At about 2:35 p.m. last Friday, Gericka Jones was in the kitchen of Beyond Sweet Kitchen and Bar off Delmar Boulevard, asking the cooks about her customers’ food orders because the lights in the building began to flicker and eventually turn off.
“When I came out of the kitchen, the glass from the front of the restaurant started exploding,” Jones said, “The glass is coming towards everyone, like knives, like shards of glass, so people started getting sliced up and cut very badly.”
Jones, the restaurant’s general manager, immediately rushed the customers and employees to the bathroom while many of them were dripping blood from their hands, backs, faces and other parts of their bodies. She tried to put pressure on wounds while in the bathroom and keep people calm until the storm passed.
She thought the damage was only to the windows, but minutes later, she heard people on the building’s second floor screaming.
“Advantage Home Health Care was upstairs, their entire roof came off while they were up there … you could hear them screaming on top of everybody else,” she said in disbelief. “It was like we got hit by a bomb or something. It was just very scary. I have never experienced anything like that in my life.”
The broken glass on the inside of the restaurant and other debris are cleaned up, and she is preparing to board up some of the broken windows. As she walked around some crumbled red and tan bricks and black shingles next to the building and along the sidewalk, she said the owner will most likely have to rebuild since there is extensive damage.
The Delmar Maker District was one area that sustained an enormous amount of damage to homes and businesses during last week's storm. There were more than 4,440 buildings damaged across St. Louis and the storm caused at least $1 billion in property damage.
Jones said the restaurant owner is looking forward to reopening someday, but getting former employees back to work is the top priority.
“This was their full-time job. I lost my job, I lost my car, and I know that's materialistic … but losing a job is hard, especially in this economy today,” she said. “On top of that, all these people who lost their homes.”
Beyond Sweet Kitchen and Bar set up a crowdfunding account with a $24,000 goal to help their 30 employees with some recovery efforts and personal bills.
A few blocks over, in a shopping center, are various businesses that were hit by Friday’s storm. Jones’ mother owns the hair and beauty salon, Hairapy, which is in the complex and was inside doing hair when the storm hit. Jones said most likely all of those businesses will have to relocate.
MADE Makerspace is ‘extremely sturdy’
Also, in the Delmar Maker District on Monday, employees at MADE Makerspace were sweeping floors, rehanging doors, sealing up cracks in the insulation and throwing trash in dumpsters.
Jason Foster, the creative workspace’s facilities manager, said there were a few employees and artists inside the space when the storm ripped through the area.
After it passed, Foster and a few others assessed the damage and saw some missing shingles and blown-out windows, but he believes the building did not sustain that much damage because it was an old auto repair shop.
“In the early 30s, it was an auto dealership, and the auto shop where they worked on the cars is on our second floor,” Foster said. “The way this building is built is extremely sturdy, so that's a good thing for us.”
Foster said he was in an office meeting with some employees when his phone alerted him that a tornado was on the way. He said he blew it off at first, but when the windows began to break, he and others in the building began to seek shelter underneath a steel work table.
He was nervous that the heavy equipment would start flying. Foster is not worried about how the company will recover, because he knows the building is insured and there was not too much damage.
‘That building completely collapsed’
Just two buildings east of MADE is the Mediterranean restaurant, Esca, which opened in March 2024. Ben Poremba was inside, sweeping up the last bit of glass and other debris from the walls and floors.
Poremba is the owner of Bengelina Hospitality Group, which operates Esca, Olio, Florentin, Deli Divine and Nixta restaurants in the area.
Poremba said he came to North St. Louis because the neighborhood showed promise, but now he said the area is devastated by this disaster.
“A lot of people here have serious structural damages, and I think we are the more fortunate ones with holes in the roof but nothing that is going to prevent us from coming back into our buildings,” Poremba said. “We have some means to be able to deal with this, but so many people don't … and we're going to lean on our insurance policies, but there's people that are going to need a lot more help than we do.”
Many of his employees were going back and forth from Esca to Florentin restaurant across the street to help with clean-up efforts. The employees have thrown out food and alcohol because they still do not have any electricity or gas.
As Poremba swiped through photos of his restaurant's damage, he stopped at a picture of Olio, which is a block over, and was immediately saddened. He suspects that damage to all of his restaurants will total hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“We were constructing our new restaurant, and that building completely collapsed,” he said. “It was in the construction phase, and we did store a lot of things there, so there's going to be some loss over there. But at the end of the day, no one was harmed.”
Poremba is concerned for his neighbors who might be able to rebuild and is also worried about his employees, whom he plans to keep on payroll.
“We started a fund for employees, and 100% of it is going to go to our employees because many of them also live in the neighborhood. Many of their apartments and homes are damaged, and I don't want them starting to have to worry about that,” he said.
While he is helping his employees, Poremba wants city officials to better support business owners and homeowners during this difficult time.
“We need the city to help us with big trash [dumpsters], I think those need to be deployed on every block, because all this debris is going to have to go somewhere,” he said. “I think they're doing a good job so far, but [we] need more communication about power and gas.”
