St. Louis Ballpark Village Site - Ground Improvement - Installing Vibratory Stone Columns

Today we are in Downtown St. Louis at the proposed addition to Ballpark Village. Ballpark Village is a dining and entertainment district adjacent to Busch Stadium 3 where the St. Louis Cardinals play in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, occupying the site of the previous Busch Stadium. This next phase of development includes 700,000 square feet for a 29-story residential tower, a 10-story office building, an 8-story hotel, and a 3-story retail and entertainment building.

We are installing Vibratory Stone Columns for ground improvement on the proposed site so that the load requirements for the structure can be met. Vibratory Stone Columns are used to mitigate settlements and increase the bearing pressure of the soils.

What’s unique about this job is that the subsurface soils vary from soft silts to clays with urban fill depths varying greatly across the site with the deepest urban fills being approximately 20 feet in depth. These urban fills consist of primary clay soils with varying amounts of concrete debris and rubble as the location of this job site was once Busch Stadium 2.

Due to the concrete debris in these urban fills, we cannot drive the vibratory stone column flot through the soils to the required vibratory stone column depth. For this reason, we have a drill rig pre-augering the holes to allow the construction of the vibratory stone columns.