by Michael R. Allen

Carondelet is the oldest part of south city, having once been a village independent of St. Louis founded in 1769 just a few years after the larger village to the north. Although integrated into the city limits by 1855, several factors have prevented Carondelet from being completely integrated into the fabric of the city. For the first thing, Carondelet carries with it its own unique character: small blocks that jar with the layout of the surrounding areas; stone houses that sit close to the street but aren’t laid out in neat rows of identical buildings; a sense of the Mississippi River’s immediacy that the rest of the city never feels. The construction of Interstate Highway 55 in 1956 effectively cut Carondelet and the rest of the south riverfront from the city, leaving a visual and pedestrian barrier. Yet Carondelet enjoys a relatively healthy life as a city neighborhood, and has a strange visual interest for many visitors because it looks different from other city neighborhoods.

Carondelet -- well, its southern part officially named the “Patch Neighborhood” -- also contains the largest abandoned site that is under the ownership of the city of St. Louis. The 40-acre Carondelet Coke plant has been owned by the city’s misnamed Land Reutilization Authority since 1989, when the Carondelet Coke owners defaulted on their loans and abandoned the property. The plant has been home to a variety of different polluters, from St. Louis’s utility monopoly Laclede Gas Company to the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, whose name is still imprinted on the plant smokestack. Laclede Gas opened the plant in 1916 for the purpose of coal gassification, which produced “manufactured gas,” a household fuel prevalent before the use of natural gas became prevalent. In 1950, Laclede sold the plant to the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, which converted it into a coke production facility. Coke is as coal by-product used in steel production. Great Lakes Carbon, by then owned by SG Carbon, sold the plant to Carondelet Coke in 1982, which continued coke production until 1987. After closing the plant, the owners of Carondelet Coke failed to pay $500,000 in taxes and an unsuccessful tax foreclosure sale occurred.

After the plant’s closure, the owners of Carondelet Coke seemed to have disappeared. An article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from early 1996 says that while Laclede Gas Company voluntarily agreed to pay $75,000 toward investigating the pollution at Carondelet Coke, the owners of Carondelet Coke and Great Lakes Carbon could not be found. According to the article, Laclede set aside another $225,000 to pay for further research, but intended to locate the other owners, whose operations were most likely more liable for the pollution at the site. The reliable Post-Dispatch never followed up on the story, but one can imagine that the pollution study was never published. A Carondelet/Holly Hills Landlord Association Newsletter from spring 2003 states that “Laclede Gas and SG Carbon have been determined to have been contributing contaminators and have agreed to be part of a voluntary clean up,” but doesn’t offer any citations. An issue of the Troubled Company Reporter states that SG Carbon has entered into a liability agreement with Laclede Gas and is making payments toward cleanup to the EPA.

Officials at the LRA act as if they know nothing about the plant, and certainly will not publicly disclose the contaminants present on the site. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that ammonia, phenol derivatives and coal tar may be among the contaminants that plague the 40 acres. None of this is as lethal as the pollutants sent up into the air by the plant in its operational days; according to the Environmental Protection Agency, emissions from coke ovens are probably the most carcinogenic industrial emissions with a 1/100 chance for developing cancer as a result of inhaling the emissions.

The site consists of mostly open space, but is marked by a set of red brick industrial buildings that are at once picturesque and sinister. I first visited the buildings well after 1:00 a.m., on a dark night after much rain had fallen. I had been working late closing the movie theater where I work, and had impulsively decided to go to the buildings when I got off work. I drove down alone, coming upon the abrupt dead-end of Reilly Street where some bright-yellow concrete barriers and piled branches keep vehicles from proceeding onto the plant grounds. I got my car stuck in the mud on the shoulder of the road and gradually became frustrated. I decided to walk down to the buildings before trying to get my car unstuck. Yet I couldn’t see any buildings around. Where were the pitched-roof buildings of the photos I had seen on the Internet?

