ST. LOUIS — The Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge has reopened, days after a nearby fire forced the closure.
The Missouri Department of Transportation said the bridge reopened just before 12:30.
Editor's note: The above video was published Tuesday afternoon.
The bridge was closed in both directions starting Monday night after smoke from a vacant warehouse fire near the intersection of North Broadway and Mullanphy Street limited visibility. The bridge remained closed through the Wednesday morning rush while as the St. Louis Fire Department doused the flames and demolition crews grappled with the century-old structure.
The crumbling heap of brick and concrete stood for a century as a fortress of frozen food. It was considered state-of-the-art architecture when it was built in 1922. The warehouse of ice, razed by fire, kept food cold through sweltering summer months and fed one of the nation's great cities during the Great Depression.
Eventually, the building's backstory landed it on the National Registry of Historic Places. But its current owner believes the city's ongoing struggles with housing the homeless caused it to go up in smoke, along with his pending plans to sell it to a new buyer in just four days.
"I'm incredibly frustrated," Armin Properties owner Adam Kuene said. "I don't have insurance. Nobody wants to insure a building like this. This is a $650,000 loss for me."
Property records show Kuene's company, a sole proprietorship, purchased the building in 2019 for $162,700.
"I put about a half a million dollars into the building, cleaning it up, removing graffiti," he said. "Within six months of me doing that, once people weren't down here (during the pandemic), homeless people started moving in."
Commercial real estate listings show the listing for sale at $495,000, down from a previous listing at $795,000. Some of the selling points included references to the building's historic status, which could come with tax breaks for developers.