Gateway Bypass

As a recent news story read, “This has not been a good year for St. Louis.” According to various rankings, it is the most dangerous, toxic, and unhealthy city in America. Of course, these pronouncements are dubious: Detroit is much more dangerous, and Houston is much fatter and more polluted. But the decay facing inner St. Louis warrants the recent attention. It is a city facing significant hardship in the form of a prolonged illness—a kind of urban hyper-thyroidism that has drastically sped up its aging process.

St. Louis was planned as the great metropolis of the American Midwest. It didn’t turn out that way, but it wasn’t for lack of qualifications. The city is perfectly located in the center of the nation on the banks of its largest river, in a region that experienced unabated growth for much of the 19th century. Its rise was, for lack of a better term, meteoric. Few cities were built as purely for the Industrial Age as St. Louis. That has made its fall equally meteoric.

A Gradual Post-Industrial Decline

By 1850, the main transit point of the emerging American Heartland, St. Louis was the 8th largest city in the nation, and its fortune was largely tied to other river and port cities like New Orleans and Cincinnati. By 1900, St. Louis had leapt to 4th place, behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, with a population of more than half a million. From its two largest industries, it became known as the city of “shoes and booze.” Manufacturing plants sprang up to serve these and other industries, stimulating the city’s early growth and drawing millions of new inhabitants seeking employment.

In 1904 St. Louis hosted the World’s Fair—the first of the 20th Century. Following on the heels of victory in the Spanish-American war, the Fair was a celebration of the new American Empire. The lead exhibit was the Philippine Exposition, a living tribute to the “White Man’s Burden” where real Filipinos, living in replica tribal villages, were trotted out like booty for the largely white, Christian fairgoers. It was, sadly, a human zoo, and a harbinger of the racial divide that would plague the city straight through to the post-industrial era.

By the time of the Fair, the seeds of St. Louis’s destruction were sown. The national rail system had developed in Chicago, shifting the center of the Midwest northwards. In 1950, St. Louis’s population peaked at 860,000, but World War II industrial giants like Detroit, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Baltimore had already surpassed it. In the following half-century, more than half a million people left St. Louis in post-war suburbanization and white flight. By the 2000 Census, St. Louis was the 48th largest city in the nation, dropping 40 places in almost as many years. The population was fewer than 350,000 people in a land area of 62 square miles. Although St. Louis is still twice as dense as Houston, 50,000 people left the city in the 1990s while Houston gained some 350,000. Today, it is not even the largest city in the state.

The grotesque Philippine Exposition of today is the homeless population, largely from a black underclass left behind when everyone who could move out did. The homeless problem is disturbingly out-in-the-open here. They inhabit downtown in droves on either side of Washington Street, encamping along the bases of beautiful classical and beaux-arts museums and civic buildings situated along a grassy mall that lies due west from the Arch. It is a stunning city center, but marred by the unmistakable signs of open-air squatting, block after block, in a manner that you would never see in New York or Chicago.

Downtown St. Louis today is, in the words of Mark Twain, a “haint”: a glorious river ghost of industrial ruins and turn-of-the-century city planning. As a city, she has seen her purpose evaporate right before her. The waters of the Mississippi have receded in recent years, the shipping traffic has thinned to a steady trickle, and the banks lie bare and polluted. Long gone are the steamboats and shorehands. Today, abandoned factories and rows of vintage smokestacks hulk above the riverfront in a uniform cliff wall of rust and brick. In the business district, empty surface lots buffer a small zone of haphazard, mixed-era office architecture, some simply awful. After 6 p.m., the whole area is deserted, and good luck to you if you get hungry late at night.

You can see failed attempts at urban renewal everywhere. The majestic steel trellised Union Station was converted into an uninspired shopping mall in the mid-‘80s. A new station was supposed to be built but never materialized. Today, visitors arriving by train disembark into an open-air parking lot beneath the Interstate 40 bypass that cuts right through downtown like a blatant afterthought. There is only a small ticket shack, a temporary structure erected 25 years ago, which is filthy, cramped, and stinks of urine. Unless there are taxis waiting, which is rare, you have to walk into downtown, which although not terribly far, requires quite a bit of frustrating navigation through a field of surface lots and across highway interchanges. All this is to say St. Louis does not exactly offer a warm welcome. It is not a city that looks loved.

