Month: June 2012

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The Vagaries of Power – Venice Power Plant Demolition – McKinley Bridge, St. Louis / Venice

I don’t specifically remember seeing this building in my childhood as I crossed the iconic McKinley Bridge, often with my dear Uncle Virgil. That is perhaps because at that time McKinley bridge demanded all of the terrified attention of a child, with its “outrigger” lanes added as an afterthought to the outside of the main bridge structure and its two-way-head-on-collision-waiting-to-happen traffic down the narrow middle. Each time one crossed the driver had to pick his poison, and pay for the privilege, it being a toll road.

Sometime after the bridge was closed and reconstructed and reopened in 2007, I began to take notice as this building was being prepped for demolition. Yesterday on my bicycle ride across the beautiful bike lane of the renewed bridge, I noticed that the demolition had made great strides and I stopped to take some pictures.

The scene below me was amazing. In some ways the cranes looked like miniatures. And one of them was parked right in the belly of the building. It was the building itself that was perhaps the most interesting, packed full of intricate structures like an organism being dissected. And all around the yard huge metal structures which had been removed and sorted looked like strange internal organs.

The building itself was once the Venice Power Plant, most recently operated by Ameren, which once was a coal fired plant and more recently was converted to oil and natural gas. And though it is sad to see such an old building demolished and have its architecture lost, it will be good to have that land restored, as I found that at least parts of it, and perhaps the whole, might be considered a brownfield site. And it seems like the folks at Spirtas are getting on with it.

I hope you enjoy the pictures. Be sure to enlarge the last one to see the arch and one pylon of the new bridge spanning the Mississippi in the background.

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Baby leviathan – Common snapping turtle – St. Louis Riverfront Trail

Last evening riding along the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, a rather exotic combination of natural riparian zones and industrial landscapes, I found this little guy in the middle of the trail, right in an industrial area and on the wrong side of the flood wall.

I call him only a baby leviathan, because he seemed to be a juvenile, and as a common snapping turtle he is a true junior compared to the true leviathan of American waterways, the alligator snapping turtle. It was rather hard to tell what sort this was, but thanks to Wikipedia and this helpful page, I believe I have got my chelonian.

Shortly after I happened on the scene a lady with a dog and a gentleman in a truck with more extensive knowledge of turtles also arrived. He said when it gets up on its hind legs it is just about to, well, snap. The lady with the dog wanted the critter back in the water, and so he got his gloves and put him in a sack promising to do so, though I would not really blame him if he might have been rather tempted to taste some of the purportedly “seven different meats of a turtle.”

I have heard that snapping turtles are holdovers from a far distant time in Earth’s history, and getting up close and personal with this one with its almost alien or dinosaur-like scales and bumps I have no difficulty in believing that at all!