APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS NAFFZIGER

Note: I have never conducted an interview such as this before, and didn't quite have the hang of the whole voice recording thing. I was late to start the initial recording, and missed some conversation towards the end when Chris started showing me his and Jason Gray's personal photos of the brewery. Chris was so generous with his time all for the sake of some random student he had never met before. It was a pleasure to meet you, Chris!

At the end of the interview transcription, I have included the photos that Chris shared with me.

Chris Naffziger is a local historian who is an expert on all things Lemp. He has visited the brewery complex several times with the owner's permission and is a wealth of knowledge about the complex, among other Lemp related things. He has written numerous articles for St. Louis Magazine on the Lemp family and brewery, in addition to countless other historic and architectural topics relevant to Saint Louis. He also runs a blog called St. Louis Patina where he documents the built environment in St. Louis.

Link to Chris' articles for St. Louis Magazine: https://www.stlmag.com/topics/chris-naffziger/

Link to St. Louis Patina: https://stlouispatina.com/

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Interviewee: Chris Naffziger

Interviewer: Katie Hepting, kmhp7c@gmail.com

Date: Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Meeting place: Living Room Coffee & Kitchen, 2810 Sutton Blvd, Maplewood, MO

Attendees: KH = Katie Hepting (interviewer), CN = Chris Naffziger (interviewee)

[Recording #1 00:00:00]

CN: …but the last time I checked, they were leaderless.  The last person who was their manager quit like a year and a half ago… like not disgust or anything, he got a new job, you know.  And they kind of were just sort of like… adrift, if that makes sense.  And the other place that has a copy is Landmarks Association of St. Louis.  I would need to email them and see if they have those available again because they move to their new - I don't know if you know Landmarks Association, they're based in Soulard.  They have a brand new amazing office in Soulard just like a block south of Soulard Market.  They are super nice, I'm friends with them.  I have known Andrew the director for well over a decade, I've known Katie the - she's essentially the assistant director - she has some other title, I've known her for years.  And I'm good friends with her as well.  And they have an office manager whose name escapes me, but he's super nice. I don't… the problem is, I don't know if they have a machine to read the microfiche.  That might have been something that they discarded in their move.  I know… but, I know of another location and I'm good friends with them and I could ask them if they will be willing to help you.  Now I have the records of them somewhere but I don't know if they're very easy to get a hold of.  It might be easier for you to just go ahead…

KH: Yeah, and I don't expect you to just…

CN: You know I'd be happy to help.  Let me just ask.  I hate to have you have to go to Room 1 just because like I said, they're so nice.

KH: But might be a fun experience!

CN: It might be… I mean well to be honest, I mean are you planning a long career in St. Louis as an architect?  Well to be honest, you probably would… actually it would be a good skill to have to learn how to navigate Room 1 if you're gonna be… you might want to go ahead and suffer through learning how to use Room 1, particularly if like, you guys are gonna be doing any historic renovations you guys are gonna have to go get the building permit record.

So you'll want to go with the block number.  You know, every city every block in the city of St. Louis has a number that has existed going way back.  I mean… and then I don't know of any block numbers ever changing, if they ever have it's because of some strange unique reason.  They generally kind of come out from the river going outwards

KH: I can probably find them on like the GIS mapping.

CN: Yeah you know Geo St. Louis? I think so Geo St. Louis.  I don't know the address of the brewery off the top of my my head, but you can find… you can… is it 1530?  Man I have to… 1530?  I can figure that out too, it's easy.  So there used to be multiple blocks, and it takes a, it takes a board bill of the Board of Aldermen to vacate streets because it's city property .  Streets are city property, so it requires the Board of Aldermen to give up the city property to a private owner.  And so that actually didn't happen till the early 20th century.  So you see views of the Lemp brewery where, you know there's just…

KH: Nothing?

CN: You know, there'll be buildings built up all around the streets and basically, you know, there's just wagons and stuff parked all up and down the streets so they pretty much kind of just took over streets decades before they legally took them over.  Does that make sense?

KH: Yeah!

CN: People probably just avoided those streets anyway because they were so congested with brewery operations.  But if you look at the Lemp brewery, the shapes of the buildings follow the streets and alleys to a tee, and that's because they when they built those buildings they hadn't taken over the streets yet from the city. Does that make sense?

[Recording #1 00:05:04]

KH: Yeah that makes sense! It's weird to think that they like just everything that goes into having to build a new building today [particularly all of the hoops we have to jump through with zoning and codes]… it's weird to think that it was maybe a little bit easier at some point…

CN: Well particularly because I mean 19th century St. Louis… I mean if you think critics of capitalism now thinks that you know America is pro-capitalist, it was just you know complete laisse faire in the 19th century. I mean business owners and factory owners could do whatever they want.  I mean I only know of one instance where the they were didn't get what they wanted.  They were wanting to turn a park that they owned - it's called Cherokee Park nowadays, do you know Cherokee Park?  It's like a block north of the brewery.  That was originally a privately owned park that they had, like it was a beer garden. And they operated a beer garden ever since the 1850s on property they owned, and they continued with the 20th century.  They had plans to turn that park into a railroad switching yard.  They would have run a track north up 18th Street.  They were gonna run a track up 18th Street up to that park and turn that into a railyard.  That got shot down by the neighbors that was… the that's the one time that I know of where they didn't get what they wanted.

KH: Interesting!  Imagine if they tried that today! I was reading through like the historic district zoning ordinances and everything else for the for that area.  It's hard to change anything over there now!

CN: It's true!

KH: Which I mean I think it's good and bad good for preserving things but also bad for example the Malt Kiln.

CN: Well I always say, you know, there's 79 neighborhoods in the city of St. Louis and there's like maybe a dozen with really strict historic preservation laws where you really can't change much at all.  I mean… that leaves, you know, a good 60 or more where you can move to in the city of St. Louis where you can do whatever you want.

KH: That's fair!

CN: But I definitely understand it can… I live in Tower Grove East, and we passed some restrictions but it was not over the top.  It actually was sort of a compromise - we didn't go with a strict historic district.  But we went with “keep things within reason” like don't do just really ugly crap, if that makes sense.

KH: Yeah, and I think for the Lemp-Cherokee district it's you just have… I think the regulation was you just have to keep things looking like they fit in with the neighborhood so even that doesn't sound that bad.  But I think they had a clause in there that you can't demolish buildings.

CN: I think that’s pretty fair.

KH: But then when you have a building that's literally crumbling…

[laughter]

CN: Yeah and you know as Shashi said in that video, International Shoe Company was terrible for that complex.  They really did not… they didn't treat it well at all.

KH: That's unfortunate.

CN: I think one thing that would kind of [surprise people]…

[Recording #1 00:09:39]

[break in recording due to noise]

[Recording #2 00:00:00]

CN: And I keep it on the down-low, is that the first thing that Jason and I notice is when we start exploring, you know, with permission… It's like, right when the shoe company takes over, there's this explosion of graffiti by employees on the wall. Like, not big, like, you know, ten foot tall, but just like, uh, “Joe was here, 1922.” Like, literally, like, there is not one... We did not find a single piece of employee graffiti from the Lemps.  Nothing.  The graffiti starts right after the shoe company takes over.

