The Brick Lady of St. Louis

This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. On the afternoon of May 16th, a message crackled across the radios of eastern Missouri. Local TV stations jumped on the story. We have crews on the way and we hope to bring you much more coming up very shortly. And videos started popping up all over the internet. Oh my god! It's we're in a tornado! We're literally in a fucking tornado dude. In the tornado! A few minutes later, Natalie Hughes jumped into her truck. I came down like immediately after it happened because my clients still calling me. So I'm trying to get to them and see you know how bad it is. When she pulled up to the northern part of St. Louis City, out her window, she saw a disaster zone. You couldn't get down that one alley, barely a street because the trees that toppled over, it was debris everywhere. An EF3 tornado had just torn through town. Winds had maxed out at over 150 miles per hour. Five people died. I wasn't off. I couldn't even put it in words other than devastation to be honest. And littered across the streets, spilling out of half crumbled houses, were piles and piles of bricks. Everywhere. Everywhere. There's not one chimney that I've seen that survived. At least the top part of it blew if nothing, if the whole thing didn't fall down. And just to put a point on it, I mean your hope is we're going to build back these houses the way that they were. That's the hope. Yes. It's become all too common to see scenes of destruction after a disaster. But these bricks aren't just rubble. St. Louis is known for its brick architecture. It's a part of the city's history. Natalie is a bricklayer. She actually calls herself the brick lady. And to her and a lot of people here, these bricks belong in St. Louis. But this disaster is an inflection point. Whether or not these houses will get rebuilt in brick or even rebuilt at all hinges on what happens next. We have so much beautiful history with the city of St. Louis with brick. It would just be a shame to just let it go. Today on the show, what's going to happen to the bricks of St. Louis? Our producer Marina Hanky spent a week looking at the forces that are moving these bricks out of the city. Profit. Plain and simple. The brick dealers themselves in the city have told me that it was always a red herring. And the people who are working to keep them there. Literally when we knock down homes now that a bricks other cities buy our bricks so that they can build. Stay with us. If you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum. Or roam the halls after closing time. The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever. And how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts. Or find us online at si.edu. Slash Side Door. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Marina Hinke. Natalie, hey. I'm good. Can I, do you want me to park out there right here? Okay, great. About three months after the tornado, I pulled up to North City in my parents' old car. I grew up in St. Louis. Most of my family still lives here. This is where everything started. This whole area that you're in right now was really the heart of the tornado. Again, this is Natalie Hughes, the brick lady. She's wearing the official brick lady t-shirt. Neon yellow with a lego-like brick character wearing lipstick and long lashes. Yeah, yep, yep. Lipstick, everything. Represent me very well, I think. Natalie is a force. When I first connected with her on the phone, she was literally laying a brick wall the entire conversation. In case you couldn't tell, bricks are a big deal in St. Louis. The bricks look beautiful. I just have to say, it is. If you were describing what that looks like to people, like, what does that look like? Look, I don't know if I want to use the word elegant, but it just gives a character. I think that's ultimately what it is. It really does give a character. Everywhere you go in St. Louis, the elegance of brick is on display. That's because clay is abundant here. In the 1800s, people would dig pits in their backyards and fire up clay bricks right on the spot. After a massive fire in 1849, building codes required new houses to be built of stone or brick. And it's not just historic or wealthy buildings that are made with the material. Affordable four-family homes might have small brick stars dotting their roof line, or a collage of golden bricks arched above a doorway. Or they did. And told the tornado. For folks that can't like see it and are just hearing this, like, what are we looking at? Well, we're looking at a 100-year-old two-story single home that is missing the two top windows on the second floor and the roof. It's an old saying that tornadoes don't hit cities. There's a kernel of truth in it, but only because the probability of a tornado hitting any one place is so low. But when they do hit cities, the destruction can feel apocalyptic. I feel like even driving up, like, the thing that just is so striking is you can just see straight into a lot of these rooms. There are beds that you can see into bedrooms, living rooms. Half houses where you see the staircase, the whole wall fell, so you can see the staircase for each level going up. People were still living there, so