Another “Late, Great” U.S. city
(Note: be sure to see James M2’s information, below, showing that St. Louis is, indeed, a “late, great” city.)
The reference in the title is to the series of articles American Renaissance ran in the 1990s about the downfall of various U.S. cities that had been taken over by blacks. To my surprise, AR seems not to have done a piece on “the late, great city of St. Louis.” The below e-mail from a reader, a life-long resident of St. Louis, could be seen as a preliminary sketch for such an article.
David A. writes:
I have been reading VFR for several years. It is high time that I commend you for your splendid work and many excellent essays.
I am a 58-year-old white man and lifelong resident of St. Louis, which was once the fourth largest American city. I am opposed to “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” The following are some reasons why.
On July 31st you posted a list of crimes perpetrated by black thugs against whites. To supplement your list, please consider these crimes committed by blacks in St. Louis from 1994-2006:
—Black man on parole kidnapped a white woman and threw her off a bridge into the Mississippi River.
—Young black male sought by police for shooting the white principal of a Catholic school in the back, leaving her paralyzed.
—Two young black males kidnapped two young white women, raped them, and shot them. One survived (after being shot three times in the face). The other died. Her brother later described her killer as “a monster.” Her father said of him: “May he rot in hell.”
—Black male (16) shot and killed a 60-year-old Korean woman cashier after she failed to open her cash register fast enough to please him.
—White woman driving through downtown St. Louis was killed in collision caused by black male (23) driving while drunk.
—A pizza restaurant decided not to make deliveries in a north St. Louis area infested with robberies and assaults.
—Police arrested two black thieves who admitted targeting whites and Asians for street robberies.
—Black man (48) stabbed to death a church employee (white woman, 64) in a downtown church.
—Nine bank robberies are traced to a group of seven blacks (six men, one woman).
—Black man (25) beat and strangled a 20-year-old white woman.
—Pizza delivery driver (woman, 36) is robbed and stabbed in black neighborhood. Restaurant then stops deliveries in that area. Two black males (17, 19) were charged.
—A roving group of 25-30 black “youths” from a “middle school” assaulted residents, broke windows, and threw rocks at cars.
—Black male (19) shot and killed a police officer (white man) in St. Louis suburb.
—A veteran fireman (white man) was killed in collision caused by black man (44) driving at 86 mph after robbing a Walgreen’s drug store.
—White man (45) was shot give times by three young blacks (two men, 25, 23, and one woman, 19) on WalMart parking lot.
—Black male (21) charged in seven cases of arson in north St. Louis.
—A 44-year-old disabled white man was beaten to death by two young black males (21, 15) who “stomped on his head.”
Then there’s the black on black violence:
—For 3 1/2 hours one day in 1998, a group of eight Gangster Disciples tortured a black woman with a broomstick, stabbed her with silverware, beat her with a pistol, poured bleach in her wounds, and doused her with scalding water—because she refused to join their group.
—For three hours one day in 1999, a black man (48) beat his eight-year-old daughter when she was unable to do her homework on adverbs. He used two leather belts, an extension cord, and a metal broomstick. She became delirious and tried to run away from him. He continued beating her. The autopsy showed she had been beaten to death.
Also: Dozens of apartment buildings in three “public housing” projects (Pruitt-Igoe, Darst-Webbe, and Laclede Town)—built half-a-century ago at the expense of white taxpayers—were ruined by black thugs and vandals and then demolished.
Also: In 1958-59 my classmates and I played baseball in a city park in a clean, quiet, peaceful, all-white neighborhood. A white woman who attended a Catholic college there many years ago recalled how pleasant that area was and how girls could walk throughout that neighborhood at any time of day or night without any fear. And today? That neighborhood is now “diverse.” Ergo, it is infested with shootings, murders, armed robberies, unrestrained “youths,” houses and apartment buildings trashed and boarded-up, shops and restaurants closed, “security” bars on doors and windows (undreamed of in the 1950s), and the unsolved vicious beating of an 89-year-old white man. It wasn’t whites, Asians, Hispanics, or Arabs, but blacks who brought unprecedented crime and degradation into that once-peaceful neighborhood.
Now try to imagine why more than half the population of St. Louis got up and left, over the past half-century.
LA replies:
Thank you very much for this panoramic view of black crime in St. Louis.
Normally, the public experiences one crime/atrocity at a time. We look at each crime as a disconnected event. Seeing a number of such crimes listed together makes a different kind of impact on the mind.
As a list from memory, it is impressive. If at some time you feel moved to research the stories and get citations or links for them (that’s a big job, I’m not requesting that you do that now), that would be even better, and we could re-post the list at that point.
- end of initial entry -
James W. writes:
I don’t see how we can include St. Louis in a list of late, great cities, where twelve years of crime worthy of special mention sounds like one week of crime from the “A” list.
LA replies:
LOL. But seriously, David A. didn’t just list a few crimes, but said that half the population of St. Louis has left over the last 50 years, presumably the whiter half, which sounds like “late, great” to me.
However, we admittedly don’t have an overall view of St. Louis and need more information.
James M2 writes:
I have some sentimental attachment to St. Louis, having spent a few childhood years there. I can remember riding in my parents’ car, passing through and being quite intrigued by the melancholic views of urban decay.
For an overall taste of the degradation of the city, I’d like to recommend this site. It’s one of my favorite bookmarks. The front page is not as intuitive as it could be, so you might start at the site map.
You could spend hours there, but to get started I’ll point you to the “Slow Death of a City Block: 1900 Montgomery Street” linked here. The other entries in the North Side section, as well as the Crumbling Landmarks and Vanished Buildings sections are particularly recommended.
As support for the notion that St. Louis can be considered a “late, great, city,” I’ll quote from the site:
In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it’s ranked 48th.
In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That’s out of two and a half million people in the metro area.
In the 1990s, the metro population increased by one percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.
At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They’re stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.
A hundred years ago, fifty, even thirty years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they’re empty. Nobody’s there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America’s most devastated urban landscapes.
Adela G. writes:
Please thank James Mc2 for the link to Built St. Louis. I found that excellent site a couple of years ago but lost the bookmark and wasn’t able to find the site again. I grew up in St. Louis County and can attest that driving through the decaying parts of St. Louis is a weirdly dislocating experience.
Here’s an article in The Riverfront Times (St. Louis’s hip publication on what’s happening on the local scene). I’m surprised to find this article in such a liberal publication. It dances around the subject a bit but basically it’s about black teens riding the transit system from their areas to other parts of town to get into trouble of various kinds. It even mentions the recent black on white attacks in the Loop and the DeBaliviere discussed at VFR last month. The Galleria mall mentioned is a couple of miles outside St. Louis’s city limits, which means the problem of black urban crime is now spilling over into what used to be a safe suburb.
August 24
Robert C. from St. Louis writes:
The effect of MetroLink on the Galleria shopping mall referenced in the article linked by Adela G. is distressing to those of us who have witnessed its slow but steady decline. I lived in a neighborhood within a half-minute walk of the mall for 14 years. In its original incarnation the Galleria housed tenants such as Cartier and Godiva, and was second in prestige only to the area mall anchored by Nieman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. As a retail venue its location is absolutely prime, literally abutting the wealthiest zip code in the county. But with the opening of the MetroLink station, even their patronage of the mall is being inconvenienced. The curfew on weekends must be particularly galling, as those residents of million-dollar homes now cannot even drop off their teens for a late afternoon movie.
Alec H. writes:
On another “late, great” city, don’t forget this.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 22, 2008 10:25 AM | Send