And we've never talked about it publicly, because we don't want it to somehow reflect badly on the current owners, who obviously have no, you know, were not responsible at all for graffiti that was done a hundred years ago.  It goes up until about the, you know, it goes up to about the 1980s when the shoe company pulls out.  Just lots of, like, homophobic and really crude and just really nasty.  And like I said, it's not in any way the current owners' fault, but like, it's really interesting.  I feel like all that graffiti in some ways kind of reflects on the very, just the very poor treatment of the complex by the shoe company.

[Recording #2 00:01:32]

KH: So we had to, like, pick some case studies to include in our thesis document, and one of them that I found was this, uh, I think it was in New York.  And it's a, like, an outdoor botanical garden sort of thing, and there used to be a factory on the block, and they tore the factory down, but it was a brick factory [building].  And they used a lot of the bricks to build, like, a wall to separate the garden from the street.  And a lot of the bricks had graffiti on them, but it was, like, it was, like, the bigger, like, mural kind of, um, so...

CN: How interesting.

[Recording #2 00:02:27]

During the recording break I showed Chris photos of “A Wall Made of Bricks,” which he found fascinating and ingenious.  We lamented over the fact that the grafittied bricks at the Lemp Brewery did not have the same look.

[Recording #3 00:00:00]

KH: If it's things that are not so, that are more hostile than just, you know, Joe was here.

CN: Yeah, it's just crap.

KH: Yeah.

CN: That makes sense.

KH: But, [can] probably be sanded off.

[laughter]

CN: It's mostly like chalk.  It's like it's washed off.

Which, apparently they used chalk to like, mark leather.

KH: Oh yeah.  Used what they had available, I guess.

CN: Exactly.

So yeah, you had a whole bunch of questions I have to answer.

KH: Yeah.  We might not go through all of them, but um...

[Recording #3 00:00:49]

KH: Do you know the neighborhood's feelings on the brewery?  Like on the complex?  What do people generally think of it?

CN: I think, you know, that's interesting.  I think, you know, I get the impression that there's sort of like a feeling of collective ownership of that place.  Even though, obviously, from a legal perspective, there's one owner. But I feel like, you know, there's a feeling of collective ownership because of its, you know... It'd be interesting to talk to a cultural anthropologist about the idea of this collective ownership, even though, because it is such a prominent landmark and there's so much… it's so beloved.

You know, like I said, it's an interesting concept, this idea of people feeling like they have a, I think they feel like it has such a rich history that they feel like they need to help preserve it.  And if they feel like it's not, if they feel like it's not being taken care of, that they have a duty to be custodians of this important[sic], I think people feel like history belongs to everybody.  If that makes sense? 

KH: I feel like that's kind of the impression that I had.  But also, I don't know that I really know anyone who lives, like, directly around it.  I mean, I feel like even people who don't live right by it kind of have the same sentiments.

CN: Well, you know, it's interesting, I mean, I know lots of people who are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s and they kind of laugh about, they laugh about this idea that, you know, the Lemp family is so famous nowadays and that was really, you know... That was really through the efforts of the Pointer family and my friend Stephen Walker, who wrote the book on the Lemps back in 1988, 1989.  And, you know, growing up, they're like, like, “Chris, nobody cared about the Lemps back in the…,” after the Lemp brewery closed, nobody cared about them. 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, nobody cared about them.  And the Pointers and Stephen Walker, you know, the Pointers owned the Lemp mansion, they also own a house across the street that was a distant relative of the Lemp family.

KH: Okay.

CN: Right there on DeMenil Place.

KH: Yeah!

CN: And, okay, now I forgot where I'm going, can you remind me what we're talking about?  I go on tangents.

KH: I love it.  The people, like, in the, like, recently the Lemp family has gotten more famous.

CN: Oh, god yeah. 

KH: Because of, like, the Pointer family and Stephen Walker.

CN: Yeah, I mean, look at the, look at the Lemp Mansion restaurant, it's still chugging along.

KH: My husband and I went to the Halloween party there a couple years ago.  That was pretty fun.

CN: Stephen Walker, still to this day, does author events every couple weeks.  He still gets lines out the door at the Lemp mansion.

KH: Oh, wow.

CN: And that book has been out for almost 40 years.

KH: What's the book called?

CN: It's Lemp: A Haunted History.  Doesn't even really talk about ghosts much, I mean.  But everything is, most stuff written about the Lemps is just simply plagiarized from his book, to be honest.  And he takes it in stride.  I mean, he's famous in St. Louis, to be honest.  He's a good friend of mine.

KH: I'll have to look into that book.

CN: It's good, it's a good book.  I mean, he was doing original research on a subject that had not been researched ever, really.  He did it through newspaper articles, talking to people who knew the family, et cetera.

KH: Thats pretty cool.

[Recording #3 00:05:13]

KH: Well, so kind of tying into that, though, like with the local neighborhood kind of feeling the collective ownership, I mean, do you think that they would like to see that, especially that building that's sitting there half taken apart, you think they'd like to see that kind of, I guess, revived or, you know?

CN: I'm sure they do, but I don't know, I'm from the practical standpoint.  I mean, that's a lot of money.  I mean, Shashi was having a hard time finding people who were able to do it.  It's a very specialized job.  I think if it was rebuilt, it needs to be rebuilt like a modern day skyscraper.  You obviously understand steel skeleton construction.  That building was simply a load-bearing brick structure.  It can't be rebuilt that way. 

It has to be rebuilt with… if it ever is rebuilt by some very wealthy developer, it's got to be completely rebuilt as, well, you know, the building just to the east of it, the new stock house, that's a reinforced concrete.  I mean, it looks like it's brick, but it's just simply brick because they're just keeping it with the same theme of all the buildings and architectural.  You know, Anheuser-Busch and Lemp are always so concerned with branding.  I mean, Anheuser-Busch is still famous for its branding, and it's sold lots of beer over the years.  People don't realize how much that Anheuser-Busch is about marketing [sic].  Their buildings are marketing, and so, you know, people have asked me, “well, Chris, are there other buildings that are going to start collapsing all over?”  You know, no, and I said, no, they're not because they're reinforced concrete.

KH: Right.

CN: You know, the Lemp Brewery was founded in 1840, but the vast majority of those buildings on the Lemp Brewery's campus were built with modern construction standards.  And they're built, you know, they're built like bomb shelters.  They're built with reinforced concrete.  They're not going anywhere.  Now, there's a couple of buildings that are still left that were built in the 1870s.  Well, the building that collapsed was one of the oldest buildings, and one of the reasons why it collapsed is because it was so old, and it wasn't built up to modern standards.  It wasn't Shashi's fault.  It was really International Shoe for not maintaining this building that's over 100 [years old].  You know, the lower stories are getting close to being 150 years old.

KH: It's kind of impressive that they're still even standing.