everything that was there is there. Natalie and I get into her truck and spend the afternoon driving to her different job sites. Look at this church. This church has no nothing. The whole roof is gone. The walls have collapsed all the way around it. Nothing left. With more than 5,000 structures hit, the effects of the tornado are still everywhere, even after three months. And of course, you cannot miss the bricks. During the storm, a lot of the bricks didn't necessarily break, but they came down in chunks. There's piles of them everywhere. Some are messy, left in huge heaps of rubble that spill out onto the street, or crumbling straight off houses like a collapsed Jenga Tower. But unlike a lot of building materials, when bricks collapse, many of them are still usable. It's just a matter of picking out the broken pieces and stacking up what's left. We see signs of this exact process in action. In North City, many are neatly stacked and wrapped in cling wrap. At one point, we drive by a group of guys lifting pallets of them onto a truck bed. Look, this is just the beginning. We just thought people started tearing down. People haven't really begun to start tearing down. Like, I know this is going to happen. Because they're still waiting. They're waiting for FEMA. They're waiting for somebody to do something. But the problem here in St. Louis' North City isn't just disaster recovery. Even before the tornado came, this neighborhood has seen much better days. So St. Louis goes from, you know, basically like a fur trader settlement in the beginning of the 19th century into the most powerful city really in the country at the close of the 19th century. This is Argic Selniak. He's an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University, where he studies urban decline. My specialty is sort of why and how cities die. I'm being kind of blunt there. I'll be blunt too. St. Louis was a powerful city. For decades, it was one of the biggest brick exporters in the country. But there was also iron, beer, eventually airplanes. But then the steel belt became the rust belt. New suburbs were built, white families packed up and left, and a few massive highway projects chopped up the city. Throughout the 1970s, St. Louis lost 27% of its population. As people left, St. Louis' black population had nowhere to go. Those loans that white families got to move out of the suburbs didn't apply to them. And so all of that combined has really set St. Louis up to deal with a sequence and succession of problems that I wouldn't wish on. I mean, no one should wish on any city. Those problems are stacked on top of each other in many parts of North City. It's one of the most vulnerable areas in St. Louis. Low income, mostly black. And because of all those people that left, full of empty brick homes. I don't mean the occasional vacant building. This particular block in itself, you see how many houses? One, two, one, two, three, four, five. It's six houses on this block, and there are none on the right-hand side. Yeah, I mean, to hit that idea home, like to the right of us, it is a grassy field. Nope. Yeah, there's no houses to the right of us. Look, the school, it's a school down the street. Let's go down the street. Okay, great. A lot of these vacant buildings look like they were also hit by the tornado. Only they weren't. They're just falling apart from neglect. Over here on the North Side, you probably got about three of them, and they all look like this. And what does that look like? The roof has collapsed completely from end to end, and this has got to be at least a 20 to 30,000 square foot building. Easy. People who live in North City are sicker, farther from grocery stores, and this one's really important after a natural disaster, less insured. Things are so bad here that after the tornado hit, Natalie said some people wondered if it wasn't manufactured by the government. Look, I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but when I talk to people and they tell me that this was done on purpose, I can't do anything. I laugh because I'm like, what? Global warming is real. What are you talking about? Somebody with a joystick just decided to go through the North Side? Yeah, that's what they did. I don't know. Stop talking to me. North City, St. Louis would not be the first place to watch some disaster exacerbate an already existing problem. The ninth ward in New Orleans struggled with depopulation for years before Katrina came. Much of Appalachia fought for reliable cell service long before Hurricane Helenehead last fall. Climate disasters, though, can also offer a window. It's brief, but it's there, where recovery can help solve a problem. But if that recovery takes too long or doesn't identify the vulnerabilities that are already there, cue an accelerated decline. All of this is why, for Natalie, keeping these brick houses isn't just about aesthetics. It's about the survival of North City itself. So we are a few blocks from our last location. This is North City Taylor and Cottage. We pull up to one of Natalie's clients' homes. There's four guys working on it, all in those neon yellow brick lady shirts. This house started as a half of a house. So as we're pulling up, you see the gentlemen mixing. So