Stealing a City Brick by Brick (Literally)

This sounds crazy but in St Louis thieves are destroying and stealing the city’s buildings brick by brick.

Unlike most of the USA, St Louis buildings are predominantly made of brick because after a fire that devastated much of St. Louis in 1849, city leaders passed an ordinance requiring all new buildings to be made of noncombustible material. That law, along with the rich clays of eastern Missouri, led to a flourishing brick industry here.

But today, the demand for the high quality bricks in the St Louis buildings has attracted gangs of brick thieves.

Officials believe that many of the 391 fires in vacant buildings over the past two years were caused by brick thieves.  Deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.

“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”

Some brick thieves also use cables and picks to collapse a wall and then harvest the bricks.

It’s reported in the New York Times that brick thieves often arrive at brickyard with “bricks in the trunk of a Lexus,” to sell.  After all a pallet of 500 bricks goes for roughly $100.  And it’s estimated that as many as eight semi-trailer loads of stolen bricks leave the city each week for Florida, Louisiana or Texas.

It’s become such a problem that there’s even a short film about called Brick by Chance and Fortune by director Bill Streeter.

I just found this amazing until I realized that it was all too real.

So hang on to your houses (literally).

Francesco …