CN: And it just needs a complete steel, just needs a complete steel structure on the inside, to put it bluntly.

KH: And that's kind of my plan in trying to figure out a way to maybe stabilize the brick onto it.

CN: And Shashi, yeah, and Shashi had steel structural elements decided [sic]. 

KH: He did a lot of work, didn't he?

CN: Yeah, I saw them with my own eyes.

[pause]

[Recording #3 00:08:25]

KH: So, if you had to, like, you know, pick something, what do you... The neighborhood is kind of in a weird spot.  It seems like it's kind of in a place where there's, like... Like, based on what I found online, it's kind of on, like, the edge of a food desert.  It's kind of on the edge of, like, an income shift.

CN: Benton Park is very well-to-do.  It exploded in the new millennium.  I have a friend who lives in Tower Grove East, a block or two away from me, Molly.  She grew up in Benton Park, and she told me about, like, what it was, kind of like this redneck neighborhood, you know?  And to the south of there is a neighborhood called Marine Villa, and it's pretty rough.  And, you know, Shashi always said, like, you know, turning the entire Lemp Brewery into a giant residential complex would double the number of residential units in Benton Park.  And he's like, that's crazy for us.  And likewise, you know, there's not that residential demand.

And with Marine Villa down to the south being pretty fragile, or very fragile, I just – I think, honestly, I think it would be best as – I think it would be best developed one building at a time, you know, take it piecemeal, you know, developing one of those complexes at a time.  You know, one of those big – you know, they're all kind of like different segments, right? 

And they were auctioned off that way.

The big myth is that the Lemp Brewery was auctioned off as one big piece back then.  It was not.  It was broken up into like four or five different pieces. 

KH: I didn't know that.

CN: No, most people don't.  And that was smart.  Because they realized that such a gigantic complex was not really economically feasible to do all at once. 

KH: Makes sense.

CN: So I think that would be the best way to do it, is that one at a time, one building grouping at a time. 

KH: Definitely.

CN: I think it would be a great place for microbreweries.

KH: Well, that was kind of my thought too.  It would be kind of cool to bring the brewing back to the brewery.

CN: I think the Pabst Blue Ribbon Brewery in Milwaukee is a great model.

KH: Okay.

CN: If you look into that.  Pabst Blue Ribbon obviously is still made, but it's not – PBR went out of business.  Its brewery was closed in Milwaukee and it's been redeveloped.  And PBR as it is now is kind of like a zombie beer.

KH: Yeah, I'll look into that.

[Recording #3 00:11:33]

KH: Like outside of the Lemp Brewery, what's your favorite feature of that area, like that neighborhood?

CN: One second.

[pause for noise]

CN: If you look closely, most of the houses in that neighborhood, Benton Park, were built in the 1880s, 1890s.  But if you know where to look closely, there are houses from the 1850s and 1860s.  That's what I love about that neighborhood.  You have to know what you're looking for, but there are extremely old houses in that neighborhood.  On 18th Street, those subdivisions, that was the St. Louis Commons, they were subdivided by Charles Dewar.  So the St. Louis Commons were owned by Colonial St. Louis and the U.S. Congress, the Congress of the United States, awarded that land back to the city of St. Louis after it became part of the United States.  And they divided it up.  Charles Dewar did it.  He surveyed it for them.  And they sold it off to people like Adam Lemp, and they used that as real estate speculation. 

Adam Lemp was a great brewer in America.  He was a terrible brewer in Germany.  But what a lot of people don't realize is that he used real estate speculation to make lots of money.  And he turned around and invested that money.  It's a little hazy.  We think he spent some of the money on his own brewery, but we also think that he used some of the money from his real estate speculation to help his son, William Lemp, start his first brewery.  Like, William Lemp worked for his dad, but then he struck out on his own and worked by himself for a while. 

And so there's this vague reference in a newspaper article I found.  And so if you look closely, these subdivisions from the 1850s, people already had started building houses when it was out in the country.  And if you look on 18th Street, there's these two little houses that are sitting abandoned.  They're in terrible shape, but I'm absolutely fascinated by them because they're some of the oldest houses in the city.  Because I think they're from the 1850s.  I think they were built by some of the first owners of the property who might have actually bought it from Adam Lemp himself.  There was an auction. 

KH: Very cool.

CN: Yeah.  So, Adam Lemp, brewer, and real estate speculator.  So.

KH: I'll just check that out.  Look for those houses.

CN: Some of the wealthiest families in St. Louis… Oh crap, can I borrow a napkin?

[laughter]

CN: Oh, thank you.  Some of the wealthiest families in St. Louis were French colonial families.  Who owned land just west of St. Louis.  And they sold it off in real estate speculation, and they made a fortune.  The Chouteau family made a fortune off their land, for example.

So what else?  What other questions you got for me?

[Recording #3 00:14:57]

KH: I’ve got some questions about the building.  I guess first, how did you get so involved in documenting it?

CN: I hit it off with Shashi.  I think my ability to deal with people is my ability to understand where people are coming from.  Shashi is a businessman.  He definitely loves the brewery.  Very intelligent.  Indian-American.  And I was able to see where he was coming from, and other people who have failed to understand where he's coming from, and they're frustrated by him.  “Oh, I just don't get him.  He wasn't nice to me.”  Well, you got to understand where people are coming from.  His father, great guy, Rao.  Oh my god, what a great guy.  He worked for Anheuser-Busch.  Very, extremely high-ranking Anheuser-Busch.  Remembers when India became independent.

KH: Oh wow.

CN: And obviously that's not a lot of great memories.  It obviously did not go very smoothly, but you got to understand where people are coming from.  You can't just go walking in there and just demand stuff from people.  And I realized that Shashi was somebody I could work with, and just a really great guy, great family.  And the next thing I know, Jason and I are just running around the brewery doing whatever we want, and we treated the place with respect.  We didn't do stuff that we were told not to do.  

KH: So you kind of had an interest in getting to kind of research and get into the complex so you kind of approached him?

CN: And do it legally.

KH: Definitely.

CN: You know, everyone wants to sneak in there.  It's like, why not ask permission?

KH: Like they'll probably say yes.  Well, maybe.

CN: Well, you have to give them something.

[Recording #3 00:17:15]

KH: How many times do you think you've visited?

CN: Probably like a dozen.

KH: What was your first visit?  Like, what was that like?

CN: The first time we officially went in there and documented, it was really cool.  We figured out what this room was for.  We went in this room.  And we figured out that this room was originally used as a hospitality room, just like Anheuser-Busch does to this day.  And we went back to Shashi and we were like, “we figured out what this room was used for.”  And he was like, “oh, thank you so much.  I always wondered why this room had all these decorations and stuff.” 

