The Brick Lady of St. Louis
Ever since a tornado tore through one of St. Louis, Missouri’s poorest neighborhoods, there are piles of bricks all over the place.
It’s not just a debris problem. Bricks in St. Louis have a long and complicated history here – the darling of many historic preservationists and a good source of profit to just as many demolition crews.
Producer Marina Henke spent a week in North City, tagging along with a brick layer who’s racing against the clock to build back homes. Can North City keep its bricks? Should they even try?
Featuring Natalie Hughes, RJ Koscielniak and Rasheen Aldridge.
Natalie Hughes (“The Brick Lady”) points out another home hit by the tornado while driving down some of the city’s most affected streets. (Photo by Marina Henke)
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
The STL Vacancy Collaborative runs a Demolition Dashboard, showing all approved and completed demolitions in St. Louis City.
The 2011 documentary Brick By Chance and Fortune provides a more in-depth look at brick’s history in St. Louis, including its architectural variance.
For a comprehensive social and economic history of St. Louis check out Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America.
The apocryphal headline and its report of a struggling St. Louis still exists in the New York Times’ archives: In St. Louis Even the Old Bricks Are Leaving Town.
In 2017, the podcast 99% Invisible took a closer look at St. Louis brick theft.
SUPPORT
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Special thanks to Cristina Garmendia and Michael Willis.
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Zabriskie, and Silver Maple
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.
[MUX IN, Vulcan Street, Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: On the afternoon of May 16th, a message crackled across the radios of Eastern Missouri.
CLIP: The National Weather Service in St. Louis has issued a tornado warning for STL City and East Central Missouri…Flying debris will be dangerous to those caught without shelter, damage to roofs…
Nate Hegyi: Local TV stations jumped on the story…
CLIP: We have crews on the way and we hope to bring you much more coming up very shortly…
Nate Hegyi: … and videos started popping up all over the internet…
CLIP: OMG! We’re in a tornado, we’re literally in a f-ing tornado dude…
Nate Hegyi: A few minutes later, Natalie Hughes jumped into her truck.
Natalie Hughes: I came down like immediately after it happened because my clients started calling me. So I’m trying to get to them and see how bad it is.
Nate Hegyi: When she pulled up to the northern part of St. Louis City, out her window she saw a disaster zone.
Natalie Hughes: You couldn't get down not one alley, barely a street because of the trees that toppled over… it was debris everywhere.
Nate Hegyi: An EF3 tornado had just torn through town. Winds had maxed out at over 150 miles per hour. 5 people had died.
Natalie Hughes: I was in awe…I couldn't even put it in words other than devastation, to be honest.
Nate Hegyi: And littered across the streets, spilling out of half crumbled houses, were piles and piles… of bricks.
Natalie Hughes: 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.
Marina Henke: And, and just to put a point on it, I mean, your hope is we're gonna build back these houses the way that they were?
Natalie Hughes: That's that's the hope. Yes.
[MUX IN, Walking Shoes, Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: 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.
Nate Hegyi: Natalie is a brick-layer. 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 get rebuilt in brick… or even rebuilt at all… hinges on what happens next.
Natalie Hughes: We have so much beautiful history with, with, with the city of Saint Louis with brick. It would just be a shame to just let it go
Nate Hegyi: Today on the show – what’s going to happen to the bricks of St. Louis? Our producer Marina Henke spent a week looking at the forces that are moving these bricks out of the city…
Natalie Hughes: Profit. Plain and simple.
RJ Koscielniak: The brick dealers themselves in the city have told me that it was always a red herring!
Nate Hegyi: And the people who are working to keep them there.
Rasheen Aldridge: Literally, when we knock down homes now that are bricks, other cities buy our bricks so that they can build.
Nate Hegyi: Stay with us.
BREAK
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Marina Henke.
Marina Henke: Natalie, hey!
Natalie Hughes: How are you?
Marina Henke: I'm good. Can I – do you want me to park out there? Right here? Okay great…
Marina Henke: About 3 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.
