The Old Neighborhood, Part 2

Linda Tate on March 7th, 2011

Last week, I introduced Ray Suarez’s 1999 book, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999. Suarez’s book looks at the phenomenon of the “old neighborhood” –  once-bustling, tight-knit urban communities that are now ghettos or that have been largely abandoned.

In his survey of numerous American cities, Suarez explores the institutional and societal pressures that contributed to the decline of the old neighborhood: the rise of automobile culture; the G.I. bill, which encouraged white Americans to purchase new homes in the suburbs; and devastating real estate practices such as racial redlining and blockbusting.

But Suarez also considers the profound role that race played in the decimation of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood, Suarez observes, was populated largely (sometimes entirely) by whites, and the subsequent ghettos found today are populated by African Americans and other racial minorities. What emerges is a tale tinged with racial politics.

To better understand what happened to the old neighborhood, Suarez visited cities across the United States and interviewed both those who left the old neighborhood (largely white Americans) and those who live in those neighborhoods today (primarily racial minorities). His chapter on St. Louis tells a familiar story, contrasting as it does former (white) residents of the City who now live in St. Charles County and the current (African American) residents of the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood (immediately adjacent to Wellston).

St. Louisan Charles Manelli describes the forces that prompted whites to leave the City of St. Louis and move to the County:

People our age at that time all wanted to buy houses, and there just weren’t any houses available in the city of St. Louis. So they all moved, and bought homes out in the county. The city was really emptying out quickly at that time. So sure, there were houses, but they were not the houses that the young people would have wanted. There was lot of old real estate in the city, and the new subdivisions was where the young people wanted to go. . . . We bought our first home on the GI Bill, that’s the way everyone was going then. You had two bathrooms, three bedrooms, it was different. And you could buy these houses for twenty thousand dollars, eighteen thousand dollars. That’s what the young people wanted. They didn’t want the big brick bungalows.

Eventually, neighborhoods in North St. Louis and in the first-ring suburbs such as Wellston began to lose their white population, which was moving further into North St. Louis County and, in recent decades, into St. Charles County. To understand the forces that drove this population further and further north, Suarez visited the St. Charles home of Pat and Lisa Petroff, who were hosting a neighborhood watch gathering of “the residents of a recently built suburban subdivision.”

What brought these folks to St. Charles County? They wanted, writes Suarez, “an area with a low crime rate and a total absence of the urban madness that crowds their late news each night.” He tells of a conversation with a man who recently moved from Florissant to St. Charles County. “You work hard,” says this man, “and you want to be comfortable and safe.” And, the man notes, “I’ve run into six people I graduated from high school with who are now living in this area.”

Standing in contrast to the Petroffs and other white St. Charles County residents is Veronica Evans, an African American resident of the Wells-Goodfellow section of St. Louis, a neighborhood just next door to Wellston.

Suarez describes the devastation the Wells-Goodfellow has suffered, pointing to its “crumbling streets, shuttered shopping strips, and dim prospects for the future.” The neighborhood is plagued by a myriad of ills: “fly dumping (the clandestine dumping of building supplies, industrial waste, or bulk household waste on vacant land), crack sales, gang violence, and the general disorder that can break out in the widening gaps between the [neighborhood’s] inhabited buildings.”

Of particular concern are the deteriorating buildings in Wells-Goodfellow and other inner-city neighborhoods in St. Louis. Suarez writes:

The contrast between the conditions in the city of St. Louis and its vast suburbs is stark, and stunning. Large sections of the city are now virtually empty. Children thread their way through vacant lots in the morning, converging on the neighborhood school in Evans’s area, Pierre Laclede, named for the French founder of St. Louis. Standing adjacent to the vacant lots are the board-ups, stout brick houses once home to one, two, and four families. Now the generous front porches are permanently empty, the windows covered in plywood, the houses empty except when colonized by squatters and drug dealers or stripped by salvagers.

