The mounds of water-logged Teddy bears, baseball caps and jerseys, of dead flowers and deflated balloons, rise thigh-high along Canfield Drive in Ferguson. The makeshift memorial to Michael Brown, the black teen killed by a white cop last August, has withstood rain, snow and fire and taken on an air of permanence.
A dozen burned-out buildings along nearby West Florissant Avenue remain wrapped in plywood or chain link fences, victims of looters’ rage and a sad testament to the St. Louis region’s recent renown for racial tension.
But the region’s psychic scars run deeper. St. Louis once was the nation’s fourth most populated city, a manufacturing and transportation colossus. It was the proud Gateway to the West, idealized by the soaring steel Arch along the banks of the Mississippi River.
St. Louis hosted the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics – in the same year. Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell Douglas and TWA brought global prestige and middle-class living to waves of German, Irish, Italian and African-American immigrants.
The region, though, lost its way. Missteps by elected and business leaders left the city shrunken, with hundreds of thousands of residents moving to the suburbs. Bad urban planning fueled the exodus. Dozens of new towns cropped up in the county, some filled with African-Americans.
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Tales of 3 cities
A century ago, city fathers realized that blight, traffic, poverty, and fragmented government threatened St. Louis’ success. They hired a city planner in 1916 who, a year later, published the “Problems of St. Louis.” The city was at a critical juncture, an inflection point where long-term success might be guaranteed if the right civic decisions were made.
Harland Bartholomew, the planner, hoped that his report would “ultimately result in some action and action is St. Louis’ greatest need.”
Action ensued, but not always the right kind.
St. Louis today ranks 27th in population and 45th in job growth among the top 50 metro areas. TWA and McDonnell Douglas both got bought by rivals. Anheuser-Busch is owned by a Belgian company.
Development and power keep moving farther from the urban core. St. Louis County includes 91 municipalities, including Ferguson, a welter of governments that complicates unified, regional action.
Decisions made — or not made — over the last 140 years bedevil the region. It wasn’t evident at the time, but a split between the city and county in 1876 was the first tear in today’s tattered urban fabric. The proliferation of towns costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of tax dollars annually in duplicative services and undermines visionary thinking to address regional problems.
In hindsight, few imagined that the year 1916 would figure so prominently. Bartholomew’s embrace of urban renewal and highways-to-the-suburbs fueled the exodus from St. Louis as well as the region’s fragmentation and racism.
A residential segregation law passed that year established an ongoing pattern of racial separateness. The law was overturned, but the scars remain. Ferguson, for example, is two-thirds black, yet at the time of the shooting the mayor and five of six council members were white.
“Ferguson affirms that we in St. Louis are in the geographic and cultural heart of America with all its issues and foibles,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, pastor of St. John’s United Church of Christ in St. Louis. “These are American problems.”
World famous
The World’s Fair and the Olympics of 1904 attracted 20 million visitors and stamped St. Louis on the nation’s consciousness. Only Chicago, New York and Philadelphia counted more residents than metropolitan St. Louis (690,000), according to the 1910 census. More railroads coursed through the city than anywhere else.
Only Detroit made more cars than St. Louis. Aviator Charles Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his Spirit of St. Louis, hauled air mail from Lambert Field, one of the nation’s first city-owned airports.
The city boomed with factories along both sides of the Mississippi luring immigrants and Southerners. City fathers, though, worried that road-clogging automobiles and urban blight threatened St. Louis’ future.
Bartholomew’s plan widened roads to accommodate cars. Major thoroughfares were built to speed people from the city core. Aged warehouses, saloons and tenements were demolished.
Neighborhoods, to Bartholomew, served as a city’s building blocks. Decrepit communities, he reasoned, sucked social-service money from city coffers. Get rid of them, via housing codes, strict zoning and urban renewal programs, and St. Louis would thrive, Bartholomew believed.
His actions proved sinister too. Bartholomew said zoning rules should be used to prevent “colored people” from moving into “finer residential districts.”
The Realtors’ association launched a successful campaign for a ballot referendum prohibiting blacks from moving into blocks where white residents comprised 75 percent of the population. A brochure showed a row of nice brick homes with an X marked above each house purchased by a black family.
“An entire block ruined by negro invasion,” the flyer read. “Save Your Home! Vote For Segregation!”
City voters approved by a 3-to-1 margin. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law a year later. That same year, 40 blacks and eight whites died in a spasm of racial riots across the river in East St. Louis.
Critics say Bartholomew’s insistence on bulldozing so-called blighted neighborhoods contributed to St. Louis’ current racial and municipal troubles. He authored a number of plans to tear down older communities and move residents into apartments. Mill Creek Valley, a black community of 5,600 homes, was demolished in 1959.
Racial tension fueled balkanization. In 1970, white residents of an unincorporated section of north St. Louis County got wind of plans for a 108-unit low-income housing project and quickly incorporated as Black Jack. By year’s end the new city council banned multi-family construction. A federal court nullified the law, but other towns also used legal means to restrict who could live where.
“Racism and racial fears were more severe in St. Louis than in most other areas around the country,” said Todd Swanstrom, a professor of public policy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “There’s a systemic problem of segregation that continues to this day. People are very angry. African-Americans have been mistreated for decades.”
Harsh reality
Despite a gnawing sense that St. Louis’ glory days had past, the region drew immigrants and job-hungry Americans in droves. Large swaths of low-rent homes and shops were bulldozed to make way for the Gateway Arch, Busch Stadium and four interstates through town.