Natalie Hughes: This is where everything started. This whole area that you're in right now was really the heart of the tornado.
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: Yeah. Yep, yep. Lipstick, everything… represents me very well, I think.
Marina Henke: 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.
Marina Henke: 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?
Natalie Hughes: I don't – I don't know if I want to use the word elegant, but it, it, just gives a character. I think that's ultimately what it is. It really does give it character
[MUX IN, Calison Sad Story, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: 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 roofline or a collage of golden bricks arched above a doorway.
[mux swell briefly, then fades]
Marina Henke: Or they did - until the tornado.
Marina Henke: For folks that can't, like, see it and are just hearing this, like, what, what are we, uh, what are we looking at?
Natalie Hughes: Well, we're looking at a 100-year old, two story, uh, single home that is missing the two front top windows on the second floor and the roof.
Marina Henke: 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.
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: Half houses where you see the staircase… the whole wall feels so you can see the staircase for each level going up… people were still living there. So everything that was there is there.
Marina Henke: Natalie and I get into her truck and spend the afternoon driving to her different job sites.
Natalie Hughes: 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…
Marina Henke: With more than 5,000 structures hit, the effects of the storm are still everywhere, even after 3 months. And of course, you CANNOT miss the bricks.
Natalie Hughes: During the storm a lot of the bricks didn't necessarily break, but they, they came down in chunks.
Marina Henke: 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 of 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.
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: Look this is just the beginning. Wait till people start tearing – people haven't really begun to start tearing down like, I know that’s going to happen. Because they’re still waiting. They’re waiting for FEMA, they’re waiting for somebody to do something.
[MUX IN, Sandpiper in Motion, BlueDot]
Marina Henke: But the problem here, in St. Louis’s North City, isn’t just disaster recovery. Even before the tornado came – this neighborhood has seen much better days.
RJ Koscielniak: So Saint 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.
Marina Henke: This is RJ Koscielniak. He’s an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University where he studies urban decline.
RJ Koscielniak: My specialty is sort of why and how cities die. I'm being kind of blunt there.
Marina Henke: 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 to the suburbs didn’t apply to them.
RJ Koscielniak: and so all of that combined is 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.
Marina Henke: 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, Black, and – because of all those people that left, FULL of empty. brick. homes. I don’t mean the occasional vacant building.
[MUX FADES]
Natalie Hughes: 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.
Marina Henke: To the right of us, it is a grassy field. Uh, no… yeah there's no houses to the right of us.
Natalie Hughes: Look the school, it's a school down the street… let's go down street.
Marina Henke: Okay, great.
Marina Henke: A lot of these vacant buildings look like they were hit by the tornado too. Only they weren’t. They’re just falling apart from neglect.
Natalie Hughes: Over here on the Northside you probably have like three of them and they all look like this!
Marina: And what does that look like?
Natalie Hughes: The roof has collapsed completely from end to end and this got to be at least a 20-30,000 square foot building. Easy.
Marina Henke: 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.
[MUX IN, Tamarinda, Blue Dot]
Natalie Hughes: Look, I'm not a, um, 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 to the north side. “Yeah, that's what they did!” No. Stop talking to me.
Marina Henke: 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 Helene hit 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.
[MUX BEAT AND FADE UNDER]
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: So we are a few blocks from our last location. This is, uh, North City… Taylor and Cottage.
Marina Henke: We pull up to one of Natalie’s clients' homes. There’s 4 guys working on it, all in those neon yellow Brick Lady shirts.
Natalie Hughes: This house started as a half of a house. So as we're pulling up, you see the gentleman mixing, so the front… [fades under]
Marina Henke: Post-tornado, Natalie seems part contractor – part community organizer. She’s got a motto these days: “Walls up, roofs on.”
Natalie Hughes: Anything on the inside, anything cosmetic you gotta find somebody else to do it because it's slowing me down.
Marina Henke: 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.
[MUX IN, Vengeful, Blue Dot]
Natalie Hughes: I mean, many of these people don't want to leave. They don't want to leave their homes. They, that's why the people that I have been helping, uh, you know they're like, I just want to save my house! and I want to help them do that by any means necessary.