In fact, says Suarez, “The board-ups are so frightening to the neighborhood that many decide a vacant lot is better. A common and effective focus of grassroots activity centers is on demolition petitions. You can tell a lot about a neighborhood when there is general rejoicing after another intact building tumbles to the wrecker’s ball.”

Evans wonders about the loss of “nice” buildings. “It couldn’t cost that much to fix this place up to make it good enough to live in,” she says of one building. But, Suarez explains, “the longer the buildings stay empty, the more they deteriorate. Floors buckle from summer expansion and winter contraction, broken windows let in the water that wrecks walls and floors, intruders set fires, water pipes burst with the cold. The real problem with [such] a brick building . . . is that it is a leftover, a relic from a past economy.” Says Evans: “It’s a shame when they got to knock them down, instead of fixing them up. But if nobody wants to fix them up, there’s really  nothing else we can do.”

Ultimately, says Suarez, the buildings become both actual manifestations of crime and community  disintegration and symbols of the neighborhood’s decline:

The abandoned buildings house both real crime and the worst fantasies of suburban whites that drive their perceptions of inner-city life. For all the buildings that do become home to shooting galleries, crack kitchens, or gang flophouses, others sit, mute and decaying. The pictures of these homes are a staple of the evening news in big metropolitan areas, acting as potent symbols in the minds of many Americans.

Seeing the dire conditions in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood, Suarez asks Evans: “Would you leave this neighborhood, if you had the cash? If you could go?”

He is stunned by her answer.

“No, I wouldn’t leave,” she says. “I couldn’t leave now.”

What ties Evans to the disintegrating neighborhood? The community work she is doing with other neighbors – a group Suarez calls “a brave little band of homeowners in a blasted landscape.”

Evans takes Suarez on a walk around the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood, showing him the community garden, “where the children of Laclede School spend their spring and fall learning about botany and nutrition,” and pointing to a “boarded-up two-family home directly across the street” from the school. “They were selling drugs in here,” explains Evans. “We called the police, and kept calling, and kept calling until we got them out of here.” When the boarded-up building was taken over by squatters (who “ran an electric line from the alley and began cooking over wood fires”), the community activists “leaned on the police again, and today the building is once more shut up tight.”

In addition to this walk around the neighborhood, Suarez accompanies Evans to a community meeting. “Around the table,” he says, “sat retired city workers, young parents, representatives of church-based not-for-profits, and the local police precinct commander.” Among the difficulties the group has to confront that night is very welcome news from the commander: “Crime against persons, like muggings and assaults, is down 10 percent from a year ago. This announcement is greeted with applause around the table.”

Despite the difficulties the neighborhood faces, the mood in the meeting room is generally positive:

Throughout the meeting setbacks are met with concern and a plan for tackling them. Good news is met with real satisfaction and optimism. In spite of everything they’re up against, it seems, these people who inhabit what would look like America’s urban nightmare on a newspaper cover, or during the late news, really believe they can control their blocks, and thus take more control of their lives.

Though Wells-Goodfellow and nearby Wellston face daunting problems, it is heartening indeed to “meet” people like Veronica Evans and to see the good work that community groups are engaged in. As this blog develops, I hope I’ll hear more good stories of the work residents are doing to bring new life to the “old neighborhood.”

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The Old Neighborhood, Part 1

Linda Tate on February 28th, 2011

Ray Suarez’s 1999 book, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999, identifies a persistent pattern in city after American city: the heyday of the old urban neighborhood, the decline and loss of that neighborhood, and the subsequent ghetto that took its place.

Suarez describes the tight-knit urban communities that many former residents now think of as “the old neighborhood”:

The year 1950 was the last full cry of urban America, at least on the surface. It was the year many of the cities visited in this book reached their historic peaks in population. Everybody was working, in folk memory, and in fact. Armies clad in overalls poured out of plants at quitting time or watched as the next shift filed in. Houses cost a couple of thousand bucks. . . . The mortgage was often less than a hundred a month. The teeming ethnic ghettos of the early century had given way to a more comfortable life, with religion and ethnicity, race and class still used as organizing principles for the neighborhood.