I climbed over the concrete barriers and branches and walked about fifteen feet ahead in the dark. Garbage was all around: an old stove, strollers, and some wood. Over to the left I saw two tall old buildings and a smokestack, looming over the litter-strewn lands that were screened from the rest of the neighborhood on the north side by woods. The buildings looked menacing; I did not think that they would contain menacing people, but that they would be menacing themselves. After all, these buildings were home to some sort of industrial process that must have left the grounds so polluted that even demolition was prohibitively expensive. I walked a few more feet alone a path that appeared to be made of black stone, which on subsequent trips would reveal itself to be the remains of coal processed at Carondelet Coke. Then I heard something: a tapping, like the sound of a hammer striking a pipe, definitely coming from the upper floor of the tallest building. I paused to see if my imagination was racing as fast as my pulse. No, it was not, because I heard it again. I quickly turned around and walked back to my car. Thick fog was rolling in close to the ground, and everything seemed cloudy and scary. I left.

Within a week or two, I returned once again after dark when Angela gave me a tour of the place. This time, everything seemed quiet and curious. She showed me a crane that was part of the plant, separated from the buildings by active railroad tracks, perched on the edge of the Mississippi River like a bird that died waiting for its prey. We didn’t go onto the crane, but I saw enough in the night -- the lights of industry reflected on the river, the barges, the sad old plant as the backdrop -- to realize that this place had a beauty that was almost frightening. There was simply so many different places within Carondelet Coke: the rusting old interiors of the main plant buildings, the empty warehouse with its collapses second floor, the burned-out office building, the fields of trees and grasses, the river banks. That night I first realized that the thrill of exploring abandonment that I had experienced years earlier at City Hospital was a recurring desire, not simply a momentary attachment. I also discovered the underground social lives of abandoned places when we came across a group of teenagers who asked our permission to be there. I had not previously encountered anyone in the few abandoned buildings that I had explored. While the presence of the teenagers startled me a bit, I felt like I was taking part in a social experience that was both mundane and clandestine -- how often does that happen? The young folks were obviously curious and probably were following in the footsteps of the many underage drinkers who have made Carondelet Coke a popular, if frequently policed, hangout.

A few days later, I visited with my friend Christina in the daylight and fully explored the buildings and the grounds. Upon our walking into one of the main buildings, we rain into a solitary middle-aged white explorer who told us to be careful. He was walking around looking for scraps of metal, but somehow only carried one piece of metal each time we saw him later in the day -- a different piece each time. Christina and I fully examined the plant, which had a sort of benign warmth in the summer sun. The graffiti in the buildings had bright colors and lots of crisp angles, seeming jaunty rather than threatening. We ran into two preteen boys, one without a shirt, who were scrambling around the upper reaches of the tallest building, shouting mock insults at each other. One timidly asked for a light for his cigarette, which neither Christina nor I were able to provide. Not that he needed one at all; the daylight revealed white chemically-infused fibers blowing about in the buildings. Probably the remains of asbestos wrap insulation, or, if not that, even more harmful dust from the old coke furnaces. Certainly harmful to one’s health, although I did not get a sore throat that day or the following day. I still wonder how much exposure to the ecological horrors of Carondelet Coke are necessary before one’s chances for cancer increase. I noticed that the long wall-like row of buildings running on the east edge of the plant, right before the tracks, contained an underground space that led into the base of the smokestack. Walking through this space with Christina, I realized that this was the exhaust tunnel and that the wall-like structures had to be the main furnaces. Disgusting. Still, a few yards over across the tracks in the grassy field, healthy deer and snakes abound.

Yet the story I am telling here begins later than my first visits. The story begins with an afternoon phone call and ends, if there is to be a happy ending, on a screen in a theater near you. One might assume that I am hinting that Carondelet Coke made it into the movies, which is inaccurate. What happened in summer 2003 is that Carondelet Coke became the location for a short film before attracting too much attention, while at the same time I became an actor in the film before being fired. This story lacks the suspense of a late-night visit or the drama of exposure to pollutants, which shows that one can never safely predict what people will do at abandoned places.