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: 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.
Marina Henke: But there are economic forces in St. Louis that make this easier said than done. That’s after a break.
BREAK
Marina Henke: This is Outside/In. I’m Marina Henke. I grew up in St. Louis, surrounded by brick. But as a kid, I can’t say I ever paid that much attention to it. But, while I was sitting in my brick elementary school, my brick middle school, my brick HIGH school, other people were starting to pay attention. In the early 2000s a pretty bizarre story started making national headlines. It was about a rise of middle-of-the-night brick thefts.
[NEWS CLIP]: An old building suddenly burned to the ground and the bricks left behind for the taking…
Marina Henke: It had all the ingredients of a good-old-fashion black market tale. I mean, how do you steal a house worth of bricks without anybody noticing?
[INTERVIEW CLIP]: And they’re very very fast, they can take an entire 2 story structure down in less than a day's time.
Marina Henke: Like a lot of popular news stories, the tale of St. Louis brick thefts has lingered for years. But urban decline professor RJ Koscielniak says what people should be focusing on is what makes bricks valuable in the first place.
RJ Koscielniak: 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.
[MUX IN, And So It Goes Alt, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: 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 brickyards 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.
RJ Koscielniak: 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.
Marina Henke: 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 can’t get enough.
You see, St. Louis owns a bunch of those vacant properties in North City. We’re talking foreclosed houses with whole walls missing, roofs caving in.
These are the houses that are taken apart like a lego box, and sold for parts. Local demolition crews are willing to do that work for VERY CHEAP, on one condition: the city lets them keep the bricks.
RJ Koscielniak: 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 actual… 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.
[MUX PEAK AND FADE]
Marina Henke: RJ’s point here is that salvaged bricks leave the city through legal ways 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 placed the blame on poor people.
RJ Koscielniak: Again, 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 is not really the fault of the person who is knocking that building down.
[CAR DRIVING AMBI RUNS IN]
Marina Henke: Is this your crew right here with the neon Brick Lady?
Natalie Hughes: Yep.
Marina Henke: 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 these other economic forces… have only gotten worse.
Marina Henke: Can you describe why the bricks became more expensive after the tornado?
Natalie Hughes: Well it’s simple. Profit. Plain and simple. Saw an opportunity to make more money and did so.
Marina Henke: 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.
Natalie Hughes: So the pandemic came around and it jumped up to 350 to 400. Now that this has happened, it's bumped up to 5 to 7. It really depends on who you're getting it from.
Marina Henke: I talked to a few different demo crews and contractors, exact prices differed, but everyone agreed that they’re going up. It’s good news for bricksellers 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 bucks a pallet.
[MUX IN, Jubelio, Blue Dot]
Natalie Hughes: I think the relationship that I have with people in general is part of what's helping me do everything that I'm doing.
Marina Henke: 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 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 salvage economy is always ready for more empty brick homes. If only Natalie tells me, people had the money… saving these bricks would be easy.
Marina Henke: I mean, do you feel that driving around North City right now. Looking at these houses, are you like this? This is a breeze. If I had the the if I had the manpower to do it, we could, we could build back –
Natalie Hughes: Oh, man. Yes, yes. Look the lottery is up to 750 million, right? I'm like, if I won that lottery, I would bring a few million over here and, and easily put up a few blocks. Easily.
[mux, seperate, new beat]
Marina Henke: But even as 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.
Rasheen Aldridge: Literally, when we knocked down homes now that are bricks, other cities buy our bricks so that they can build.
Marina Henke: This is Rasheen Aldridge, alderman for St. Louis’ 14th ward. It’s basically St. Louis’ version of a city councilor. Rasheen grew up in North City, and is the face of one of the mayor’s new tornado initiatives. A brick bank.
Rasheen Aldridge: 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.
Marina Henke: Here’s what Rasheen and the “Brick Reuse Committee" are imagining right now: they’d take North City houses that were already set for demolition and store those bricks. Then homeowners 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.