St. Louisan Charles Manelli (interviewed in Suarez’s book) paints a picture of life in those days:

You had a parochial school on one corner, and down the street was the public school. It was a neighborhood, and it was like that all over the city. And everybody knew everybody, whether you went to parochial or public school, it was just a big neighborhood; you could walk anyplace in the whole area and you knew everybody. You had places to go . . . drugstores, hamburger places, school grounds. It was unbelievable.

By the late 1960s, however, the “old neighborhood” was quickly disappearing, replaced by ghettos with high poverty and crime levels. Now, previous residents look back with nostalgia to the old neighborhood, unable to visit due to safety concerns. In many cases, the large number of abandoned and destroyed buildings has rendered the neighborhood virtually non-existent. There’s no there there. Suarez describes what has become of the old neighborhood:

When an accidental detour or a missed expressway exit brings us into contact with the world we left behind, we can still place all the blame firmly and squarely elsewhere. The shuttered factories and collapsing row houses, the vacant storefronts and rutted streets are regarded with the same awe reserved for the scenes of natural disasters. We look out on a world that somehow, in the American collective memory, destroyed itself.

But this world didn’t just destroy itself, Suarez asserts. Rather, a potent combination of institutional and societal pressures caused the decline of the old neighborhood – the rise of the automobile culture; the G.I. bill, which encouraged whites to purchase new homes in “greenfield” suburban developments; and real estate practices such as racial redlining and blockbusting.

But Suarez doesn’t stop with those larger forces – he also blames individual whites for their abandonment of the old neighborhood. “Blame” is not too strong a word to describe Suarez’s take on what happened. On page after page of The Old Neighborhood, you can feel Suarez’s anger not just at the institutional and societal forces that erased the old neighborhoods but also his deep frustration at the complicity of whites who fled those once-thriving communities. He writes,

I have spoken to hundreds of people who mourn the loss of a sense of place tied to block, school, and neighborhood church. When you talk to them further, you may also find that they were busily helping to create the new rootlessness during the years of urban change. Many conclude there was no other way for things to end up. I’ll insist until the day they’re tossing spadefuls of city soil on my casket that we gave up far too easily, driven by a range of forces in the society we did not recognize.

Whatever the cause of this decline, in cities like St. Louis that decline was rapid. Manelli explains,

It happened so fast, I mean, my gosh . . . overnight. It was like an exodus . . . zoom, everybody was gone! I’d say it was a five-year period, the whole city of St. Louis changed. And I think it was because of panic. The whole atmosphere of the city changed, and everybody just panicked, and left. Oh, I’d love to live there now, in the same atmosphere as it was, but back then it was just panic.

While I’m not sure Suarez’s frustration with the average white citizen is entirely warranted, I’m intrigued nevertheless by his exploration of what happened to the old neighborhood. I’d recommend reading The Old Neighborhood – but be forewarned that former residents of the old neighborhood aren’t always portrayed positively in the book. Suarez identifies “nostalgia,” “racial resentment,” a (selfish?) desire for upward mobility and safety as the qualities he’s found in the “ten million accomplices” to the crime of abandoning the inner cities. According to Suarez, former residents love to “tell the stories of that good, gone life” – but then don’t want to take any of the blame for the disappearance of that good life.

The cost, claims Suarez, has been high. This migration – “white flight and the hollowing out of the American city” – “has left deep, unacknowledged scars in the lives of millions of families,” says Suarez. “They were obeying the American siren call to mobility; they were only doing the best thing for their children; they were spending new money in search of space – but the scars were still there.” “Even good intentions,” he concludes, “can end up leaving scars.”

