KD Station (Former Swift & Co. Packing Plant)

The hulking brick structure on Leech Avenue began life around 1918-19 as a speculative venture called the Midland Packing Plant, part of Sioux City's enormous stockyards economy. After the original venture went into receivership, Swift & Co. acquired the plant in 1924 and ran a packing operation there for decades, employing thousands of workers in one of the largest livestock markets in the country.

The building's defining tragedy came on the morning of December 14, 1949. An underground natural-gas leak accumulated beneath the structure, and at 11:33 a.m. it detonated. The blast blew out the west wall, shattered windows, and collapsed floors and walls. Twenty-one people were killed and ninety-one injured, with roughly one million dollars in property damage. The clocks in the building reportedly froze at the moment of the explosion. It remains one of the deadliest industrial disasters in Sioux City history.

Swift continued operations until 1974. The following year, local businessman Kermit Lohry purchased the vacant plant and converted it into an enclosed shopping mall, incorporating much of the original packing equipment as decor. It opened in 1976 as the KD Stockyards Station and by the late 1970s housed more than sixty businesses, including retail shops, a bowling alley, and a miniature-golf course.

The mall declined over the following decades. In 2004 a fire that began in an outdoor electrical transformer combined with a major roof leak rendered the building unsafe, and the city declared it unfit for occupancy. After years of vacancy, the structure was demolished in 2010 at a cost exceeding three million dollars. The site today is a cleared lot, with the building's history preserved by the Sioux City Public Museum.