NiNi and Shelia
Last weekend we had the wonderful experience of interviewing NiNi Harris and her sister Shelia. NiNi is a local historian who has written several books about St. Louis history and is a big fan of St. Louis brick. Shelia is a retired school teacher who is now an active artist whose work is inspired by the architecture of St. Louis. NiNi lives with her husband in the house where she grew up. When you see the murals that NiNi and Shelias father painted on the interior walls of this house over 50 years ago you begin to understand where these two got some of their creative energy. NiNi has...
read more96 Years Ago
I love perusing older National Geographic magazines. On my first pass, I skip the articles and study the advertisements. I can’t quite explain my fascination, but I think it’s a combination of the artwork, fonts and language used to illustrate whatever product or service one is selling. Together they give me a small glimpse into a bygone era and leave an impression of something that is no more. I came across this ad scanned from the March 1914 issue of National Geographic for Hy-Tex Brick, a product of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company, Largest Manufacturers of Brick Face in...
read moreElaborating on the title
One of the things we’ve both spent a lot of time thinking and talking about is the film’s title. I wasn’t instantly sold when Bill first mentioned the quote and presented a rough draft of the title. Almost immediately he changed my mind by elaborating that it was chance that St. Louis had such an abundance of clay, chance that brought so many skilled immigrants to St. Louis where they were allowed to do such amazing brick work, and now we have a chance to save what we still have; many fortunes were built in brick, St. Louis brick is our underappreciated fortune and the brick...
read moreAbout Brick By Chance and Fortune
St. Louis is a city with a rich heritage of brick architecture. Home to some of the largest and most innovative clay working companies of the nineteenth century, you can still see some of the finest examples of brick work ever produced all over the city and region. Today the city's brick heritage is under threat by neglect, brick theft and urban renewal.
