City Seeds St. Louis

I went out for a walk one evening, ostensibly to explore the neighborhood and work on some urban decay photography. In Saint Louis, there is certainly enough urban decay to go around. I’m still a new resident, so I wasn’t sure exactly where to go first. My inclination was to head north, where the abandoned warehouses start appearing a few blocks off of the newly gentrified Washington Avenue. However, to be honest, after a few conversations over the weekend about crime, I haven’t worked up the courage to go to far off the beaten path with my equipment by myself. So I headed west along Pine, intending to spend some time taking pictures of the dozens upon dozens of unused parking meters all over the city.

Next to the highway on-ramp, squeezed in next to a hotel in one of the many empty lots in the area I stumbled across City Seeds, a St. Louis non-profit project with the goal of increasing “food security in St. Louis” by providing “mentorship, supervision, and training twice a week.”

It certainly is an interesting project, there in the middle of the urban landscape, and given the number of signs warning people not to steal food, I was a little concerned about being chased off. To be honest tough, there wasn’t a lot of ready to eat food, so either it had already been stolen, legitimately harvested, or the garden wasn’t really producing much. Looked like there were a lot of leeks and potatoes approaching maturity, so maybe all of the earlier veggies had already been picked.

I was able to spend some time photographing the site and it was a really neat experience. I’m all about urban gardens – if I had some grass or a green roof I would certainly have one. Makes a lot of sense both environmentally and economically. Really cool to see that sort of thing locally here in St. Louis. Below are some of the images from my excursion of City Seeds as well as the surrounding area.