And we were like, why is this, you know, utilitarian brewery?  All of a sudden this one room has all these decorations.  And we put two and two together.  It was right on the public street.  And it was the hospitality room.  And I'm like, well, hey, we're already like, what I got so sick with art history is that it became so political.  It was more about making political statements.  And I would be reading these art history articles and they'd be making these claims about painting.  And I'd be like, well, I agree with you politically, that painting doesn't show that.  Like, where are you coming up with this?  And I started getting to know about art history because it was no longer about looking.  And so, what I thought, what I think is what's valuable about my research at Lemp Brewery is that it actually involves looking, like go and look.  And when I actually started to go actually do looking, you start discovering stuff.  Like, I figured out so many things about the Lemp Brewery.  Like, I don't even consider it, I don't consider scholarship valid if you don't actually look at what you're studying. 

I mean, you as an architect, can you imagine, like, let's say you're adding an addition onto a building.  If you don't actually go out to the site and look at the site of the building that you're adding on to, that's like malpractice. 

KH: Yep.

CN: And I consider it to be malpractice in art history to not actually look at what you're studying. 

KH: Yeah, I would agree with that.

[pause]

[Recording #3 00:19:58]

KH: So, what's your favorite building on the complex?

CN: That whole area around the original cellars.  I also love the old, the old, the fermenting house.  You know what a hypostyle hall is, right?

KH: A what?

CN: A hypostyle hall.  It's a, okay, it goes back to the ancient Egyptians.  It's probably an architectural term that you don't get taught anymore. [laughter]  It's a room held up with columns and hypostyle.  Yeah, it's very, it's an old-fashioned term.  But this building is incredible.  As an employee of the Lemp brewery, who doesn't work there anymore, he and Mark [sic], it's just as deep as it is tall above ground, and it's true.  So, the walls are like this thick, three pane windows, and just massive space.  And it's kind of weird because originally it would have been filled with gigantic fermenting vats as wide as this room [that we are in right now], and taller than this room, and they're all gone now, obviously.  But it would have just been absolutely filled with beer, and obviously it would have had to be, you know, as an architect, you have to consider the weight of what this building is going to hold.  You know, the old joke about the museum that wasn't designed to hold its collections, or it was not true, or the library that isn't designed to hold its books. 

Well, obviously this building was designed to hold, and you know, water is very heavy, or beer is water mainly, just obviously massively built to hold just an enormous weight.  And I really like that, but I mean the cellars, the cellars are just mind blowing.  These vaults that are built out of, you know, I think they would probably, would they qualify as rubble stone? you know what rubble wall is right, where you just stack stones on top of each other. 

KH: I'm not sure.  I'm not sure if that's what they would be called.

CN: You stack stones on top of each other carefully.  It's actually a very difficult way to build, as opposed to ashlar.

KH: Yeah.  Is that how all the supports are built underneath?

CN: Yeah, it's all just, it's rubble, rubble wall.  I mean, well, it's weird.  I want to say that there's cut or dress stone columns built into the wall, and then there's rubble, rubble wall construction in between these dress stones.  Yeah, it's weird.  It's really beautiful stonework though.  I've seen other, I've seen other lagering cellars in St. Louis, and the quality of the stone construction is way lower.  Lemps had much higher quality stonework.  You can just tell a total difference in quality.  They had much higher quality stonework.  Not surprising, obviously.

[Recording #3 00:23:23]

KH: So what's holding the building up?  Like, are the cellars, do you think the cellars have any part in the structural integrity?

CN: Oh my god!  They're huge.  I mean, they're barrel vaults, if you know what a barrel vault is.  But they're like this thick [hand motions] in between the vaults.  It's huge.

KH: Is it like carved into the rock underneath, or like how would it…?  So it's actually like the bedrock… is that the right thing?  The cellars are like a slab basically, and then the building above it is just kind of like anchored on top.

CN: Okay, so here's the story.  So there's the cave nearby, right?  Well, definitely the cellars underneath the Malt House and Malt Kiln, they are definitely excavated into the bedrock.  I think we all generally believe that they took the stone excavated from the excavation hole, then turned around with using the vaults.  Now, was that enough stone to build all the vaults?  I don't know. 

Now that being said, there were limestone quarries all over the place down there.  We know because there's newspaper articles about people falling into them.  And you can see in Compton and Dry, you can see the quarries everywhere.  Now, I suspect that most of the quarries were started in sinkholes in the karst topography.  They probably just pumped the sinkhole out, and then they had exposed rock face.  Now, they also, I know for a fact, they quarried out the rock face along the bluffs of the Mississippi River.  There were definitely quarries along there.

The Workhouse was a famous example of there being a quarry right along the rock face.  Not necessarily the best quality.  At the workhouse, they just used that to break down into gravel.  It's called macadamized roads.  I don't know if you've ever heard of that.  It was a type of road bed invented by a man named McAdam in England, so they got the name macadamized roads.  I thought it came from macadamia nuts, but actually it was macadamized road.

[laughter]

CN: I can't even pronounce it correctly.  Anyway, they had more than enough limestone sources in the immediate area to make a long story short.

KH: When you say the cellars were excavated into the bedrock and the vaults were formed with what you think they excavated... 

CN: Locally sourced limestone is what I guess you'd call it.

KH: I guess I don't know what the difference between the vaults and the cellars is in the way you're talking about them.  Is the cellar just like the whole space and then the vaults are just like the ceiling vaults and all that?

CN: Yes, yeah.  And what's really fascinating, so there's seven in a row.  They're parallel with Cherokee Street.  So the northernmost vault probably is wide enough to be the only one underneath the Malt Kiln, I suspect.  So the remaining six are underneath the Malt House.  But now what's really fascinating, you're going to love this.  At the furthest south vault, there's a little doorway.  It's bricked up.  They designed it so they could expand to the south with more vaults.  And there'll be a picture you can see.  And there's a little window and you can look in and you can see the exposed rock face.  And it's all calcium rich because it's limestone, right?  And it's actually already started to form… It's alive.  It's an alive cave wall. 

But, do you know what happened?  Artificial refrigeration was invented so they didn't need to ever come back.

Do you want to wait a second?

[Recording #3 00:28:18]

[break for noise]

[Recording #4 00:00:00]

[long pause]

KH: How do you get down there? Is there a way to get down to the vault underneath the Malt Kiln from the Malt Kiln?

CN: SO! There is a staircase from… [thoughtful pause] there’s a staircase from the sub basement of the brew house.

The current brew house is the second brew house that was built, supposedly was built around the old original brew house built in 1865 in the middle of the Civil War, supposedly.

How they built it around the old one, I don't know if I necessarily believe that.

I think… they had some other place where they made the wort, as they call it, somewhere else.  I don't know if I believe them.

KH: That's the building right next to the kiln, right?

CN: Yes.  They claim that they built the second brew house around the old one.

[short pause]

CN: Now I call it the second brew house, not the new brew house, because I swear to you that they were going to build a brand new, awesome, state-of-the-art third brew house, but Prohibition stopped [sic].  They had another one in the works.

KH: Oh wow.

CN: How do I know that?  Because the new stock house, which is just to the north of it, the back of it is not finished. It has a temporary wall. And, also you can tell that alleyway, all of the buildings built after the brew houses is wider.  The brew house sticks out like a sore thumb.  I can guarantee you they were going to build a third new modern brew house that was going to replace the second one, and it was going to be built back along that new, wider alleyway.