NOTHING to lose: even museums serve beer

However, looks can be deceiving. In its defense, this is only the downtown, and everyone in the city would openly admit it is a mess. But all around it grows St. Louis County, a very nice suburban metropolis of nearly three million people, the 18th largest in the nation. It is a significant economic center anchored by a few blue chip industries that have become its lifeblood, like auto manufacturing and aerospace, and it hosts the headquarters for Alcoa, Purina, Enterprise, Anheuser-Busch, and A.G. Edwards.

And even downtown is not hopeless. Structurally, it is small and accessible, and has a modest collection of some of the nation’s most beautiful Chicago School buildings. All along Washington Street in the aging city are clear signs of the urban loft-epidemic. Transplanted urban youth spill out onto the sidewalks outside Tangerine, a pastel-colored bar distinguished by go-go dancers and martinis served in pint glasses. Up the block is the City Museum, a public entertainment complex housed in an old manufacturing plant that defies description, and in any other city, would violate most safety standards. It is a post-industrial masterpiece built from the steel and slag of the city’s past, an indoor-outdoor recreational space with a tiny Ferris wheel, aerial climbing course, and a three-story high stainless steel slide. Honoring the city’s love affair with the bottle, there are two taverns within the museum complex for plenty of drunken climbing and sliding. You really need to see the City Museum to understand how it and alcohol may not be the best combination, but it is indicative of the St. Louis spirit, a jerry-rigged sense of creativity that says, “So what, what the hell do we have to lose?”

The City’s New Boosters

This particular stretch of Washington Street is the epicenter of a small but very passionate revitalization movement, one that has been, on a limited scale, immensely successful. It owes much of its success to eccentric philanthropists like Bob and Gail Cassilly, who built the City Museum in 1997 to spur redevelopment. But on-going promotional efforts from a group of committed young professional and civic groups like those at Metropolis St. Louis are the real ideological force behind the push for renaissance. Metropolis St. Louis, a group formed to create and promote an urban environment that attracts and retains young people, recently hosted Urban Convergence ’03, a weekend confab of young urban leaders from around the country brought together to address problems facing declining mid-sized industrial cities. Those problems are obvious, and they are consistent across the country: a steadily declining population and tax base.

“When you lose 500,000 residents in 50 years to the outlying areas, you get a major financial crisis in which the city cannot take care of itself,” explains Emily Bratcher, a graduate student in Urban Planning and Real Estate Development at St. Louis University.

In St. Louis, she explains, the major political schism is between the St. Louis City and County governments, a gridlock of power in a system that promotes the independence of the affluent suburban municipalities over the welfare of the city.

“The city’s financial crisis has taken a major toll on public services which ultimately affects everybody. There is no longer a public hospital, the public transit system is inadequate, and the public schools are in disarray. When the best bus system in town is run by Washington University, you know there is a problem.”

Melanie Adams, Co-Chair of Urban Convergence, acknowledges these problems, but does not agree that St. Louis is a “disposable” city. “‘Disposable’ connotes that we have trashed all our resources. If anything, we have an abundance of cheap, raw space to redevelop. I think St. Louis is on the rise.”

Adams, subscribing to the recent work of Joel Kotkin, puts St. Louis alongside cities like Memphis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and New Orleans as beneficiaries of a second major wave of youth migration. In the first wave during the 1990s, charted in best-sellers like The Rise of the Creative Class and Bobos in Paradise, young, mobile professionals, known largely as the Creative Class and somewhat erroneously as “Generation X,” moved to vibrant, densely populated, culturally astute cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and DC-Baltimore. The second wave, which is just beginning, encompasses Echo Boomers, the 70 million-odd children of Baby Boomers who will be looking for their first homes in the next decade. Property values in the first-wave cities have risen and jobs are scarce, so workers and corporations are beginning to look for smaller cities to base their operations. For the time being, smaller cities offer the advantages of cheaper rents and home prices, fewer work hours, less travel time, and the ability to become almost immediately involved in meaningful civic affairs.

