommend that our readers become familiar with local laws and possible dangers, accept the chance of legal action, and recognize that urbexing is a hazardous adventure. It is not the duty of this publication to teach urbexers how to stay safe and free, or even to inspire urbexers to dig deeper into a world of abandoned places.

UrbEx takes no responsibility for the actions of our readers, and only point to the warning offered here and throughout our advisory pieces. Still, the photographs, interviews, and articles presented in this publication should not seminally influence the act of urban exploration.

If they do, however, tap into a buried need to take risks and uncover the forgotten, so be it.

Contents hollow city 1 first experience 9 sk8 liborius 14 sub-urban explorer 23 cementland 25

HOLLOW CITY A HISTORY OF ABANDONED ST. LOUIS

Imagine a borderless sea of weeds, trash, broken glass, chipping paint, rotting wood, and falling bricks— a body of land plots and buildings that have putrefied for years, an urban underworld.

Now, imagine graceful white pillars; lovingly plotted gardens of coneflowers, lilies, hyacinths; clean, glassy ponds; gleaming, well-oiled bridges; and miles of bright green slopes. Picture the brightest and busiest outdoor hub of a small Midwestern city. One of these places is bigger than the other. Can you guess which?

Just two years ago, there were more than 7,500 abandoned structures in St. Louis city. The number has grown exceedingly since then. It is estimated that the Land Reutilization Authority, a city-mandated organization, currently serves as a “repository” for more than 11,000 St. Louis city land plots and/or buildings.

Established in 1971, after St. Louis’ population had begun to decline exponentially, the LRA legally owns many of the abandoned structures in the city. Land is determined to be abandoned and is ‘owned’ by the LRA if a property’s taxes have gone unpaid for years, and if the city is unable to sell the property after foreclosure.

IF ALL THE LRA’S PROPERTY WAS LUMPED TOGETHER, IT WOULD BE LARGER THAN FOREST PARK. But how did this come to be? What chain of events has emptied out entire neighborhoods in St. Louis and has driven hundreds of families and businesses away, into the county or even further, over the latter half of the 20th century?

The problem is rooted in several complex and intertwined factors, including racial division, stupid politicians, and national economic downslides—things that most St. Louisans are aware of, though they may not have an understanding of how deeply these problems have affected the city’s landscape.

One place to begin when tracing the decline of St. Louis’ population is the phenomenon of monopoly men who moved in from the coasts to take control of growing Midwestern industries. This is most obviously seen in their complete control of the city’s waterfront, the most opportune crossing point of the Mississippi.

Progress in St. Louis halted because iconic and powerful financiers were discouraging people from sending their goods through or traveling to St. Louis by constantly raising the price of crossing their bridges and ferries.

AT ONE POINT, ONE MAN CONTROLLED THE ENTIRE ST. LOUIS WATERFRONT, HIS FERRY COMPANY WAS THE ONLY FERRY COMPANY – AND THE ONLY WAY ACROSS. A farmer on the other side of the river said of his company that it “was not only a terror, but a real vampire, sucking our very lifeblood.” Later, when there were other alternatives, such as bridges, the cost of use for motorists and railroads rose even higher.

Notably, the governor of St. Louis’ Federal Reserve Bank branch, Rolla Wells, supported these high tariffs, fares, and tolls.

But the rest of St. Louis City fought to end the monopolization of the railroads, the meatpacking industry, and other sources of growth for the city. For a time, the taxpayers owned the Eads bridge, then nicknamed the “free bridge.”

Between World Wars I and II, the momentum continued. A series of federal acts, such as the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, worked to allocate the power of massive corporations to smaller businesses. Other acts passed during this time kept specific companies in their respective cities, and prevented mergers with larger companies—including businesses in St. Louis. The 1920s and 1930s saw growths in market competition and an increase in the number of businesses that stayed local and continued hiring people in the city.

More businesses popped up in the city as competition increased.

There were more jobs. People began to move in from small towns for the chance to work in one of the Midwest’s fastest-growing areas.

But what do bridges and meatpacking businesses from decades ago have to do with the thousands of abandoned lots that have become a pastime for curious trespassers—and an opportunity for others?

Because this strangling of St. Louis’ economic growth is a pattern.

We are always on the verge of inviting that vampire back inside, giving him permission to take what is not his.

It happened again in the 1970s.

An economic movement of promonopolization started in D.C., and policy began to once again support massive corporations, low competition, and constant mergers. The Airline Deregulation Act, passed in ’78, effectively decapitated two growing airlines in St. Louis; TWA, which was based in St. Louis, was about half a billion dollars in debt when it was forced to go private years later. The Justice Department relaxed its rules about punishing companies for moving bases or merging. It is difficult to estimate how many jobs were lost.