These scars affect both the whites who have moved to the suburbs and the racial minorities who now live in the “old neighborhood.” Living in subdivisions, people like Charles Manelli “yearn for the closeness, the coherence, that an old urban neighborhood gave their lives.” “We don’t have that neighborhood life here,” says Manelli. “It was just a wonderful place. These kids are missing so much now. I just can’t believe . . . I know it will never go back to the way it was, but that’s a shame because it was great.”

To read all of chapter one of The Old Neighborhood, visit this New York Times page.

Next week, I’ll highlight Suarez’s chapter on St. Louis and look more closely at the role race played in the transformation of Wellston and other “old neighborhoods” in St. Louis.

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Wagner Electric and Brownfield Redevelopment

Linda Tate on February 21st, 2011

Abandoned Wagner Electric Factory Building

As I reported last week, Wagner Electric – once a mainstay of Wellston residents’ employment – closed its doors in 1981. What happened next is one of the most tragic stories in Wellston history.

“When Wagner Electric abandoned Wellston,” writes U.M.-St. Louis historian Andrew Hurley in his outstanding 1997 Environmental History article, “Fiasco at Wagner Electric: Environmental Justice and Urban Geography in St. Louis,” “few residents knew that its property was contaminated with toxic waste. Only after the company transferred title to the property to St. Louis County did inspectors discover that the company had left behind more than four thousand gallons of oil containing PCBs,” with soil concentrations “ranging up to almost 100,000 parts per million” (“levels above 50 parts per million [are] a threat to human health”). It turned out that Wagner’s Wellston plant “had a long history of handling toxic substances, including the contaminated oil that was used as an insulator and coolant in the transformers manufactured by the company.” Hurley concludes:

Although the firm used other hazardous substances elsewhere in the plant – asbestos in the brake division and cyanide in the plating department – it was the spillage and careless disposal of PCB-laden oil that would come to haunt the county. . . . Particularly heavy concentrations were found on the banks of the River des Peres. Inside the plant, PCB contamination was discovered in building floors, within concrete pillars, and in a variety of cans, buckets, and tanks scattered around the premises.

But wait . . . it gets worse.

Rather than remediation immediately getting underway, the Wagner facility sat empty, as St. Louis County, Wagner Electric, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency argued – in lawsuits and countersuits – about who was responsible for the cleanup and just how far the cleanup needed to go. In an excellent overview of this “wrangling,” Hurley describes the County’s inability to pay for remediation, Wagner’s insistence that it had no responsibility for the mess, and the EPA’s “flexible regulatory approach.” Ultimately, “a 1987 settlement with Wagner Electric’s parent company, Cooper Industries, guaranteed enough money to fund a partial cleanup of the site,” says Hurley, but “redevelopment proceeded at an excruciatingly slow pace.” “The completion of the partial cleanup did not rekindle interest among prospective clients,” he writes, and “the partially-cleaned site was still not in marketable condition.” Indeed, after the partial cleanup had been completed, “large quantities of asbestos” were discovered, and other contamination problems were found. In short, the Wagner plant was indeed the site of a “fiasco.”

What happened at Wagner is, unfortunately, not an isolated case. So prevalent are deserted, contaminated sites (most of them industrial) that a word has been coined to describe them. A “brownfield,” as defined by the EPA, is “real property where redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.” Brownfield sites, says Ashley Williams, author of a 2009 Kansas State University master’s thesis, “A Case Study of the Brownfield Redevelopment in Wellston, Missouri,” “remain blighted areas acting as urban ‘eyesores.’”

As Hurley notes, brownfields tend to predominate in poor, minority neighborhoods. “Inner-city brownfield properties,” says Hurley, “have imposed a double burden upon surrounding communities.” Not only are residents at physical risk due to the contaminants in these brownfields, but “potential investors have shied away from properties that contain even the hint of contamination,” thus “denying jobs and revenue to distressed communities.”