And that was going to come up and be gigantic, modern, and it was going to then cause the back of the new stock house to have its completed southern wall.  That was coming next.  In fact, at some point, I want to just ransack Shashi's blueprints, which are original back [sic].  It has Guy Tyler Norton's signature on it.  He was the staff architect.  …And see if I can find if they still had the blueprints for the new stock house.

And also, I'm telling you, they were going to build new malt kilns, I can guarantee you.

[long pause]

CN: New malt kilns, new brew house, and they were going to finish the second bottling plant.  That has a temporary wall, too, along Broadway.

KH: Interesting.

CN: I still, to this day, don't know what the heck they were thinking.  They built the first bottling plant, then they built that gigantic second bottling plant - two-thirds of it, and then they built this triangular third bottling plant before they completed the second bottling plant. 

I don't know.  They really had some weird decision-making.

KH: It would have been cool to see them finish all of that.

CN: Well, if they had actually finished all of their plans, many of the buildings that are there today would have been demolished and replaced with new buildings. 

A substantial number of those buildings would have been demolished.  Now, some of them would have still been there, probably.  Just like Anheuser-Busch says, some of his original buildings.  A substantial number of those would have been demolished and replaced with new, modern ones.

[Recording #4 00:04:02]

KH: Interesting.  I guess I can go to the next one.  Kind of still talking about the sub-basement.  What's the ground floor, what’s that made out of?  Is it concrete?  Is it just rock?

CN: On street level? It's concrete.  I want to say it's concrete.  We can check my photos.

So, here's the darnedest thing.  Because the main floor of the malt kiln was rented out to Bike Works, you know, the lawsuit, I only was in there once before it was rented out, and I snapped a quick picture with my old iPhone 5.  I probably have one of the few only [sic] legally obtained photographs of the malt hearth.

It's destroyed now.  It was destroyed in the collapse.  If we can look at the floor, I want to say it's concrete.  I think it pretty much has to be.  It might have been fire brick to withstand the intense flames.  I mean, you can see the black scorch marks from the huge flames - they would have had huge flames that would have sent smoke up to dry out the hops and the barley.  And, yeah, it's gone.  But the other one at the other end, wow, man, is that one safe?  That other one might have been damaged, too.  I don't know.  That's a good question.  But, yeah, I have one of the few photographs that that preserves.

KH: That's pretty cool.

CN: Preserved in a really bad photo.

[pause for laughter]

KH: You sent me the sections of the International Shoe Co. building.

CN: Yes, that's from a ground plan of the International Shoe owned it [sic].  And you know how to read those.  Man, those little squiggly lines, I don't know what those mean, but you do, right?

KH: Probably.  Maybe.  But it looked like one of them was showing the heights of the different levels of the building.  Do you have any idea, because that can help me get the floors in the right spot. But as far as how… I'm trying to figure out how thick that street level floor is.

CN: That I do not know.  Sorry.

KH: That's okay!

CN: I actually, when I went back and revisited those, I'm actually glad you told me to look at those, because I didn't realize that there's a basement that's only this tall [hand motions] in between the two acarine [sic] basements.  I forgot that.  I didn't realize that.

[pause]

CN: You know, you do need to go on a haunted house this October.

KH: Should I take a look?

CN: You need to look as much as possible at what you're going through.  Because you pass in between the brew house cellars into the malt house cellars.  And you can see a lot.  All the people working there were wondering why.

[laughter]

KH: “Sorry, I'm not here for you.”

So it [the haunted house] actually goes underneath the kiln, the malt kiln building.

CN: You know, I can't really tell from you for sure where.  You're going around in circles, passing through vaults.

KH: It's probably a very similar construction, though.

CN: Well, just from a structural standpoint, it can't get too wild, because it obviously [sic]... those vaults on the subbasement are so thick that I'm sure you can maybe have a little bit more freedom up above.

KH: Yeah… Okay! 

Yeah, because that was one thing I was trying to figure out.  Do I need to, obviously all theoretical, do I need to drill down and make new footings and foundations, or can I just...

CN: Man, those vaults are so strong.  I'm telling you, they're insane.

KH: Yeah, so if that's the case, then it probably would make my job easier.

CN: I think so.  I honestly think that those vaults are just real, like, they could have [sic]... like bomb shelters.  They're so big.

[Recording #4 00:08:19]

KH: If you had to guess, like, how tall are the ceilings down [sic], like, the tallest point in the ceiling, what do you think?

CN: Well… definitely didn't have to duck through the doorways.

KH: Okay.

CN: And... easily 20 feet.

KH: Okay, wow.

CN: They're tall.  And you can...  I mean, you're probably... what you can do is in those photos, you can tell...  I mean, Jason and I are both about 5'10".  He might be 6'.  He might be a little bit taller than me.

KH: Okay.

CN: But I'm 5'10", and you can extrapolate from the photos when the ones where we're standing in them.  And you can kind of tell how... I mean, they're tall.  And I don't know... yeah, they're big.

Do you think... did they teach you, like, how to figure out how tall something is?

KH: I can take a pretty good guess.

CN: Okay.  They're tall.  They're big.

I mean, because you've got to realize, there were giant steel... there were giant steel racks, and they'd push the ice through them, and the ice would sit up on top of them, and the ice would then... the cold air would settle down on top of the lagering tanks.

KH: Interesting.

CN: Yeah.  Oh, it's very cool.

Huh.  I'm trying to think...  I don't think I have an article about how tall they were, unfortunately.

And they only lost like an inch or two because there were these big, like, round footings that then the tanks sat on top, and obviously the Shoe Company didn't want everybody tripping on them, so they maybe put like a... just a skim coat of concrete over the top of them, and they only lost like an inch or two of height so that you don't need to worry about... You don't need to worry about the shoe company putting down like a foot or two of concrete.  It was just like an inch or two.

KH: Okay.  Cool.

[Recording #4 00:10:21]

KH: Do you know, in the Malt Kiln, like the remaining parts of the upper floors, do you know what kind of shape those are in?

CN: I don't know.  I think we went up a floor or two, and I didn't feel scared. 

I've gotten over my fear of heights recently, but I don't remember being too scared.  I remember there's staircases maybe about this wide [hand motions demonstrating narrow width].  I don't know.  I mean, they obviously are in good enough shape that he [Shashi] doesn't feel the need to tear them down.

KH: That's fair.  Good point.  All right, let me see here…

[long pause]

[Recording #4 00:11:11]

KH: What's your favorite part of the Malt Kiln?

CN: You know, I think my favorite part is the original design where it was just three stories.  And that really cool neoclassical penthouse.  It was really cool.  I honestly think that actually looks better.  I honestly, if I owned the building, I would basically make an appeal to the pres. board to let me...

KH: To restore it.

CN: Yeah, because honestly, I would talk them into letting me just tear the building down to the original three stories and use all those extra bricks left over to patch around the complex.  Honestly, that's what I would do because that building just... They put an additional three stories onto a building that I don't think personally was designed to carry that much weight.

KH: Probably not.

