The Attempt of the International Shoe Company to Erase the Lemp Legacy.

Just about anywhere you drive in South St. Louis; you can see the Lemp Brewery smokestack somewhere on the horizon. Towering almost three hundred feet, it is one of the most dominant features of the brewery complex. Many people think that the letters ISCO are painted, but they are not. The letters are actually glazed brick and were initially arranged to spell LEMP. When the International Shoe Company bought the brewery in 1922, they spent a tremendous amount of money rearranging the glazed brick to spell ISCO. If you look at the Lemp Falstaff Shields located above the doors that face Broadway, you will notice that the name Lemp has been chiseled off. Every place where the International Shoe Company maintenance workers could reach, they were instructed to remove the name Lemp. Luckily you can still see the Lemp name on the top of some of the buildings, and if you look hard enough, you can even see faint remnants of old Lemp Brewery ghost signs. No matter how hard the International Shoe Company tried to erase the Lemp legacy, the name just stuck. The brewery complex today is still known more by its brewing past, then by its shorter-lived stint has the nation's largest shoe factory.