One afternoon in June I am sitting at home, reading a book and enjoying the two or three hours I had left before having to report to work. The phone rings, and I pick it up to hear my sister Amanda’s voice. She is out scouting film locations with the filmmaker and Webster University professor Hong Zhou, and would like to know if I had any suggestions. After all, I had earlier promised top serve as location scout for the project. Having recently read his short script Dying for Franjibelle and also having recently visited Carondelet Coke, I put the two together and told Amanda that I had the perfect location for Hong. This was no joke, since one major scene of the script described an abandoned industrial area near the river set amid a semi-rural area. The Carondelet Coke plant, with its surrounding acres of grass and trees at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the River Des Peres, fit the bill entirely. Its harmful aura also served the script well, since Dying for Franjibelle is essentially a dark coming-of-age film involving the kidnapping of two young sisters after they inhale the scent of the hallucinogenic flower of the fictional “franjibelle” plant. Hong had earlier described to me his vision of making a coming-of-age film in which no girls had to lose their virginity or see their siblings die, such as in recent films like Rain, The Ice Storm or Blue Car. Yet he wanted the film to retain a fundamental comic darkness without becoming too scary or too silly. The gently threatening old coke plant seems like a good location for such a film.

So I tell Amanda and Hong to meet me at my house within the next half-hour and promise to take them to a good location. When we get there, Hong is impressed with my stories about the place but doesn’t immediately see the plant. We walk down the long way, following Espenschied Street east to the railroad tracks, catching a few glimpses of an outer building behind a rusty chain-link fence. I notice that the fence is broken by a newer gate, and see an LRA sign on the fence nearby. We follow the street’s bend at the railroad tracks, and end up standing right in front of the back entrance to the plant, near the burnt-out office building and the end of the row of furnaces. Hong is suddenly excited. We walk around the buildings, and Hong cannot contain his enthusiasm. I tell him the little I know about the plant and its past life. We walk across the tracks and down to the crane. Hong and I walk out onto the crane, while Amanda is more cautious. The metal decking is rusted and ridden with holes, but the overall structure is stable. I begin climbing stairs up to the top when I notice that Hong and Amanda are back on the riverbank, waiting for me. Hong’s enthusiasm is quick to start and runs quick. He tells me that he wants to return for a long day at the site. Out of nowhere, he says that I should write a feature-length script about the plant and the people who hang out there in its abandoned life, an enticing proposition. Most importantly, he says that the plant is exactly the location he needs. Unfortunately, I have to work through the next few days. I know that he cannot wait, but tell him to call me if he returns.

That is the last I see of him for a few weeks. Amanda tells me that Hong has returned with her, and they spent hours walking through each building. His excitement seems to have remained steady. Yet I sense some flaw in the plan. Surely something is going to go wrong with the use of Carondelet Coke. I had already had second thoughts about showing the site to a man who planned to bring eleven children actors down to this brownfield; obviously the place was about to be exposed to people who don’t regularly spend summer days at abandoned buildings. I felt as if I could be personally delivering the final blow to the site, the one that would shut it down to both the revelers and the amateur detectives. I certainly do not disclose site locations to people whom I know would exploit places and jeopardize the already-tenuous access that myself and a few others enjoy. Carondelet Coke, of course, is wide-open and fairly well-known, so showing it to Hong probably will change very much about it. Still, he will bring expensive equipment and lots of people there for at least eight hours at a time. Such actions attract attention because they are a bit unusual.

At least Hong and Amanda play it safe at first. At some point Amanda decides to seek a permit from the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) for use of the site, while Hong requests that I obtain a map of the site or prepare one. On one afternoon I head over to the LRA to get a map. Because I don’t know what the status of the permit is, I don’t mention it to the clerk. Instead, I claim that I am writing a history of the River Des Peres and wanted a map of Cardondelet Coke to study development at the confluence of the River Des Peres and the Mississippi. This being Saint Louis, a wetlands city that infamously snubs its waterways, the woman is suspicious because I claim to be primarily interested in rivers. I should tell her that I want to know about the abandoned buildings, because that would be more understandable here. She has no information anyway, and send me up one floor to the Community Development Agency’s mapping division. I meet with a map specialist there, and he invites me back into the warren of drafting tables and computers that serve as the mapping center of the city. But he has never heard of Carondelet Coke, and I have to show him where it is on a city map for him to track down the site by parcel numbers. He eventually prints an accurate map -- based on property tax records--showing some of the structures. I later discover that anyone can print the same map from any computer in the world with Internet access.