the front, we're going to take the post-tornado. Natalie seems part contractor, part community organizer. She's got a motto these days. Walls up, roof's on. Anything on the inside, anything cosmetic, you gotta find somebody else to do it because it's slowing me down. But recovery in North City hasn't looked the same for everybody. There's the homeowners that can afford to rebuild. They'll salvage some of their fallen bricks and work with contractor teams like Natalie to make their house livable. Some people, though, are stuck waiting for FEMA money or insurance adjustments to come through. It's an unclear timeline. And meanwhile, their bricks sit there, often covered in blue tarps that you see scattered throughout the neighborhood. I mean, many of these people don't want to leave. They don't want to leave their homes. That's why the people that I have been helping, they're like, I just want to save my house. And I want to help them do that by any means necessary. And here's where we come back to that window of opportunity. Because on the one hand, we have vacant buildings, often waiting to be demolished. And on the other hand, tornado victims who may not have the materials or the money to rebuild. To Natalie, the solution is right there. In my mind, I feel like if you're going to tear buildings down, use the brick to rebuild. The brick is half the battle because it's so expensive. That's half the battle at this point. But there are economic forces in St. Louis that make this easier said than done. That's after a break. Summer always changes how I get dressed. 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In the early 2000s, a pretty bizarre story started making national headlines. It was about a rise of middle of the night brick thefts. It had all the ingredients of a good old fashioned black market tale. I mean, how do you steal a house worth of bricks without anybody noticing? And they're very, very fast. They can take an entire two story structure down in less than a day's time. Like a lot of popular news stories, the tale of St. Louis brick thefts has lingered for years. But urban declined professor R. J. Kacelnac says what people should be focusing on is what makes these bricks valuable in the first place. The brick dealers themselves in the city have told me that it was always a red herring, that it was a distraction from the actual supply chain. In 1979, The New York Times published an article with the headline, in St. Louis, even the old bricks are leaving. It was catchy and true. Back then, local brick yards had stumbled onto a bit of a magic trick. Brick facade. Put a thin layer of sliced up brick over other materials. And you can get the same aesthetic, but with a much better profit margin for brick sellers. So you might sell a brick to a yard for $1.50. Somebody else might buy that brick for $2. And then the yard in Louisiana can sell it for $3. But also they're chopping the brick up and they're selling each one of those pieces of brick for $2. Right? So like the margins on this basically escalate and accumulate over time and across space. What this means is that ever since the population started to plummet, St. Louis has been hemorrhaging used bricks. States like Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, they cannot get enough. You see, St. Louis owns a bunch of these vacant properties in North City. We're talking for closed houses with whole walls missing, roofs scathing in. These are the houses that are taken apart like a Lego box and sold for parts. And local demolition crews are willing to do that work for very cheap on one condition. The city lets them keep the bricks. And so you can actually start seeing this, the math, right? We're seeing the math play out where it's the city endorsing this process because they need the buildings taken down. You have the brickyards that know that they can make money at each level of this supply chain, right? And then you have the contractors and the wreckers who are doing their best to operate as quickly as possible, tear these things down, stack the bricks and sell them away. RJ's point here is that salvaged bricks leave the city through legal means at a much greater scale than the occasional brick burglary. He thinks it's like comparing a leaky faucet to a snapped water pipe. And besides, all those headlines on theft place the blame on poor people. Again, right? You're choosing to take a societal and scalar problem like neighborhood decline, urban decline and make it about how individuals relate to that problem and not how that problem is produced at a certain scale and then produces those people, right? Like the desire to have to knock a building down so that you can pay for food. It's not really the fault of the person who was knocking that building down. Is this your crew right here? With the neon brick lady? Yeah. Back when I was driving through North City with Natalie, she told me the brick thefts aren't really a thing anymore. Other contractors I spoke with agreed. But other economic forces have only gotten worse. Can you describe why the bricks became more expensive after the tornado? It's simple profit. It's plain and simple. Saw an opportunity to make more money and did so. For years, bricks have