IN THE 1960S, ST. LOUIS HAD ABOUT 750,000 RESIDENTS. BY THE 1990S, THE CITY HAD LESS THAN 400,000.

The interesting thing is that the buildings that were abandoned and demolished, or abandoned and then taken over by the LRA, were not just ‘left over’ from the years when St. Louis was at its peak. Many were constructed because the city was expecting to continue its rise in power, in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

The city was seeing a response to more localized economic growth brought about by the depletion of industry monopolies.

More jobs meant more people, which meant the city needed more houses, office buildings, post offices, parks, etc. And, as we all know, wartime causes people to push out babies like it’s the end of the world.

That meant the city needed more schools—a lot of them. The city would even need more warehouses and riverfront structures; the federally sanctioned Army Corps of Engineers stream-lined cargo transportation on the Mississippi.

Before the War even ended, the river’s annual cargo tonnage increased from 50mil to 110mil.

By the late 1940s, it looked like St. Louis might break through midsized mediocrity.

THE CITY WAS EXPECTING THE POPULATION TO BREAK A MILLION. Harland Bartholomew tried to warn them. The seasoned urban planner knew that the city was being too optimistic and interpretative when it came to other planning firms’ population projections for the next few decades. He wrote federal reports and academic articles about the faulty ratio-based formulas many other planners used to predict

growth, and how it really had no basis in all the factors that can hit a city. It makes sense—if your entire career as a planner is based on expansion and growth, wouldn’t you use fancy math to predict big numbers, too?

Despite this, white families were still moving out into the suburbs, for bigger yards and lower prices. The city tried to build massive housing projects to keep people in the city proper, but we all know how that turned out.

The city’s response of spreading out neighborhoods and building community buildings was what he called ‘peripheral expansion’.

He claimed that this premature utilization of space and taxpayer money would bring about something worse than the Great Depression, for St. Louis.

Then, of course, the economic downturn happened. Airlines, meatpacking companies, marketing agencies, breweries, and hundreds of other businesses were hurt by monopolies rising once again.

It seems that Bartholomew had a lot of foresight. He even predicted that the culturally accepted view of treating immigrants differently or negatively would push them out into the county. And with the economic downturns of the 60s and 70s, more St. Louis natives followed them. As more black families moved toward the central part of the city, and as the city decided to ‘revitalize’ that area, thousands of those families were pushed out by increasing costs as well as rental agreements designed to segregate neighborhoods.

Now, our reutilization agency is in control of more abandoned plots of land and buildings than any other city in the United States, including Detroit. We spend more to mow the grass on these abandoned lots than Detroit spends on theirs. But Detroit has started to own it—just look at their marketing campaign and fancy reutilized housing site. St. Louis has grown a bit in the past decade, and has demolished hundreds of buildings of late, but vast stretches of the city are still hollow, still sucked dry.

AND HERE WE ARE.

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.�

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I explored an abandoned women’s juvenile prison.

I turned a corner, and at the end of a long, dark corridor, there was a person just standing there, looking at me. Scared the shit out of me. Then, I realised he was a cardboard cutout and I knocked him over.”

“We were checking out an old abandoned farmhouse. In the basement was a small wooden cage with iron bars with what appeared to the skeleton of a cow inside.”

“I went walking along an abandoned railroad line one night with a friend and heard a voice say “Choo-choo”. We spun around to see a smiling old man crouched in the bushes right behind us, staring from the shadows. Ran away as fast as we could.”

“We explored an old abandoned mud brick house as the sun was going down. I saw a rope hanging from a doorway and shined my flashlight on it to see that it was in fact a string of bird heads that appeared to be rather fresh.

Definitely some kind of witchcraft object. I felt like I heard footsteps at this point, so I ran the fuck out of there!”

“When I was in high school I went with some friends to check out an old house that had burned down. It was in a the middle of a field in nowhere, rural Missouri. Everything in the house was burned to a crisp except a single children’s book which looked brand new. Never been so unsettled in my life.”

Sourced from Reddit

ST. LOUIS IS HOME TO OVER 25,000 VACANT PROPERTIES

MY FIRST

URBEX EXPERIENCE I wanted to see a place that once lived and has since been forgotten.

There are others who feel the same way, people who gave me addresses and locations so I could quench this desire. But in my journey I became increasingly discouraged, driving from site to site to see the places that looked so beautiful in photographs demolished and flattened into empty lots often months before I got there. I had this fascination with the idea of going somewhere familiar that people used to gather until time and neglect had taken hold. I wanted to see a mall, a hospital, a school.

