MICHAEL ALLEN with CHEERAZ GORMAN + CHRIS KALLMYER
MA
The other issue is we are still exporting our brick, as some of you know. We are demolishing buildings. Although our rate of demolitions has never been lower in my lifetime than it is now. The biggest rate of loss was between 1970 and 1990. Bricks are leaving St. Louis legally and illegally. We’ve delved into the issue of brick theft, brick burglary.
CK
Are these folks from St Louis or from the outside?
MA
Lots of thieves are locals. They are people who have worked on demolition sites before, or have some expertise. They might know how to take a building down, they need the cash, and you can get $200-$250 dollars for a pallet of brick, cash at a no tell brickyard. The city has not tightened regulations on it, brick theft. People have talked about it for a long time. There are stories going back to the seventies and eighties about it.
CG
What are they being used for?
MA
The bricks are being used to put facing, called brick veneer on new houses in the gulf sunbelt, Texas, Arizona. Patios. We used to use a lot of the brick here like out in Chesterfield and other places. When a building comes down the outer layer of brick, the technical term is hard facebrick. Inside is softer, it’s always going to be insulated. That softer brick cannot stand our temperature fluctuations, so it tends to disintegrate if it’s put on the face of a building here. When you tear a building down, there’s not enough time or money to tell these two types of brick apart. You would have to take the walls down by hand. Most of the wreckers were using bulldozers and wrecking balls. Bricks get mixed up. Well, the climates where soft bricks can withstand the weather are south. So, they sell them south. They were using them here, mixing them. These brand new houses in Chesterfield were losing their brick face, disintegrating in the eighties. So St. Louis construction stopped using St. Louis brick. Again, you can go down to Houston, or Mississippi, these resort communities and see St. Louis brick.
CK
It’s an odd exchange.
MA
It is an odd exchange, but it shows the latent value of brick. People still pay money for it. Even after coming off a broken down building it still has an exchange value. And sometimes it’s the only thing with an exchange value left in some parts of the city where a lot of this is happening. Brick theft makes a lot of sense as a symptom of urban decline right? It’s like metal theft or anything else. Simply throwing the brick thieves in jail is not a real holistic solution. Obviously there’s no demand to live in those buildings. That’s one of the issues. Obviously people wouldn’t steal brick if they had other ways of making money right? So those are two areas we should be working on, in my opinion.
CG
So when a building is demolished, there is a bunch of brick. Then, what typically happens with that brick?
MA
Well that gets sold the same way. The brickyard will broker mass bulk sales to dealers. Some of those brickyards are pretty rundown. Some in north city are pretty unassuming. You wouldn’t even know it was a real business. The yards look abandoned themselves. Others are a little more high-end. There’s one in Brentwood, there’s one in Soulard- Century Brick. Barb Buck, who owns it, she says she will never buy stolen. She asks for a copy of the demolition permit. It’s her own rule. Century is one of the more legit operations. But they do the same thing. Nobody wants to buy local so they sell almost exclusively out of state. A few people might buy it for a patio or garden installation, but there is no demand for it, reusing it. Like a lot of other architectural materials we have in St. Louis, there is no reuse market, for the bigger stuff. Interior-timber and wood, there’s growing markets there.
COMMONFIELD CLAY WORKSHOP INTERVIEWS
I. The Land & The Brick
II. The Theft of The Brick
III. The People & The Brick