been getting more expensive. This is a big problem for Natalie, who has to supplement her rebuilds with plenty of purchased brick. Before COVID, she was paying about $200 per pallet. So the pandemic came around and it jumped up to 350 to 400. Now that this has happened, it's bumped up to five to seven. It really depends on who you're getting it from. I talked to a few demo crews and contractors. Exact prices varied, but everyone agreed that they are going up. It's good news for brick sellers and salvagers, but not for tornado victims who are struggling to pay for repairs. Natalie's been able to cut a deal with a few demolition crews and they're charging her way less than $700 a pallet. I think the relationship that I have with people in general is part of what's helping me do everything that I'm doing. Meanwhile, Natalie makes her own sacrifices. She's put many of her clients on very low interest payment plans and spends hours talking to FEMA on their behalf. If brick prices stay high, Natalie worries that this could be the final push for homeowners to make a rebuilding unattainable. For many families, it might be the path of least resistance to cut their losses and leave North City. And like a monster waiting in the shadows, the brick salvage economy is always ready for more empty brick homes. If only Natalie tells me people had the money, saving these brick homes would be easy. I mean, do you feel that driving around North City right now? If looking at these houses, are you like this? This is a breeze. If I had the manpower to do it, we could we could build back. Oh man, yes, yes. Look, the lottery is this up to 750 million, right? I'm like, if I won that lottery, I would bring a few million over and easily put up a few bucks easily. But even a St. Louis pays demolition crews to take used bricks away. Some people in the city government are trying to find a way to keep them in North City. Literally when we knock down homes now that a bricks other cities buy our bricks so that they can build. This is Racheen Aldridge, alderman for St. Louis's 14th ward. It's basically St. Louis's version of a city counselor. Racheen grew up in North City and is the face of one of the mayor's new tornado initiatives, a brick bank. The idea of the brick bank so that people understand is a place or a storage facility or a location where we can be able to store bricks that could be able to help rebuild homes that was impacted by the storm. Here's what Racheen and the brick reuse committee are imagining right now. They take North City houses that were already set for demolition and store those bricks. Then home owners hit by the tornado could use those bricks for free to defray the costs of rebuilding. This is exactly what Natalie was proposing in the first half of the episode. In my mind, I feel like if you're going to tear buildings down, use the brick to rebuild. Using this brick bank model, St. Louis would essentially create a city-sponsored salvage yard to help fund the costs. They're even toying with trying to sell the bricks. They don't give away for free, just like the private brick yards. It's a pretty optimistic idea of like we could become this like seller of bricks maybe. Has anyone heard you say this and be like, Alderman Aldrich, like this is this is insane. No, I mean, I think people already know that we in the city, it's kind of a known thing that if a home is knocked down, you know, we sell the bricks, we don't we don't keep the brick. So it's it's nothing new that we do. I think it's just a way that we can sell them now to be able to help offset the costs of what this program is going to look like, which we're still not clear yet. You can see why the brick bank is another catchy brick story. I mean, the name basically explains itself. Even before they started working out the details, Roshin was getting contacted by the media. The city says they're still working on what they're calling a brick bank. Now there has been discussion of a possible brick bank for the city. Roshin Aldrich wants to start a brick bank. So far, there's no timeline on how soon that could happen. But there are so many unknowns here. Would saving the bricks make the costs of demolitions go up? Remember, crews are working for less because they could keep the salvage materials. And Roshin doesn't even know where they'd store them. They've toured old newspaper offices, some outdoor spaces. None of them have worked out. And meanwhile, the people who were hit by the tornado, they need solutions now. It's exciting, but I also think we're dealing with people that have been impacted now. So it's like, what can we do to save big mama and big daddy and auntie and uncle home that has been in generations for a long time? So it's exciting, but it's also more like reality of we're living through this. So how do we make this happen? I want to be clear. I'm not saying a brick bank is a bad idea. And it's way too early to tell if this plan will fail or succeed. But it's certainly not a silver bullet to the problems at play in North City, brick economy or beyond. For those reasons and more, RJ, the urban planning professor, is skeptical. You know, if your home was hit by a tornado, those are your bricks. And if you want to rebuild using