Natalie Hughes: In my mind, I feel like if you're going to tear buildings down, use the brick to rebuild.
Marina Henke: 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 brickyards.
Marina Henke: 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 Alrdige? Like, this is… this is insane.
Rasheen Aldridge: No, 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 bricks. So 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 cost of what this program is going to look like, which we're still not clear yet.
Marina Henke: 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, Rasheen was getting contacted by the media.
NEWS CLIP: 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… Rasheen Aldridge wants to start a brick bank, so far there’s no timeline on how soon…
[MUX IN, Particle Emission, Silver Maple]
Marina Henke: But there are so many unknowns here. Would saving the bricks make the costs of the demolitions go up? Remember, crews are working for less because they get to keep the salvaged materials. And Rasheen 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.
Rasheen Aldridge: 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’s home that has been in generations for a long time? So it's exciting, but it's also more like the reality of we're living through this, so how do we make this happen?
[MUX UP AND OUT]
Marina Henke: 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.
RJ Koscielniak: You know, if your home was hit by a tornado, those are your bricks. And if you want to rebuild using those 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 Saint 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?”
Marina Henke: 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 away from what really matters.
RJ Koscielniak: 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 that neighborhoods matter and social networks matter and, and investments, physical investments, we make matter.
Marina Henke: 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 STL 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.
[MUX IN, Sumire, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: Solving these issues will not make for the same splashy headlines, and sometimes… it might not even include brick.
RJ Koscielniak: Any new construction that happens in St.Louis, whether it's north or south or central, it's going to be multifamily, 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.
BEAT
[DRIVING AMBI FADES UP]
Natalie Hughes: Alright you want to go to the last one?
Marina Henke: Yeah, totally.
Natalie Hughes: So see these houses, these are all Ranken houses, see them frame houses? We're gonna drive down there.
Marina Henke: Natalie doesn’t like it, but she agrees with RJ – the future of North City isn’t brick. At least, not 100% brick.
Marina Henke: Yeah and so what we're looking at again is like little brick right in the front, siding for actually most of the house.
Natalie Hughes: Yep. That's exactly what they're doing. They're just using it for a brick facade of the front.
Marina Henke: These days, contractors rarely build with brick anymore. There are cheaper and faster ways to build a house.
Marina Henke: What do you see when you look at those houses in North City?
Natalie Hughes: I see the future, honestly. I want to see brick, but I don't… I don't see it coming back the way it left.
[MUX FADES AS CICADA/SITE AMBI COMES UP]
Marina Henke: 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.
Marina Henke: What's up Natalie? How are you doing?
Natalie Hughes: I’m good, I’m good.
Marina Henke: It's so fun to see you just pop up on the top of that roof.
Natalie Hughes: Look, I gotta do what I gotta do! (Laughs)
Marina Henke: 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.
Marina Henke: How's it going today?
Natalie Hughes: 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.
Marina Henke: Trusses – they’re basically roof-shaped Lincoln logs. Natalie tells me that setting that first one is really hard. Everything has to be measured just so, and there’s not much room for error.
[MUX IN, Chris Zabriskie Rewound]
Marina Henke: 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.
Marina Henke: Right now they’re tying up this truss just with rope…. Alright there it goes!... It’s going up, it’s going up!... And it’s up, you did it!
Marina Henke: Up it goes, and onto the next. Just like the motto – walls up, roofs on. Again, and again, and again. You could be daunted by the idea. Natalie’s not.
Natalie Hughes: The weather’s beautiful.
Marina Henke: So beautiful!
Natalie Hughes: Right! (laughs)
[Chatter of workers and job site noises]
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This story was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke. It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I'm your host, Nate Hegyi.
Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR's director of on demand audio.
Marina Henke: Check out our website where you can find photos of Marina’s reporting in North City, along with some additional photos of St. Louis’ brick architecture.
Nate Hegyi: Special thanks to Michael Willis and Cristina Garmendia.
Marina Henke: Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, Chris Zabriskie, and Silver Maple.
Nate Hegyi: Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.