I take the map the next night to the Franjibelle crew, which has set up a set in an unoccupied dorm building at the private Thomas Jefferson School in south St. Louis County. Engrossed in setting up a camera, Hong brushes me off -- and with good reason. He is an hour behind schedule, and will end up filming a scene featuring two preteen actresses past 3:00 a.m. I leave the map with my sister, look around the school’s buildings a bit, and leave. Later in the week, Hong and Amanda arrange to meet me at Carondelet Coke in the early afternoon. They tell me that they have obtained a permit to use the site and need to stake out a shooting area. Although I should know better, I arrive on time and park close. After I park, a large truck carrying three men drives past me and enters the site. Then a large SUV comes up and turns around. I get nervous, but decided to walk around rather than wait by my car. I enter the charred remains of the office building, and head to the cool confines of its basement, stumbling over nail-ridden boards and ashen wood heaps. The floor is littered with old paper records, many scorched from whatever fire damaged this building. I end up walking around to the two main buildings and call my sister from a cell phone. She tells me that Hong is running late -- an hour late at this point. I walk around to the end of the largest of the two buildings and find a cinder-block, one-story building in a thicket of trees. The building contains one car, which appears to have been sitting around for a long time (deflated tires, spider webs) but looks like it might run. I emerge from the thicket and walk toward the plant entrance at the railroad tracks right as a police car comes through the pock-marked road that runs through the middle of the site. Confidant that the driver does not see me, I duck into some of the copious vegetation and promptly call Amanda. I tell her what’s going on. She calmly states that the LRA has informed her assistant production manager that a developer has just purchased Carondelet Coke and is preparing the site for demolition, and thus any entry onto the site by the film crew will be considered trespassing. Yet she advises me to wait where I am. As I watch the police car stop in front of my car for a minute, I decide not to take Amanda’s advice. I wait for the police car to disappear and then go over to my car to drive off.

On the way back, I drive down Espenschied and see a man sitting on a chair on the side of the street. I stop and ask him if he knows about the purported sale of Carondelet Coke. He says that he does not. I tell him about the film and ask him why the police would drive through the site in the afternoon. He replies that the police drive through at least once a day to look for illegal dumping, which happens at the site almost daily. This information is reassuring, but I cannot be sure. (To this day the police have yet to contact me regarding the presence of my car near the site. Perhaps they are waiting for me to return.)

I assume that Hong and Amanda are moving on to other locations when they start looking at live industrial sites near Carondelet Coke. Yet hostile factory owners and suspicious security guards send their thoughts back to the old coke plant, which beckons. Rather than tie up the production -- which is already experiencing crew burnout as Hong’s time schedule becomes rather generous -- Hong and Amanda decide to shoot on Carondelet Coke land regardless of LRA warnings (which are probably not true). On Friday, July 4, they set up and commence a day of shooting -- replete with eleven young actors, assorted crew, parents and equipment. Besides some kids shooting off fireworks on the plant grounds, no one seems to take notice of the film crew. The children acting in the film apparently aren’t scared or tempted by the decaying factory not too far from their riverbank location. The luck does not last long, though. On the next day, the police arrive after a few hours and calmly advise everyone to leave. Hong momentarily pretends not to speak English (he was born in China), but ultimately agrees and the crew packs up. I hear about this turn of events later, but am not surprised.

Within a week, Amanda locates a recently-abandoned quarry in Saint Charles. The place is compact in layout and is several blocks inland from the Missouri River, but it shares with Carondelet Coke a setting that is very rustic and partly isolated from neighboring buildings. There is a bluff and woods at one end of the property that screen the place from the rest of the city. Still, the quarry buildings are a humble substitute: some frame sheds and two orange-brown rusted tanks. The film continues shooting at this location and others, encountering no real obstacles but some unwanted attention. At one point, I am cast as the child-enslaving character Mr. Axel in a personal audition before Hong, who proclaims that I am very “cool” -- a genuine compliment that somehow leads to my being fired before any of my scenes are shot. Yet Hong’s inventive direction doesn’t seem to halt for a second when things change; he just moves on.

Yet the Carondelet Coke site does not move on; it continues to accumulate all sorts of things: trash, pollution, animal life and stories. Let this chapter be one more story to add to its store.

more writing ~ ecology of absence