You have seen that my experience with Blacks in St. Louis was quite limited. And that the St. Louis I grew up in was highly segregated, designed to keep Whites and Blacks very separate. I should expand on this a bit, before I wind up in Cambridge.

The city of St. Louis was, in my opinion, unconsciously designed for failure. What do I mean by that? You have to think about the geography of the city. Built on the Mississippi, St. Louis started out as a river port and quickly became an industrial center. The downtown, once the population began to grow seriously, was surrounded by industrial establishments and dense residential buildings. The 1904 World’s Fair provided for the creation of Forest Park, in the west of the city, and a campus for Washington University, and pushed the higher end residential neighborhoods further and further from the city center, mainly to the west, but also to the south of the city. This left the inner city residential areas to become largely the home of the city’s burgeoning Black population. Unlike those cities which have been able to maintain growth in their downtown areas, where there is a clear connection between the downtown and some of the wealthier areas, downtown St. Louis found it self totally isolated from the more prosperous citizens of the region.

I remember well the drive from our house to my father’s office downtown in the 1940s and 1950s. We would drive through the suburb of Clayton (the county seat of St. Louis County, which is politically separate from the City – another unfortunate anomaly), we pass Washington University’s beautiful campus and through or next to the incomparable Forest Park (home of the city’s Art Museum, Zoo, Historical Museum, Municipal Opera, and much more) and then through the very small West End of the city, past Barnes and Jewish Hospitals, the Chase and Park Plaza Hotels, and some high end apartments. Quickly, we’d get a mixed area of small factories and businesses, and then we’d get to Grand Avenue, where there was, in effect, a second downtown, with several large movie theaters. East of Grand we would drive through what was known as Mill Creek, an extensive area of 19th century brick row houses, some dating back until just after the Civil War, many without any indoor plumbing, seemingly very crowded and very, very poor (this is where I remember my father making sure the car doors were locked). Finally, we would reach downtown.

I think the city leaders realized that the lack of a clear corridor from downtown to the western suburbs was problematic for the future of the city. Their conclusion was that Mill Creek must be demolished and a better corridor created through rebuilding the area which was to be leveled. The demolition began in 1959, the year before I left for college. The Mill Creek Urban Renewal Project had many results. Two of the most important were (1) the destruction of the homes of about 20,000 Black St. Louisans, and their businesses and churches, requiring them to relocate, many to public housing (see below, re Pruitt Igoe), and (2) the powers that be not recognizing that there was no market for the land that had been cleared, so that other than new highway construction and the eventual expansion of the Grand Avenue St. Louis University campus, the uses to which the land was put was exactly wrong for the center of a city – warehouses and small industrial buildings, etc., the kind of development you would see in not very desirable suburbs, and even this took years to build. So, driving downtown, you no longer drove through slums that frightened so many, but you drove through a no-man’s land continued to isolate downtown from the rest of the city.

I should add that St. Louis had a very active public housing program, starting in the 1940s, with projects located both south and north of downtown. There was no public housing built to the west. I should also add that, not surprisingly, all St. Louis Public Housing was segregated. There were White projects; there were Black projects. I don’t think any were integrated.

This included the infamous Pruitt Igoe project built in the early 1950s, just north of downtown. Pruitt Igoe consisted of 33 separate 11 story buildings, consisting of almost 3,000 residential units. Pruitt was to be the Black side of the Pruitt Igoe; Igoe was for Whites. Shortly after it was built, court decisions required it to be integrated and it soon became almost fully Black. Although for a time, Pruitt Igoe seemed to be quite successful, when it became a prime relocation resource for Mill Creek residents, it fell apart, becoming a development of crime and poverty. It was demolished in the early 1970s, after years of lowered occupancy. But Pruitt Igoe played another role, as it also isolated downtown, as it was located as a major part of downtown’s northern border.

Another result of the Mill Creek demolition was to push Black residents to the next neighborhoods to the west and to the north. These neighborhoods had been occupied by White, often Jewish, families, who ran from the neighborhoods to the western suburbs like University City and Olivette. Because the very conservative Missouri legislature kept the welfare and other payments to poverty-ridden families so low (much lower than virtually other states), many (most?) of these families could not pay the rent required to keep up their new homes. This meant that some properties were allowed to fall into disrepair and others were abandoned altogether by their owners, simply moving the problematic neighborhoods outward from downtown, but still circling it.

For those living in the White suburbs, none of this really mattered, except for what you saw out your car windows as you drove downtown. Or at least you didn’t think it did.

St. Louis is doing quite a bit today, much of it very successful, to reverse the problems of the past. But this is a gargantuan task and will not end soon.