[laughter]

CN: But I don't talk about that a lot because...  I was joking with the Alderman woman down there, my friend Kara, which I've known since junior high. 1990... that dates me.  I said...

KH: That's when I was born.

CN: Oh, really?  I joked with Kara.  I was like, Kara, I know who's to blame for that.  And she's like, who? I was like, William Lemp Sr.

[laughter]

CN: It was a bad, bad idea for him to do that, honestly.  It just creates a mess for everybody who came after him.

Ten years later, they should have gone all the way down the street level and built a new building on top of it.  It was just a bad idea.

They had so much land, they could have just built a new giant malt house.  Anheuser-Busch had these massive malt mills that were so much better built.

It's all William Lemp's fault.

KH: I like that.

CN: It's just bad.  They built so many buildings that were so well designed and then there's that one.  It drives me crazy.

KH: Yeaaah…

[Recording #4 00:13:27]

KH: This other question was, or the next one was, can you share any little known facts about the history of the building, of the complex?  I think you kind of shared a few.

CN: I think what people would really be shocked at is that that building was really elegant.  Ernesto's reconstruction and just how when you're down on the street level, it's just such this elegant and really successful building from a proportion [sic].  You talk about proportions.  It's really what beauty is when things are in correct proportions.  That building just works so well as a three-story building.

Then it's just kind of this silly, gross, out-of-proportion building when it's six stories.

KH: Yeah.

CN: There's photographs with the chimneys on top of it, and that doesn't help it, you know what I mean?  It's not like, oh, well, if you put the chimneys back on top, it looks better.

No, it doesn't.  It's still this awkward, weird, weird building.

KH: Yeah.

[pause]

[Recording #4 00:14:36]

KH: What's your favorite resource, or sources, for finding information about the brewery?

CN: The Western Brewer is good.

KH: Is that like a magazine or…?

CN: A trade journal that started in the late 1860s and no later than the early 1870s.  I've harvested all the articles.  None of those are in German.  You don't have to worry about that.  Those give incredible detail.  …Are there any articles about the malt kiln?  I can dig them out.  It might take me a little while, but I'll see if I can find them.

And newspaper articles.  There's also a general electric article about the new malt kiln and the new malt house, which I don't know if that's of any value to you.  General Electric provided all the motors for the new malt house.  I don't know if that's of any interest.  It is so detailed that, I mean, it kind of just provides so much detail.  It's not really...

I mean, when I wrote my article about the new malt house, it was just like, I'm not going to recount everything that's in it because it's just not really...  It would have made the article so long.  If you're not an electrical engineer, it probably wouldn't really... 

As a writer, you have to decide, do you put every bit of information...  Do you supply all of the research that you've found?  Or is this going to bore your audience?  I don't feel like everyone's going to be that interested in early 20th century electrical water pumps.

KH: That's fair.

CN: I just didn't really feel like that would be something that people would be interested in, unless you were just really interested in water pumps.

[laughter]

[Recording #4 00:16:40]

KH: We already kind of hit this one about what impact you think ISCO had taking over the buildings.

CN: Terrible.  [laughter] I mean, it was the dumbest place for a shoe factory.

I'm actually very curious.  We know from the records, the map, that they were storing shoes down in the basement.  I just don't understand how they didn't get moldy.  Did they have dehumidifiers down there?  I don't know how mold didn't grow on the leather down in those sub-basements.

KH: That's a good point.

CN: It must have been the dumbest shoe factory ever. 

KH: That's why it's not still there.

[Laughter]

CN: No.  All the way up to the 1980s.  It's just silly.

KH: So they were there for like 40 years?  30, 40 years?

CN: They were there for a long time.  I actually did a calculation one time.  I think International Shoe might have actually owned it for like one year longer than the Lemps.  Don't quote me on that, though.  It's absurd, though.  The shoe factory closed, and then they owned the property for a little bit longer.  So, 1922 to 1987?  I think it was 65 years, and the Lemp's owned the property from...  Well, it doesn't matter.  To make a long story short, the years that the shoe factory owned it rivaled the number of years that the Lemp's owned it.  How’s that for crazy?

KH: Yeah, that's unfortunate.

CN: Yeah, that's for sure.

[Recording #4 00:18:40]

KH: What do you think it would do for the neighborhood and all the residents to see that building revitalized?  Do you think it would really have that big of an impact?

CN: I think it would be a positive impact, because there's just something depressing about a building blocking off the sidewalk.  I mean, it just looks bad.  It just looks really bad.

[Recording #4 00:19:04]

KH: Yeah.  So, I kind of mentioned earlier, thinking about turning it into something like putting in some microbrewery, maybe have an exhibit about the Lemp family and the Lemp brewery, an event space.

CN: I think it's great as asset is the fact that it's so easily reached from Cherokee Street.  You don't have to go back into the property, which is kind of a negative aspect of some of the other buildings.  You can very easily control people's access to that building.  I think that's the best… I think that's the strongest suit.

KH: So, you've said that you would love to see it rebuilt to what it originally looked like.

CN: Yeah, I mean, in a perfect world, you'd rebuild it back to the way that it looked at the height, have it rebuilt all the way up to its original six stories.  But barring that, I also do feel like it being restored back to its 1870s appearance, I think would be a practical, more realistic solution.  Those are the two options.  You could restore it to its 1870s appearance, or if you have more resources, you could restore it to its 1880s appearance.

KH: So my plan was to kind of venture away from that and maybe the additions that I do, maybe have them be a little more modern, but maybe use glass and...

CN: I mean, that's not a bad idea, too.  You should look into what they did with the mills up on the riverfront in Minneapolis.  That was an incredibly successful—oh, you should definitely look into that.  Yeah, along the Mississippi River and downtown—oh my God, it's beautiful.  They took buildings that were in—obviously, Minneapolis was a mill town. 

3M, Pillsbury is all right there.  They used the rapids to generate power for their water mills.  But you should see how they took ruined mills right in downtown.

KH: Oh yeah, I'd love to see that.

CN: Oh, take a look at it.

KH: Yeah, I'll look it up.

CN: And that actually would be a great kind of inspiration for making American ruins look— Yeah.  And they used a lot of glass, and it's very, very cool. 

KH: Yeah, because my thought was, yeah, the building's in ruins, but it's also— 

CN: But you can make ruins look really cool.

KH: Yeah, and that would kind of preserve it in this moment in time, but also— 

CN: Oh, that's a good idea.  That's a really good idea.

[Recording #4 00:21:55]

KH: So, the size of the building, when I initially started kind of putting this together last year, I somehow misestimated the dimensions of the building, and it's actually a lot smaller than I was thinking.

CN: Oh, interesting.

KH: I actually went through, and I think I sent you a screenshot of the model that I've

started for it.

CN: Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

KH: So, I went through, and I actually used some of your photos.  I took my own photos, but I counted all the bricks, like, you know, going across and going up to get all the dimensions.  So, I think it's pretty accurate, and it's like 20 feet shorter than I was thinking it was.

CN: Oh, wow, okay.

