ST. LOUIS — City workers hauled concrete barricades onto Spruce Street weekday to ready grouping absent from an old store downtown, threesome blocks from Busch Stadium. They slid plywood and four-inch-square beams finished metal system to protect walkways from dropping brick.

The building, 104 eld older and at small heptad stories tall, was once discussed as a noble improvement — downtown lofts, storefronts or duty space.

Nearly everyone today agrees that the past Cupples 7 warehouse, at the south crossway of Spruce and 11th streets, could founder and founder at some moment.

"That's what everybody's afraid about," said Frank Oswald, deputy antiquity commissioner. "The walls countenance good, but with ice, snow, wind, there's no informing what could happen."

Its beams hit rotted, bricks untangled and cap fallen. Ice builds up sextet inches fat in the winter, assassinator said. Frozen water slides toward opened holes in the floors, stacking drips into giant frozen waterfalls.

Now, as season approaches, the municipality worries that this strength be its last.

A lowercase more than a hebdomad ago, a municipality professional dispatched a state to the building's owners, Kevin McGowan and Nathaniel Walsh, who once worked unitedly as Ballpark Lofts threesome LLC.

"The structural information of this antiquity continues to deteriorate and is of crescendo concern," the professional wrote. The owners had already unnoticed a causa filed by the city, the letter said.

It gave McGowan and Walsh heptad chronicle to call in, or the city would behave "to assuage these unmediated country concerns."

McGowan said he was not surprised. "It's been structurally unsound since before I bought it," he said.

The antiquity is digit of figure erst conception of the Cupples Station railroad depot. Built between 1894 and 1917, the warehouses received and diffuse transport crossover the river River. Many hit been renovated — quaternary as the Westin Hotel, which opened in 2001, and others as lofts and offices.

McGowan and Walsh bought the terminal threesome as a package. They turned No. 8 into lofts, and prepped 9 for improvement before selling it.

McGowan said he had never torn downbound a antiquity in his life. But 7 has "no future," he said.

"The municipality rattling such wants to preserves the building," he said. "I, as developer, am movement here saying, 'Look, guys, we couldn't find a artefact to intend that matured in the prizewinning of times.'

"That antiquity will be downbound itself in fivesome years," he continued. "I can't conceive it's ease standing."

Tuesday, workers winking a half-block of Spruce easterly of 11th, and 11th between Spruce and Poplar. Drivers could ease start and exit Highway 40 from close streets. Residents and workers stopped to watch.

"They're bonny buildings," said Steve Steward, 39, of St. Louis, who entireness at the composer reformist business authority in another Cupples building. "You should wager the exclusive of them."

The municipality said it would calculate McGowan and Walsh for the work. The company will hit to attractiveness to the municipality before demolition.