This six-story, 235,000-square-foot building was built in 1930 and originally used by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for newspaper publishing. The Globe-Democrat vacated the site in 1960 when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bought the building and began using it for its newspaper production.
In late 2018, the building was purchased by StarLake Holdings. The Post-Dispatch originally planned to stay and occupy the top two floors, but the publication’s owner decided to instead move the operation to a building on North 10th Street in August 2019.
StarLake Holdings enrolled in the program in November 2018 to address asbestos and lead-based paint within the building. They also wanted to investigate possible underground contamination in the adjoining parking lot to the west, where a gas station was located in the 1930s.
“Renovating older buildings is both exciting and challenging. Years of neglect, along with original materials and methods, many unregulated at the time, generate many surprises during these projects - most of them negative,” said Fred Lafser, owner of Lafser and Associates, the remediating partner on the project. “The environmental challenges created by past uses of chemicals, lead-based paint and asbestos-containing materials create financial hurdles that often make the reuse of these buildings financially impossible. The Missouri Brownfields/Voluntary Cleanup Program provides assistance to help projects over these hurdles, thus making the property more useful and productive to our economy.”
The property owner identified approximately 55,000 linear feet of asbestos-containing thermal insulating material and 70,510 square feet of asbestos-containing material, including window glazing, floor tile and mastic, during the building inspections. In addition, many other hazardous materials were identified, such as fluorescent light bulbs and ballasts, containers of printing inks and a variety of cleaning products.
In late 2020, the department oversaw a subsurface investigation of the adjoining parking lot that indicated minor petroleum contamination in the soil and groundwater on the lot’s east side. However, sample concentrations were all below residential target levels, so no further action was necessary.
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The real work begins
Beginning on the sixth floor and working their way down, workers conducted the building remediation in two phases. Phase 1 included removing most of the asbestos and lead-based paint, followed by lead dust clearance sampling. Phase 2 addressed replacing the approximately 300 exterior windows. This job was delayed by several months because each window had to be custom made.
Although all of the asbestos was removed from the site, it was not possible to remove all of the lead-based paint; some lead-based paint remains in areas of the building but has been safely encapsulated.
An operations and maintenance plan was created to track these encapsulated areas. The plan outlines the locations of the remaining encapsulated paint and methods required to repair any deteriorating protective material. The plan also details the annual inspections and reporting of findings to the department.
With the recording of the operations and maintenance plan, the North Tucker Building project was complete. The official certificate of completion was issued Jan. 27, 2022.
“We received clear and prompt guidance from the program with the identification of environmental issues, cleanup solutions and eventually clearance to assure the project owners, tenants and lenders that the environmental concerns were resolved in a satisfactory manner,” said Lafser. “It was refreshing to work with a government agency in a cooperative, problem-solving team effort.”
All cleaned up and ready to go
The North Tucker Building is now occupied by Square, a company that produces a payment platform aimed at small and medium businesses. The platform allows users to accept credit card payments and use tablet computers and phones as payment registers for a point-of-sale system. Square moved 850 of its employees into the building in July 2021.
Square’s move into the North Tucker Building is part of an effort to stimulate business growth in the area north of Washington Avenue, in St. Louis.
Learn more about the Brownfields/Voluntary Cleanup Program at dnr.mo.gov/waste-recycling/investigations-cleanups/brownfields-voluntary-cleanup.