KH: And like 5 to 10—maybe 5 feet narrower, and part of that, I think, is just because of the thickness of the walls.

CN: Now, you know you can figure out the thickness of the walls from the fire insurance map.  They tell you the inches.

KH: Okay.

CN: That's part of the problem is the walls are so thin at the bottom.  Yeah, it tells you the thickness of the walls.

KH: But I'm wondering if it would—obviously, in real life, it probably would get shot down, but my professor thinks I could make the theoretical argument to the planning board to push the front out, like, you know, 10, 15 feet into that open area.

CN: To the west?

KH: Yes.

CN: They probably would never allow that.  No.

[pause, laughter]

CN: With glass, or?  Yeah, or, you know— I mean, you know, this is all just for your thesis.  I guess you could do whatever you—I mean, if you wanted to have fun with it, I mean, you would get shot down at the pres. board.

KH: Yeah, but my professor was thinking, you know, if this was real life, you could make the argument that turning this into a building for modern use, you need more space inside, even just for things like, you know, putting in elevators or— 

CN: That's true.

KH: —having the space be accessible, which, you know, I feel like there's a slim chance that could work in real life, but— 

CN: Right.

KH: But I'm just wondering, too, like, is that going to impede anything, because I know there's, like, a gated entrance to that empty—I want to call it a parking lot, but I don't know if that's really— 

CN: Oh, it's a rail yard is what you want to call it.

And actually, you know, very fascinating.  This is maybe something good for you to know.  To the west of there was actually a quarry, and I think one of the reasons they never built on that spot and used it as a rail yard is because they were concerned about it not being a— structurally stable place to build.  I actually just recently, in the last year or two, discovered that that was, in fact, from surveyors' notes from the 1850s— That was, in fact, a limestone quarry, and I think that's probably why they never built on it.

KH: I was wondering about that.

[pause]

[Recording #4 00:25:09]

KH: And, you know, something like this where it's kind of more like a—what to call it, like an entertainment spot, but, you know, it has a lot of activities.  Do you think that would be well-received by, like, the whole region?  Do you think people would come to it?

CN: Oh my god, people would eat that shit up and go, oh my god.

[laughter]

CN: And so back to you, like, that limestone quarry is far enough away that you could go a little bit to the west.  The limestone quarry is maybe 40 feet.

KH: Okay, yeah.

CN: The reason why there's no buildings there, like, you could go a little—you could theoretically go a little bit to the west.  Before you hit the quarry.

Which I don't—I think you would—the cost would go up extensively if you had to go down into the quarry for footings or whatever.

KH: Sure.

CN: But you couldn't—you would not be able to build a massive new wing out to the west because you would be going into fill.

KH: Okay, that makes sense.

[pause]

[Recording #4 00:26:10]

KH: Oh, I forgot to ask you one of the questions that I was really excited about.

Have you had any ghost experiences?

[laughter]

CN: No, I actually—I got sent on an assignment to go on the stupid ghost tour at the Lamp Mansion.  And I actually remarked on the fact that all the times that Jason and I ran around inside of there, we never once had any kind of experience.  And I even actually said, you know, “hey guys, this is the chance. We're down here” —you know, because one thing that's really kind of deceptive about those photographs is that we were actually in complete, total, 100% pitch darkness.

KH: Really?

CN: There's no light down there.  I mean, it's complete darkness down there.  So, I mean, when we took those photographs, Jason would basically have me by the camera.  I would have a remote control because you could not have any kind of vibrations.  And so Jason would take the strobe and he would run in pitch darkness.  And so basically what he would do is I would yell that I had hit the shutter with the remote control and Jason would take off running with the strobe.  And he even hit him [sic]—I think he ran into a pipe one time.  And so I was the idiot that the extent of my ability was to be able to hit a button and then he would do all the light painting, I guess is pretty much what you call it.

Just to clear, we didn't do stupid stuff with like different colors.  But like the malt kiln, the malt house cellars, those were all done with Jason running as fast as he could with a strobe.  And so the shutter was open for like a minute.  It was open for a while.

And then when it closed, we had to stand in complete darkness because it was also then having to register in complete darkness.  And so we had to stand there and wait without moving because we couldn't possibly move and shake the camera.  And meanwhile, Jason was standing off somewhere and he couldn't turn his flashlight on to walk back until it had closed.  And then I would have to yell and tell him that the shutter had closed and then he could walk back safely.

So it was a lot of work on Jason's part.

[laughter]

KH: Sounds like it.  It was kind of fun though.

CN: Oh, oh my gosh.  It was an amazing opportunity.  No one else, no one else has taken such good photographs as Jason has. 

KH: That's awesome.

CN: But yeah, I mean, if you want, I can take my computer out and I can show you all the questions.

[Recording #4 00:28:58]

Chris got his laptop out and started showing me photos taken by himself and Jason, but I neglected to start the recording when he started talking as I was more interested in the photos…

[Recording #5 00:00:00]

CN: Yeah, I have a better photograph of the chimneys, but you can see the two chimneys added on the middle.

[pause]

CN: Then oh man, it seems like a long time since yeah, I Have no idea what that is.  Anyway, here's the doorway that might have written it might originally have been larger.  That’s Jason's photograph.

KH: Is that the back, the alley side?

CN: Yeah.

That's looking down into the cellars. You can feel the cold air coming up!

No, this is so this is somewhere.  This is actually in Ireland. Here is a Illustration of what a mall kiln...[sic] so you can see the kiln floor.  They would have laid out the the hops and barley right here, I don't know why I even have this in here to be honest.

So I have the cellars underneath the mall house,

[pause]

CN: Just ignore this this is a picture of what it looks like and again probably like a British one so Here's that doorway.  See the bricked up[sic]? so You can see that that usually is on there.

That's the… That's me you can kind of get a sense of scale there's Jason. And these are hard to see sorry.

No, like I said, I'll ask Jason if it's all right for you to take a look. You can see the rock face, you can see how it's alive. I guess you call it alive.

Yeah, that's really tall

You know, I don't know how tall it was… 20 feet, what do you think?

KH: I’ll have to look at it… Do you have any pictures of you guys standing like where this line is?

CN: Would that help?

KH: Maybe

CN: I could crouch down you can measure how tall I am… I won't be embarrassed If you want to do that

[laughter]

CN: Maybe…

KH: If you can get Jason's permission to share these with me I could kind of lighten them up in Photoshop and probably be easier for me to kind of look at and see if there's anything in the background that I can relate it to.

[pause]

CN: Oh This is awesome This goes back millennia.

KH: Dynamite?

CN: Well, actually these are from drills.

This is going back This is centuries old or millennia old.  Most likely it's from drills - But most likely or possibly they drilled and that was enough to make the stone snap off Yeah But if it wasn't what they would have done next they would have pound They would have pounded wood steaks in there and then they would have poured water on what does wood do when it gets wet?

KH: It expands!

CN: I don't know if they had to go that far, but that's what they stone is much darker.  I Don't know if they had to do that to break the stone open.

Oh Here you go.

