Over the past few years I’ve spent much time, if only in my imagination, in the north St. Louis neighborhood of pre-Civil War red-brick flats within easy walking distance of downtown. The setting for my forthcoming historical novel The Bootlegger’s Bride, it’s where my parents grew up, my grandparents lived their final days, and I passed countless hours as a boy on the red-brick streets, sidewalks, and alleys. It’s also where my family participated in Prohibition bootlegging operations and my father witnessed a gangland killing, as Eagan’s Rats and Jellyroll Hogan’s gang fought over illegal liquor, gambling, and prostitution markets.
But that vibrant neighborhood of my youth no longer exists, I recently discovered on a trip to my former hometown. What I found was a largely unrecognizable urban prairie of vacant lots, with few remaining vintage homes, most having been abandoned and demolished. My maternal grandmother’s block of antebellum flats on North 14th Street still stands, barely. The roofs have collapsed, and derelict automobiles and busted furniture litter the herringbone brick backyards where I once played.
A few neighborhood landmarks remain: St. Stanislaus Kostka Polish Catholic Church on North 20th Street, The Polish Falcon Nest on St. Louis Avenue, and Crown Candy Kitchen, where I devoured ice cream sodas. Otherwise, the blocks were undifferentiated to me. Without the old taverns, storefronts, and homes I once knew, I kept getting lost driving the streets, whose red bricks have been blacktopped over.
The Cass Avenue Bank & Trust building still stands, though boarded up and cordoned off by a chain-link fence, which does little to deter the homeless men and women I saw hanging out there. Cass Avenue was also the site of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe urban renewal housing project, 33 eleven-story high rises that the City of St. Louis erected in 1954 and dynamited into history in 1972.
That wasn’t the city’s only notable failure. My 2014 urban murder-mystery Fail catalogues the public schools’ educational malpractice and city hall’s ongoing corruption—officials continue to get caught perpetrating illegal moneymaking schemes and locked up. Further, downtown St. Louis wallows in a “doom loop” according to The Wall Street Journal, with institutions, corporations, small businesses, and residents fleeing the diminished, high-crime locale.
However, I remember it as it was not that long ago, a thriving, safe, and welcoming venue, with people shopping, dining, going to ball games, partying, and enjoying life. That’s where I will continue to visit my hometown, in memory.
The doom loop: https://theweek.com/business/economy/st-louis-doom-loop
Pruitt-Igoe housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe
Eagan’s Rats vs. the Jellyroll Hogan gang: https://www.crimelibrary.org/gangsters_outlaws/family_epics/louis/3.html
The Bootlegger’s Bride: rb.gy/m5n26c