An abandoned Elementary School in North County offered just that. I could stand in classrooms filled with debris and graffiti, while imagining lines of children in desks facing the board. I could walk the hallways with shattered windows and overturned bookshelves and could hear bells ringing and students walking from class to class.

This place was a rotting memory.

We would later be told by more experienced explorers that entering the school was a mistake—that it had become a homeless den known for robbery and drug-induced violence. Not knowing this, we were ecstatic to arrive at the massive, three-story jungle gym.

We entered the school through a second-story window, one of the few that had not been boarded up. It was only about a six-foot climb, with the assistance of the main staircase and a conveniently placed inverted milk crate.

There was an inherent adrenaline rush and uneasiness that went along with doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing in a neighborhood you didn’t particularly want to be in. That in combination with the apocalyptic scenery, the rotting campus provided us an unparalleled feeling of adventure.

We followed the empty halls, often climbing over and moving large chunks of debris to clear the path ahead. At one point, my partner heard the uncomfortable sound of foreign footsteps, but brushed it off as paranoia. This idea that we were not truly alone was reinforced by an open room with hanging clothes, a set up tent and a cardboard sign that read “DO NOT ENTER.” We kept walking, treading more lightly now than before. During this time, we both heard the unmistakable sound of a closing door behind us. We decided it would be a good time to check out a different floor.

Eventually, we stumbled upon a roof access ladder, half detached with a rusted metal housing balancing a line of bricks just above your head. We dared each other back and forth to test it out, until I finally decided to take the lead. As we reached the top, a large blown out section of roofing revealed a massive city landscape that served as a reminder of the civilization that surrounds this forgotten relic.

As the sun went down, we realized we had gotten our fill, and we packed up our stuff, made our way back downstairs and climbed out through our secret window entrance to a confused audience of kids playing basketball across the street. As we stepped out of our urban wasteland and back into civilization, I wondered what else the world has forgotten about that still sits right next door.

“ I wanted to see a place that once lived AND HAS SINCE BEEN FORGOTTEN. ”

Don’t go alone.

Bring an object that can work like a doorstop… or, bring a doorstop.

Headlamps, masks for dust, and gloves are always helpful.

“Cigarettes are street currency.”

Park at nearby public places or in neighborhoods, not right in front of a structure.

High vis vests are not out of the question.

Never say that you are an urban explorer. Call yourself a photographer.

Always have an alibi for visiting a place, and always tell someone exactly where you’re going.

Don’t just rely on your phone’s light. Always have two or more sources.

If trying to crawl over some barbed wire, use a mat from your car, a heavy blanket, or a thick bathroom mat.

St. Louis’ first Skate Church

In St. Liborius,

a church piano becomes a tricky, steep, skate ramp. The high altar becomes a funbox. The cross perched on its crumbling bricks has been turned upside down.

At one point, the skate park was jokingly called the Church of Skatan. But as this place has become more than a series of ramps and stairs surrounded by stone columns and stained glass, the staff and volunteers try to move away from that name.

Instead, they call it by a name that is rooted in the building’s original purpose. This name has been painted throughout the building, on ramps, on walls, on propped-up wooden boards: Sk8 Liborius.

The skatepark used to be one of St. Louis’ largest German churches. Now, the gothic cathedral’s broken spire rises above vacant warehouses and old brick homes, blocks from the City Museum. Most of the exterior of the church was modeled after the famed Freiburg Cathedral in Germany— another Catholic cathedral of sandy red and beige stone, with sharp lancet arches adorned with circular panes of glass.

Just one photograph of the inside can reveal three different stages of life (and death) in this place.

But some of the stained glass has shattered, most of the plaster has chipped away, the alters and baptismal basin have been obliterated, and according to Joss Hay, a staff member, just two years ago the balcony in particular had piles of pigeon excrement that required a shovel for removal.

Every wall is covered in graffiti; every corner is piled with ancient wood and rusted metal. There’s loneliness in the peeling plaster, the piles of discarded building materials, the dirt, the broken windows covered by plastic, the absence of light. Pigeons flutter in and out of broken windows. The dust is pervasive. Here, we see what twenty years of abandonment can do to a beautiful place.

“In Scotland, we don’t tear down we constantly find new ways hospital might be converted into this case, a cathedral

The cathedral has become more than a place or a unique photo opportunity. It has become a community in its own right, just like the congregation that occupied it decades before it was abandoned.

And, in a way, Sk8 Liborius has become one of the biggest pieces of evidence that urban reutilization is a worthwhile goal since the City Museum, a former shoe factory turned into a nationally recognized attraction. The two even have some common threads; some of the steel fabricators who worked on the Museum have worked on the skate park’s features.