the bricks, you should. I don't think there's a debate there. There shouldn't be a debate there. I think though, the amount of bricks that are flowing out of St. Louis suggests that it's less about, oh, can we get a part of that, that supply and more, how do we control the money? Instead of trying to keep bricks in North City, RJ would like to see the money that's being made off of them stay in the neighborhood, valuing the labor, paying more for demolition work. He's worried that the brick bank, just like the brick thefts before it, is just another distraction. A catchy story with an easy solution that keeps people's attention from what really matters. By treating brick as some shared thing, it actually ends up concealing the fact that we should be investing as if the city is the shared thing, right? As if the school districts are the shared thing, as if the infrastructure is a shared thing, right? Not treating downtown and brick as the two things that everybody shares. The reality is that those oftentimes then stand in the way of us taking seriously that neighborhoods matter and social networks matter and the investments, physical investments we make matter. After the tornado, there were a lot of headlines reminding people how special St. Louis brick is, which is true. Even RJ admits he keeps a couple St. Louis bricks around his house for decoration. But keeping alive the mythology of brick alone will not keep people in North City. Real recovery means looking at the problems that have always been there. Affordable housing, healthcare, education. Solving these issues will not make for the same splashy headlines. And sometimes it might not even include brick. Any new construct then happens in St. Louis, whether it's North or South or Central. It's going to be multi-family. It's going to be very, very modern. It might borrow some of the aesthetics of bricks, but by no way, shape or means is it going to be a brick building? All right, you want to go to the left? Yeah, totally. All right. So, see, these are all wrecking houses. See them frame houses? We're going to drive down that. Natalie doesn't like it, but she agrees with RJ. The future of North City isn't brick, not 100% brick, at least. Yeah, and so what we're looking at again is like little brick right in the front, siding for actually most of the house. Yep, that's exactly what they're doing. They're just using it for a brick facade of the front. These days, contractors rarely build with brick anymore. There are cheaper and faster ways to build a house. What do you see when you look at those houses in North City? I see the future, honestly. I want to see brick, but I don't see it coming back the way it left. But if it's not coming back, Natalie is determined to make sure what's still here stays, especially now in this window of recovery. She might call herself the brick lady, but for her, it's always been about taking care of the families that live inside of them. On a Thursday morning, I pull up to one of Natalie's clients' homes. I'm interrupting, but she's gracious about it. What's up, Natalie? How much are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I just wanted to see you just pop up on the top of that roof. Look, I gotta do what I gotta do. The job is a classic St. Louis house. Two stories, a shallow front porch, and, of course, brick. The roof and practically the entire second floor got torn down by the storm. How's it going today? So far, so good. Yeah? Yeah, we're just trying to get the first set of trusses set so we can set them all and go and start putting the roof on. Trusses. They're basically roof-shaped Lincoln logs. Natalie tells me that setting the first one is really hard. Everything has to be measured just so, and there's not much room for error. A little while later, it's go time. Two guys haul one of the trusses right to the base of the house. It's got to be more than 200 pounds. And so right now they're tying up this trestle, just with rope. All right, there it goes. It's going up. It's going up. And it's up. You did it. Up it goes and on to the next, just like the motto. Walls up, roof's on. Again and again and again. You could be daunted by the idea. Natalie's not. The wood is beautiful. So beautiful. This story was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Hanky. It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I'm your host, Nate Hedgie. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio. Check out our website where you can find some photos of my reporting in North City along with some additional photos of St. Louis' brick architecture. Special thanks to Michael Willis and Christina Garmandia. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Zabrisky and Silver Maple. Outside In is a production of NHPR. Music Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded Hello Sunshine or where Kevin O'Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earl became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, the new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry hosted by me, Reza Satchu. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high-profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. 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