Glass, soot and splinters of wood crunch under Zoe McKelvie’s feet as she walks into Stella Blues Bar. Water drips, and electrical wires droop from the ceiling. Everything smells of wet earth and char.
“Holy s—-,” she mutters on video as she pans her phone’s camera over the aftermath of a fire that started in the kitchen of the south St. Louis dive bar in the early afternoon of April 5, 2024. “Oh my god, I’m going to get f——- dripped on.”
Everyone inside the bar that afternoon got out safely, but the burned-out business shuttered…