Can you see how this is cut different?  There's like there's there's a column - a square column - built into the stone So do you see up there - so there would have been these stone, or iron trellises and they would have pushed the ice along and then that's the help to pull there… [sic] uniformly go through the cellars. This right there are that's just Sprinkler system relic.

KH: Okay wait, go back to that!

CN: I don't know what the hell that is.  I don't remember what that is.

KH: Can you see the top of the ceiling in there?  It's kind of hard to tell. 

CN: Sorry it's so dark.

I don't know what the heck that is… that looks like a repair.  Yeah, almost like the stone failed and they replace it with a brick… I… I don't know.

KH: But with that if you could see like, the top of the wall…I could Count those bricks and figure out how tall that section is and then kind of like use that Yes, to estimate the top.

CN: You're right! So this is important in the middle fourth vault that's where the staircase that comes down and I think there was an elevator right there. 

KH: So that’s under the Malt House.

CN: Yes, it would be and we reached that not via the mall house but through this rickety staircase from the brew house. This is looking up the elevator shaft.

KH: Oh cool!

CN: And that's like this little office that was in that.  Here's the shitty ass staircase.  I told Jason that if I would have known how bad the staircase was in [sic] I would never have made it down… We actually crawled down the side.  We walked along…

KH: Are those wood?

CN: Yeah, and they're totally - totally - and they're, it's like wrought iron.  I don't even know if it's steel.  It's so shady.

This is the money shot.  This is the one that Jason… I’ll let you in on a little secret: This is actually two photographs stitched together.  He did half of the barrel vaults in one shot and he did the other half in another one.

KH: I mean, it looks cool. 

CN: It's amazing, but that's – 

KH: So that's going, kind of cutting through all of them. 

CN: That's all seven of them.  This is up above Anyway, Jason, I'm sure he'll let you take a look at them.

KH: Yeah, that'd be great

CN: The rest of the mall house is basically rented out.  So we were not able to go in.

KH: What kind of businesses does he [Shashi] rent to?

CN: Nothing exciting

Yeah, so that's that.  This was day five, I guess this is our fifth is it there?  I'll show you the brew house.

Oh… So Carnegie steel - this is the last, basically the last thing they did is they replaced some of the wood timbers with steel ones.  And it was actually after the brewery closed if you can believe that. So I'm sorry you can't see it very well.

Okay, the brew house was heavily Altered by the shoe company because of fire standards and so here are the cellars the sub basement These date from the 1860s.  These are some of the oldest surviving lagering sellers in St.Louis.

KH: Do you think it's true that they really connect to an actual cave?

CN: Oh, they do.  Oh, yeah, they do.  Yeah, I Could show you the cave pictures.

[laughter]

KH: I Would kind of like to see those.

CN: Yeah, of course.  So it's three and three so three up and three down. 

They had to replace a valve and they quite frankly didn't feel like carrying the old one out.  It's obviously very heavy.  But you get this goes over to that lagering house.

This is the addition built in the 1870s, that's some of the oldest buildings on the campus.  Yeah, this is what we found out we figured out was the Hospitality room.

KH: What would that have been used for, just like people coming to visit.

CN: Yeah free beer and stuff.  Just like it still exists in Anheuser-Busch to this day.

I'll show you the cave

KH: That's more just for my own personal interest

[pause]

CN: There is the cave - oh here it is So here's us…

KH: I think I did see this picture online somewhere…That's cool.

CN: I don't know if this photograph actually helps you With height this is in the… this is underneath.

So this is an entrance off of the Brewhouse, okay, so you can see… I mean how tall we... Jason looks shorter than me because it's closer

KH: That actually might be helpful.  I know I saw that one somewhere in an article.

CN: Oh, yeah, Jason posted it online.

So this is the southern so this is where we think it actually goes to another entrance that's blocked off.  But basically there's three entrances possibly four This is down at the junction of the three arms.

This is probably this is where they think the swimming pool was - that's stupid.  It wasn't a swimming pool

KH: Maybe just like a pool of water. 

CN: Yeah drainage.

This is the wall that blocked it off from another brewery who had a lagering cave.  This is to keep the yeast from intermingling. There was another wall right there that was taken down to that level.  It was whitewashed.  And the cave is about 90% hollowed out by humans, it probably was much narrower and they basically just quarried it out.  Labor was very cheap - a dollar a day. So these people were very well off.

This is the so-called “theater” which I don't think actually was used for theater.  I think it was just a party room. 

And You can see how there were their locked gates we actually know From invoice that was in Adam Lemp's probate file.  He died before he could pay the bill.  He was in perfectly good financial state; obviously if you die you can't pay bills, right?  So his probate file is where they settled, where they settled up bills.  And you can see where they probably locked it up there, they had bills for padlocks and stuff like that.

But you can actually see in the oldest part of the cave where they built the walls out of stone and then the newer part where they added on it was made out of brick.

This is all post- this is all within the last 100 years.

KH: So or the entrance is like –Are they under buildings or are they like out somewhere else?  I’m not gonna try and go find them… just curious.

CN: So this is where it's tricky.  One entrance is in a parking lot which originally was covered up with the original cave house, and it was demolished… Oh my god, early 20th century, and they put it… This is actually that entrance up there.  Obviously you cannot lower Barrels of beer down the staircase, so this was added after it became just like a Vestigial organ.  There's another entrance underneath the second part, a second cave house, they added, which was added in the 1850s. And then there's the entrance into the old brew house, which you saw where Jason and I were standing.

KH: So when you say cave house, is that just kind of like a structure that denotes the entrance?

CN: So they would have had a winch to lower the barrels down.  Now that obviously became incredibly inefficient.  I can't even imagine how much hard work these guys did - it's insane!  They would have… obviously very quickly after it became logistically possible, they moved the brewery down to South City, and then they didn't have to move the barrels to and from Downtown - and that was a long ways! - these guys must have just had been working non-stop. And What's so important for people to realize, and people don't understand, is that by the time that brewery was built and finished in the 1870s, those barrels stayed in the basement and they had pumps that pumped the beer back and forth.  I mean they always - they're German, they always have the best technology. This is where the cave keeps going to the west.  That staircase built in early 20th century - Shashi has the blueprints for it.  That's when the cave had become purely Entertainment for the Lemps.  It’s actually very interesting - the cave began to be used again because the brewery was so successful that their buildings, their basements, got so crowded, that they ended up just…started having barrels go back into the cave even though it was functionally obsolete.  They only use the… the cave was only in use for 35-40 years and then artificial steam-powered, ammonia based refrigeration took over.

And this - this passageway is 100% artificial, this is what went up to attach to the brewhouse It would have been quarried out in the 1860s.  And that's where it attaches to The brewhouse.

KH: Very cool!  Thanks for sharing.

CN: That’s pretty much all I have!

KH: Thanks!

CN: So just I'll talk to Jason, feel free to email me!

[Recording #5 00:14:58]

NOTE:

After our interview, Chris reached out to his friend Jason Gray and obtained Jason's permission to share these photos with me for use in this project. Thank you both for sharing so much information with me!