Perhaps they are on to something. A new 2003 report by the U.S. Census Bureau shows the St. Louis metropolitan area is attracting a growing number of people who are age 25 to 39, single, and possess at least a bachelor’s degree, even as Missouri as a whole has seen a net exodus in this category.

St. Louis definitely has a small town feel. The opening-night reception to Urban Convergence in October was a buffet and beer keg tapped in the rotunda of City Hall. The Mayor addressed the gathering from a staircase ten feet away and then stayed to talk and drink with the guests. In New York and Chicago, this scene would be unfathomable. St. Louis is hoping this approachability will make them more attractive to “real, down to earth people.”

For Rob Thurman, who grew up in rural Kentucky and now works for St. Louis’s leading gay paper, The Vital Voice, “St. Louis is halfway between Chicago and the farm. It isn’t densely urbanized like Chicago, there is a lot of space, a lot of grass, and I can drive anywhere I want in the city in ten minutes.”

Driving is sadly a necessity, and the lack of amenities and a viable public transit system are serious impediments to a vibrant downtown. Thurman notes that the city’s sparse gay population is spread over four disconnected neighborhoods, and most of the youth are clustered in college strips near the two major universities, far from downtown, in lively enclaves like University Village that are literally miles from Washington Street.

Trying to Find a Way Out

The lack of downtown amenities, the homeless problem, and an underlying lack of quality affordable housing threaten the sustainability of the recent revitalization movement. Bill Carson, Leadership Chair of Metropolis St. Louis and the Co-Chair of Urban Convergence, is one of the growing number that believe mixed-income development, along the lines of federally-funded HOPE VI redevelopments of aging public housing projects, is the key to the city’s future success. But continued mixed-income development depends on continued economic growth and scarce federal funding, both hard to come by these days. The nationwide housing boom has not had much effect inside the city—instead, building has almost exclusively occurred in the suburbs.

Still, Carson has nothing but optimism for the future of his adopted home. What he does think is “disposable” about St. Louis is the same thing that is becoming disposable about America: manufacturing. Although Carson doesn’t believe that St. Louis is in any imminent danger of economic blight, he admits that he doesn’t know what will happen in the next twenty years. There is a lot of concern about the potential out-migration of high-end service jobs, which would kill their chance for a renaissance.

“Right now, the risk that corporations in the St. Louis region will outsource to the third world is low because of high entry barriers and a certain technical knowledge barrier in high-end manufacturing like aerospace. But this gap is closing fast.”

In mid-November, Washington University unveiled plans for a $300 million initiative, named Bio Med 21, which includes plans for a $150 million, 250,000-square-foot research building to be built in stages at the center of the university’s medical campus. It is hoped that this project will spur job growth and development in the surrounding areas. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that 29 jobs are created in the local community for every $1 million of funding granted to a university in Missouri, a statistic that may foretell a continued downtown renaissance. Still, the tech boom and bust of the last decade, and the number of cities tying their hopes to biotech, makes Bio Med a real gamble.

But some chance at success still seems better than a bleak wasteland of abandoned Rust Belt cities. It has already happened in smaller cities all across the old industrial rail corridors of the Midwest. The miles and miles of dead factory and farming towns have taken their place alongside mining towns, frontier trading posts, and logging communities, all built upon single industries that collapsed when a particular resource was expended. That the horror of such abandonment could overtake a city once as glorious as St. Louis seems unfathomable. But as populations grow and economies shift, there has got to be something left behind. We must admit that a city without industry cannot, and should not, logically survive.

Still, hope springs eternal in the new urban leaders of St. Louis. As other Americans speed past the city, bypassed high above and fed west across the Great Plains, and as the native-born still stream out of the state, these transplants are not afraid to stop and call this place home. Their connection is not so much historical as it is spiritual. It is a place that speaks to them—in that glorious ‘haint’ of industrial ruin—and they attempt to speak back to and through it, laying blueprints that they hope will bring a new tomorrow.