ST. LOUIS – People are talking about what is likely St. Louis’s biggest billboard. It’s on the roof of a building that sits right in the flight path of St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
You can’t miss it as you exit or enter Lambert: a massive warehouse with “Davidson-Logistics.com” written on the roof. The giant red letters span nearly a third of a mile (1,657 feet).
“Actually, our business card is on top of our roof,” said Don Davidson, Jr., founder of Davidson Logistics, Inc. “We’re right on the runway path, 1-2, which is the approach and departure. I thought what better advertisement could we have for a lot of aircraft passengers and people that fly on airplanes that go in and out…actually we’ve gotten some customers off of it. Oh yeah, we have.”
They are customers who require logistics space to store items as well as the ability to get those items where they are needed when they are needed. That massive ‘business card’ has 35 million cubic feet of space, making it ideal for nearby Boeing as well as companies from Europe to South Africa and Japan.
Davidson’s office walls and boardrooms are now covered in priceless sports memorabilia, a far cry from the delivery business he started out of his house in Bellefontaine Neighbors more than 40 years ago.
He credited his staff, family, support from the City of Bridgeton, and faith for the company’s survival and growth.
“The ‘guy upstairs,’” Davidson said. “(plus) a lot of hard work. We worked hard to be lucky, too. We got some good contracts, hit some home runs.”
There’s another aspect to what’s going on beneath the now-famous roof that has nothing to do with logistics. It has everything to do with Davidson’s passion for collecting things, not just sports stuff. He’s into Scandinavian antiques.
“Over 30 years of going back and forth to Europe, we bought a couple of pieces for the house,” he said. “The next thing we turn around, there’s 8,000 pieces.”
The antique furniture, glassware, religious art, and other items are hundreds of years old.
“We’re so busy, we’ve never had a chance to get it online and archive it and put it together, but we’re getting ready to do that,” Davidson said.
He’s also planning to increase the workforce from 200 to 300–350 people and to expand the Bridgeton headquarters with a new $40 million, 500,000-square-foot building in 2024.