Trip Down Memory Lane with St. Louis Corvette Production Photos
Bowling Green may be Corvette’s official home, but St. Louis pumped out our favorite sports car right up to the end of the C3’s production run.
Natural Bridge Avenue and Union Boulevard flanked two sides of Chevrolet’s St. Louis plant in Missouri, which produced, as you can guess, the Chevrolet Corvette. With the building having been closed for over 30 years, not too many memories of this plant exist, but our CorvetteForum members, some of whom formerly worked there, share some rare photos and memories of how things were back in the day.
Production lines at the St. Louis facility produced a number of Chevrolet vehicles, including cars and trucks, but another part of the manufacturing compound had to be used for Corvettes due to the varied differences in building fiberglass bodies compared to steel. A few comments recall conditions not exactly being ideal, with dimly lit areas, and in the summer, overwhelming heat.
Of the buildings that originally made Chevrolets, the Corvette building no longer exists as such, and the rest of the larger manufacturing plant has been repurposed for other companies and manufacturing needs. The close in the mid-80’s came about from the opening of the Bowling Green plant’s tooling for the new C3, and truck manufacturing moving elsewhere. While we can’t visit the plant in its original form any more, we really treasure the memories of our forum members.