There are bright stained-glass windows, well-preserved columns, vivid icons above the altar, and massive biblical paintings between the arches that link the walls to the ceiling. Letting your eyes roam across this ceiling brings you back to a formal and traditional place of worship. And this is what the building was, from its construction in 1889, to its closing in 1992.

A Catholic school once operated here as well.

After being used for storage until 1993, the building was left to the mercy of nature.

And now, the lively, exorbitant slamming and scraping sounds of an active skatepark echo through the cathedral.

The graffiti here today is not random, or applied without welcome; many of the artists are active in local Midwestern festivals. In the church, all the art is chosen by the people who have worked to rein-

force the foundation, to put in the ramps, to sweep away the dust and dirt, to bury the animal remains, to patch leaks and fill in gaps in walls and cover windows and pull out rusted nails, to install bright and warm lights, to fill the space with the warmth of bodies and voices, to scare away some of that gnawing ancient feeling of a place that has been left to die.

Many of the ramps and stairs were repurposed out of the cathedral’s wood.

The volunteers, some of whom have become fulltime staff, used everything they could from the original interior.

From the slamming of boards and the smoothness of wheels against

From arrival, it’s clear that St. Liborius is a place of community.

On the left of the church is a women’s shelter called Karen’s Kitchen; this building used to be a convent, built 16 years after the church was finished. At the church’s right, set back from the street, is New Roots Urban Farm, a business that works to provide nutritious food and ecological knowledge to the neighborhood.

Sk8 Liborius and its surrounding structures around it are perfect examples of how buildings that have abandoned for years do not need to be completely written off.

The buildings and the materials inside them can be used to reinvent the community in unique ways.

the church complex over to him. It isn’t clear what the former parishioner hoped his friend would do with the building complex or the land, which may be why this investor immediately called on some other friends, many of them steel fabricators, for ideas.

Bryan Bedwell, chairman of the board of directors of Kingshighway Vigilante Transitions, has been hugely involved in raising money and doing construction work for Sk8 Liborius. It seems that he came up with the idea of building a skatepark within the church, after he and others had already begun to restore the building. In the early days, Joss says, Brian and his friends had to deal with “waterfalls of rain” and “heaps of dead animals.”

or just abandon our buildings, to use them. A 600-year-old an apartment complex, or in into a skate park.”

—Joss, Director of PR

the grain, you can hear how solid that wood still is.

The rectory on the right of the church, a building that is also being restored for nonprofit use, has some laid tiles from the cathedral’s original marble. One staff member remembered how much marble had already been stolen from the cathedral before they started to work on it. But the tiles that were left have been used for the rectory’s backsplashes and showers. Maybe, soon, someone will live there again.

It may take some money and a lot of work, but there’s no telling how much attention Sk8 Liborius will bring to St. Louis over the next few decades. An event hosted there last year was attended by Lil Wayne.

People have already begun to notice.

About six years ago, the church was legally in the hands of a former parishioner, an older man who volunteered at the women’s shelter next to the church. There he met another volunteer, an unnamed investor, and essentially signed over

According to Joss, it was Brian who ultimately suggested,

“Hey, let’s put in a skatepark, we’ll make money — and they believed him.” Some of the fabricators

who worked on this project also worked on the skate park in the City Museum, but visitors of the Museum will quickly learn that no skating takes place there. >>

But these ramps, stairs and rails, in Sk8 Liborius, are made for real skating, and much more.

Occasionally, as in most skate parks, the place falls silence in the random intervals between tricks and conversations. The silence is deafening, and even with broken windows and falling plaster, the acoustics are monstrous. That is why the cathedral is so great for music events, something the owners have capitalized on heavily in recent months. When a DJ sets up in main part of the cathedral, the sound is colossal. “You can feel it in your chest, inside you,” says Joss.

Sk8 Liborius has been hosting a lot of music events, lately. It is sometimes up to the artist’s discretion where they would like to set up, and there are lots of options. Some DJs choose to work at the top of the ramp where a sign used to say, in graffiti style,

“Sk8 Liborius,” until

the sign fell down from boards repeatedly slamming into it. They also had a day of yoga, hosted by one of the volunteer’s girlfriends.

In the past few years, the church has also drawn in many photographers who are fascinated by the apposition of crumbling plaster, graffiti, and stained glass. There are also the private groups and nonprofits who have paid to host parties and other events within the church. It seems reasonable

that as the building becomes more weatherproof and amenable, while still maintaining its old charm and the visibility of its many stages of life, the church will become host to much more.

