A five-year effort to mark Missouri’s most notorious slave prison will come to fruition next month, when a bronze historical plaque will be installed on the exterior of the Stadium East parking garage across from Ballpark Village and Busch Stadium.
Historians say the parking garage, owned by InterPark Holdings, is located on the site of a slave prison once owned by Bernard M. Lynch, a nationally known trader of enslaved men, women and children. Lynch operated several “slave pens” in pre-Civil War St. Louis, with the largest one beneath the site of the garage.
The project’s backers are planning a ceremony in late January to unveil the new marker. On game days in the summer, they say, thousands of Cardinals fans will pass by the 20-by-16-inch bronze panel on the parking garage on Broadway; it will include text and a photo of one of Lynch’s brutal slave prisons.
“From 1849 to 1861, Lynch held enslaved people here in inhumane conditions, buying and selling them in St. Louis and in other markets across the South,” a mockup of the plaque reads in part. “On September 1, 1861, the Union army seized his slave pen and transformed it into a Confederate prison.”…