Corporations poured $300 million into more than a dozen downtown buildings transforming the 1970s skyline. TWA had a 70-gate hub at Lambert International. Stadiums for the football and hockey teams opened downtown. The MetroLink light rail line, currently operating 37 stations, began service in 1993.
All the development, though, couldn’t mask a harsh reality: the city of St. Louis was in decline. The population peaked at 856,000 in 1950.
“If St. Louis remains content to go along without aggressive action – there lurk decay, squalor, the threat of steady decline,” intoned the city’s main newspaper in 1950. “Ultimately, St. Louis (will) take a back seat among American cities.”
Union Station, with its vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows, lost passenger service in 1978. Boatmen’s Bank and Southwestern Bell left town. Post-Cold War cuts cost 10,000 aircraft and missile jobs.
Today, only 318,000 people live in St. Louis proper. The city comprises 13 percent of the region’s population of 2.5 million. Atlanta, similarly, accounts for just 8 percent of the region’s 5.5 million people.
Between 1993 and 2013, the St. Louis region’s population grew by 7 percent. Nationwide the growth was three times faster. Job growth is less than half the national rate of 8 percent since the recession.
“In terms of job stagnation, we had a lot of the same recessionary pressures that everybody else did,” said Denny Coleman, who runs the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership. “But we also had three automobile plants shut down. We’ve had defense industry downturns and automotive downturns. You’ve got to remain resilient. You need to keep fighting back.”
A metro divided
Bill Bangert fought. A Golden Gloves boxer and collegiate discus champion, Bangert incorporated the village of Champ in 1959 on a spit of land in northwest St. Louis County. A road builder, Bangert’s dream was to attract industry, issue bonds and build a domed stadium with 100,000 seats.
But the governor nixed the bonds and the dome was never built. Champ today consists of six aluminum-sided houses on a cul-de-sac sandwiched between a high school and a rock quarry. A dozen people live there. Bangert died in 2011.
He left behind the smallest and most insignificant of St. Louis County’s 91 municipalities, a symbol of a fragmented and dysfunctional region. Among big U.S. metro areas, only Pittsburgh and Denver count more municipalities per capita. Fulton County, home to Atlanta, tallies 14 with surrounding counties adding dozens more.
Blame it on St. Louis’ Great Divorce, back in 1876. Leaders decided they didn’t want city-generated revenue spent on county services, so they voted for independence.
The split proved disastrous for St. Louis. The city can’t annex new territory and the industrial parks, shopping centers and housing developments that pay taxes. The suburbs lured residents, companies and jobs from downtown.
In 1973, the Rand Corp. blamed the city’s “unusual rate of decline (on) its political boundaries, frozen since 1876, (that) have prevented the city from expanding its resource base as its proportion of disadvantaged residents increased.” City leaders have tried a half-dozen times since the divorce to merge or consolidate city-county services, to no avail.
The Great Divorce “was the dumbest idea in retrospect,” said Richard Ward, a longtime urban planner and development consultant in St. Louis. “Obviously, we’re fracturing and the root cause is the ineffectiveness of local government and parochial thinking that’s driven by fragmentation. There’s really just a lack of vision and sophistication.”
St. Louis County municipalities fund separate courts, police, roads and other services. Better Together, a business-backed group fighting fragmentation, reports that duplication costs county residents an additional $750 million a year in taxes.
Many municipalities rely on traffic-ticket revenue to fund 30 percent or more of their budgets, which leads to a lot of tickets, distrust of police and anger that turned violent in Ferguson.
“Fragmentation is a state of mind,” said Ward, the urban consultant. “It makes it hard to get the populace, as a whole, to rally around big concerns. It causes people to think small.”
‘Wailing Wall’
Delmar Boulevard runs east-to-west and unofficially divides black north St. Louis from white south St. Louis. An artist chose a vacant lot at the corner of Delmar and Walton Avenue for a Wailing Wall, an eight-foot high black box with mail slots for St. Louisans to insert letters intended “to combat the ignorance and fear that plagues us.”
St. Louis is trying to heal from the Ferguson debacle. Public and private groups pledged $1.5 million to tear down or help re-open damaged buildings and businesses. Emerson Electric, a Ferguson-based Fortune 500 company, offered $4.4 million in scholarships and job training programs for local youths.
Meanwhile, General Motors, Boeing and Monsanto plan to hire about 700 workers each. Construction is underway on a $380 million project to build a park over an interstate to connect the Arch with downtown.
“I’m not worried,” read one letter stuffed in the Wailing Wall last fall. “We are a community that is coming together in front of the nation!”
ABOUT ATLANTA FORWARD 2015
Today’s special report is the second piece of the AJC’s year-long examination of the economic state of metro Atlanta.
The key question we seek to answer: as our region recovers, do we have what it takes to attract the companies, jobs and talent we need to regain our pre-recession prosperity?
The first installment, published in February, found metro Atlanta trailing two perennial economic competitors, Dallas-Fort Worth and Charlotte, in a host of economic indicators since the recession ended. You can read the first installment on myajc.com.
We’ll follow the Atlanta Forward theme all year, deeply reporting the region’s challenges in transportation, education, leadership and more that could stunt our progress. We’ll also examine potential solutions.
We did a similar investigation in 2011. The result was our first Atlanta Forward special report, an eight-day series that illuminated many of the region’s obstacles. Four years later, the region is grappling with the same problems. So we decided to take a fresh look.
- Charles Gay, Senior Editor for Economy/Business
Email: cgay@ajc.com
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