Joss hints at Sk8 Liborius becoming involved with a nonprofit organization, similar to KHVT. It is not yet clear what the nonprofit’s mission is, but it is likely that it will mirror the community focus that Sk8 Liborius has already offered through its skate park. As the park’s volunteer base and staff grows, the cathedral becomes even stronger proof that revitalization does not have to mean completely starting over. Sk8 Liborius would not be Sk8 Liborius without the layers of history visible in the chipped walls and broken glass.

According to Joss, one of the next projects is to replace a fallen icon at the high altar with a painting of one of the skate park’s fabricators.

It appears that successful urban revitalization is just a matter of making a place your own.

(38.646839, -90.199681)

A mile-long canvas of ever-changing artwork across

a concrete flood wall where graffiti artists are free

to express themselves without fear of the law.

ST. LOUIS GRAFfITI WALL

Interview with a

“subURBAN” Explorer

Are there any buildings that you grew up around that have since become abandoned?

I grew up in Lake St. Louis, a middle-to-upperclass suburban area with a slightly “uppity”, Desperate Housewives type of reputation. Not typically the image that comes to mind when you think of abandoned buildings, but there are some weird derelict buildings scattered around the edge of the town. I have explored an old daycare, gas station, and sports bar.

How long were those places abandoned?

The daycare had been closed maybe 5 years before I visited it. I drove passed it almost everyday not knowing the state it was in. The gas station and bar, I’d say was closed up to 15 years.

I think it had been about that long since I visited, too.

Can you explain your experience revisiting these places as an adult?

A while ago I explored the gas station, a Shell that I vividly remember stopping at before playing Frisbee golf with my Dad and brother.

Then, it was busy like any other gas station righ t off the highway. Now, it’s empty and the Shell sign is covered in a “FOR SALE” banner.

Right next to it was a sports bar that I remember hating when I was young because it was loud and smoky—no place for a kid. Fast-forward 15 years, I found myself running off the property after hearing people yell and finding a belt… must be how addicts mark their territory. Still no place for kids. Several years before that, I stumbled upon the abandoned daycare while looking for interesting subjects for a black-and-white film project. I had no idea it was even there. Since I had never been there in my childhood, it wasn’t nostalgic like the other places, but it made me ask myself “why?”. How does a daycare not manage to survive in this ever-growing community? I think questions like these are what draw myself and a lot of other people to exploring these dead places.

How did it make you feel to be there?

All three of these places weren’t necessarily creepy, like an old abandoned psych ward would be. They were just odd. It felt kind of like these places were on pause from the rest of the world. All three locations still had things left inside them from when they were “alive”. Baby dolls, legos, and playground equipment were left unbothered at the daycare. Cases of mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup bottles were sitting in the entryway of the bar. The inside of the gas station was empty as though it was looted in an apocalyptic emergency, yet at the same time, it was immaculate and looked almost untouched.

What do you think killed those places?

The area has developed significantly since my childhood, and it happened really quickly. First there was a Walmart built, then came the Taco Bell and everything else that follows in the Midwest. A Target. An outlet mall. There are more elementary schools that have been built (and continue to be built) than I can keep track of. Because it happened so quickly, there was this weird shift that happened geographically, economically, culturally, and so on. This left the gas stations, restaurants, and small businesses on “the old side of town,”right next to extremely busy highways, juxtaposing the shopping meccas less than a mile away. Funnily enough, I have even seen some of these new stores such as the Sports Authority, Aeropostle, and Claires to bite the dust shortly after being established. I think of these dead places as cultural and anthropological artifacts, because lot can be learned about the current state of our country (and the world as a whole) by looking at the decline of these places and asking “why?”.

What do you think will happen to those three buildings overtime?

I have no idea. Lake St. Louis fines you if you store your trash cans in a place that is visible from the street. They fine you if your trees or weeds are overgrown… so I was always mystified as to why they wouldn’t just knock the buildings down, or atleast repurpose them. I think this is a question most people have regarding old unoccupied buildings. But... I don’t really want them to tear them down. I loved revisiting those places and see beauty in their state. Now that I’ve moved out of my hometown, I cherish those experiences even more, and I’m so glad they were still there for me to explore.

Photography provided by interviewee

information sourced from various archived St. Louis Post Dispatch articles

UrbEx: St. Louis is a collection of articles,

stories, interviews and photography with a focus on uncovering St. Louis’ less visible side, an abandoned wasteland that tucks itself within pockets of our city. The goal of this publication is to serve as a resource for those who find beauty in the derelict and hope in the rubble. UrbEx hopes to provide a feeling of adventure for the reader that emulates the liberating experience urban exploration offers to satisfy the curious and inspire the bold.

Enjoy the ride,

R.M.