New York is dead; St. Louis decomposes

WESTPORT, Missouri — St. Louis began like many cities, as a junction or harbor, in this case settled by French traders near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. It’s known as a sort of gateway to expansion, but now walking through its empty arch brings you nowhere.

My mom grew up in St. Louis for a while. For her it is like Ann Arbor is for me, a place she lived and left but never where she was from. Driving around the ruins in north St. Louis I imagined I would find her old house there, but I really didn’t know what part of the city she’d lived in and of course I wouldn’t have recognized the address. The houses there were ancient, made of bricks. Of some of them, bricks were all there was left.

The area reminded me in some ways of the more desolate parts of Brooklyn, except I couldn’t get over the liberal use of the land space. The buildings were brick—rectangular, usually without a sloping roof, and so looked somewhat like little apartments. But the lots always widely surrounded the walls themselves, with huge gaps between the houses like an old hobo’s grin.

There were many empty lots too, sometimes several in a row, and these were totally overgrown with grass, green and lush without bramble, different than the brownfields in Detroit. Colors were full in the spring sunshine. Every one of the houses matched the Golden Gate Bridge and the grass was the color of artichokes. The people I saw in this neighborhood, lounging on stoops, loitering behind a barricade, walking—these people were all black.

I passed a pile of rubble: a house collapsed, but oddly—as though someone had put it in a plastic bag and shaken it till all the bricks and lumber broke apart and mixed, and then dumped it out there in a mound. The house next door was missing a façade and I looked into it as a cross section. Strewn debris, a mattress, copper pipes, gashed walls with plaster torn away to reveal the brick exterior. Many of the other houses were boarded up, abandoned.

I wanted to take one. The weather was nice today and there was so much unclaimed space. I looked at downtown St. Louis, at the arch and the dome. It was so close. I hadn’t driven far, had gone immediately for gas after splitting from my companions near the arena and the first pump I found was in that little slum just north of downtown. My companions were driving to Indianapolis for the day to write an assignment about women’s basketball. Luckily, my writing duties are more flexible and I wanted to understand a bit about St. Louis, about its character.

Everywhere I’ve lived property values are high. Seattle boomed in the eighties and nineties. Competition’s fierce in Ann Arbor. A new high rise goes up every week in Madison. New York City tries to turn every lifeless or putrefying hovel into profitable development and anything anywhere near Manhattan is at a premium, so even Jersey City has its little housing explosion. Why would developers allow such blasted wreckage just blocks from the liveliest part of this city?

I’ve heard East St. Louis is a ghetto. But that’s across the river, not even in the same state, so the neglect seems administratively reasonable. I passed a one-story house on a rising patch of grass with its door open. I saw five or six girls in plain summer clothes collecting their things in the doorway. The house didn’t extend very far back from the street. Each house on that street was made with red bricks but each one was differently shaped, with different dark scars chipped in the baked walls. I’m drawn to places like this. But I don’t believe it would be fun sharing a brick hut with a family of eight.

Certainly the people who live there must live somewhere. They didn’t build the house. It was already there. That whole community may have at one time been lovely. I saw a lot of beauty in it as it was, and each structure standing alone in the sun carried a sort of aged nobility. But that’s the thing with St. Louis. It’s an inherited city, an occupied city; not a city being created.

In fact, I don’t know if anything is created in St. Louis these days. I suppose Anheuser-Busch makes beer here. There are tours of the flagship Budweiser brewery; a picture in the brochure at my hotel shows it, too, lined with brick. The baseball park where the World Series ended here last fall is called Busch Stadium. I’m not sure I would even think of St. Louis as a big city if it weren’t for the big league teams, the Cardinals and Rams. Its pro basketball team is just a ghost. The Spirits of St. Louis were the only club not functionally adopted when the old ABA merged with the NBA years ago, but a provision in the dissolution contract allows its owners to make a slice of the current mega-league’s general revenue even though the team remains idle.

So sports and tourism are truly the main industries in St. Louis today. After I left the poor brick boneyard I rode into the city proper. Much of the architecture there is old, too. I saw the protestant names of extinct corporations carved high in the stone edifices of buildings long since taken over by anonymous offices. The latest dates on those buildings are the 1920s. There are a handful of newer structures: Like Indianapolis, the city features bulging convention and athletic complexes and these help bring dollars to the local economy despite there being no real product, as with the Spirits.

The basketball tournament here this weekend, which cycles to St. Louis frequently thanks to the state-of-the-art dome built to bring the Rams here, must be one of the most important times for the vendors and bars and hotels. There are riverboat casinos docked along the waterfront, not far from the dome and the arch and the Budweiser brewery. Newer immobile casinos sprout along the bend of the Missouri nearer where I’m staying outside of town. Last night one of the dealers at Harrah’s carried on a pleasant rapport with some of the players at a blackjack table. The dealer is having his first child soon. One player just bought a Corvette. When the dealer’s shift ended, he and that player went to the waffle house together. The player was a regular.

I remember reading in my studies of third world countries about “degradation” brought on by tourism. Islands spend fortunes to build airports and luxurious hotels while their thousands of inhabitants live in squalor or work in service. Independence is not necessarily autonomy and former colonies remain intestines to the rest of the world. And in St. Louis, what was once an outpost has been swallowed by an expansion it once pioneered—is now merely provincial.

*****

Postscript: New York is trying to build a new football stadium, to bring the Jets back from New Jersey and snare the Olympics for 2012. Part of the plan is even greater expansion of its convention district on the west side of Manhattan. I like football but the parallels with St. Louis are disturbing. If New York has nothing better to invest in than tourism it’s time to call an end to New York. The only opposition to the stadium I’ve seen has been from a rival arena (Madison Square Garden) and from editorials mostly concerned about dealing with more annoying yokels wandering the streets and footing the up-front tax expense. No one seems interested in the larger issue: Because of globalism, much of the world is now provincial. Everyone comes from somewhere and everyone wants to visit places but fewer and fewer people cares about really being anywhere. I like to travel and am averse to settling, but I think I try to deeply experience the places I go and to make something of those experiences—to make something of those places. I try not to just flock. But the good news is that wasting the world accomplishes two important artistic requirements—suffering and low rent. Most art expresses a desire for transformation, and strife tends to engender such calls for change. Most artistic movements arise in areas where artists can afford to settle because no one else wants to live there (conversely, where there are no good jobs, people turn to art). Think Hemingway-Stein-Fitzgerald in depressed Paris after WWI or the British rock explosion coming from the ashes of bombed-out England after WWII or basically anything black people have ever done. On the other hand I think there’s a difference between a field going fallow to refertilize and paving it into a parking lot. In some respects, constructing an artifice of touristic entertainment is worse than carpet bombing everything. It’s like making an arch that doesn’t hold anything up. Because instead of forcing people to make something over, it just gives them something to look at without enriching them at all. If New York, considered a decadent Casbah or a “Calcutta with money,” becomes just another provincial loitering hole (in many ways it is already; but I mean if it becomes exclusively that, like St. Louis) then where else is left in the world to turn?