Such was the case with the Wagner Electric factory. This site – along with the nearby ABEX Foundry site – was, as Williams notes, “deserted in the early 1980s and . . . left to deteriorate for nearly twenty years.” Those who traveled on the MetroLink in years past likely saw the “bombed-out” Wagner facility, easily visible from the Wellston Station. As St. Louis County official Wayne Wiedemann noted, the PCB contamination had a “dramatic effect on [our] ability to market the property.” And according to Michael Clark of Clark Properties (the developer involved in efforts to reclaim the site), “the [old Wagner] site has been a black eye on the community for years. When you have a property that looks that bad, it’s difficult to attract companies that are coming in and looking at St. Louis.”

Inside Abandoned Wagner Electric Factory Building

But this story may have a happy ending – for another chapter of the story unfolded in the last decade: that of brownfield redevelopment. This type of urban infill project focuses, as Williams says, on “the recycling of land” and thus “breaks from traditional models in that it does not promote the development of vacant, open land or agricultural land” (also known as greenfields). For a good overview of the current thinking on brownfield redevelopment, consult Williams’s literature review.

According to Williams, much has been accomplished due to the brownfield redevelopment of the Wagner and ABEX sites. New facilities that have been created include the Plymouth Industrial Park (formerly the Cornerstore Industrial Park), the Wellston Technology Park (on the ABEX site), a small business incubator known as the St. Louis Enterprise Center, and a “state-of-the-art” workforce training center, the Metropolitan Education and Training Center (also known as the MET Center). Providing hands-on, trade-based training and “comprehensive” career development services, the MET Center serves unemployed and underemployed area residents and helps provide a “bridge not only to employment but also to further college coursework.” Liz Connolly, planner for the East-West Gateway Council of Governments and a community fellow at U.M.-St. Louis’s Public Policy Research Center, also points to the St. Louis County and Municipal Police Academy, which was built on part of the Wagner site.

Where Hurley was distressed in 1997 to see the sad state of the Wagner brownfield site, both Connolly and Williams found that brownfield redevelopment was finally taking hold in positive ways. Writing in 2004, Connolly described Wellston as “a poster child for brownfields redevelopment,” noting that “Wellston was profiled as an ‘environmental justice success story’ in a 2002 EPA report.” And from her 2009 vantage point, Williams was so encouraged by what has happened to Wellston’s abandoned factory sites that she calls Wellston “a successful example” of brownfield redevelopment.

I’d be interested to hear from readers who have been to Wellston and seen this redevelopment first hand. What does Wagner look like today?

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The History of Wagner Electric

Linda Tate on February 14th, 2011

In 1891, Herbert Wagner and Ferdinand Schwedtman started Wagner Electric, a small motors company. Located in downtown St. Louis, the small company quickly grew and, according to historian Andrew Hurley, “became one of St. Louis’s most prominent manufacturers.” In his article, “Fiasco at Wagner Electric: Environmental Justice and Urban Geography of St. Louis,” Hurley goes on to say:

The phenomenal expansion of electric power networks in cities such as St. Louis during this era sparked a demand for machinery, transmission apparatus, and appliances. Responding to these fortuitous conditions, Wagner and Schwedtman broadened their product line to include dynamos, transformers, and ventilating fans. By the turn of the century, they boasted that their company had built the world’s largest power transformer.

Business was booming, and it was time to move to larger quarters. In 1906, Wagner Electric began building a factory complex along Plymouth Avenue in Wellston. Eventually, the Wagner facility took up the entire block. (See photograph of the factory complex here.) The company moved to what was then a suburban setting for several reasons, among them, says Hurley, “cheap land, infrastructural improvements, favorable tax rates, and lenient environmental regulations,” “access to railroad transportation,” and “an extensive metropolitan streetcar system” with “proximity to [those] streetcar lines.”

While the streetcar system made it possible for workers to commute to the factory, Wagner officials also saw the possibility of “modest” housing in the vicinity of the complex. Hurley describes a “brochure announcing the plant’s opening.” The brochure states: “the surroundings are clean and clear of obnoxious industries, and there is every prospect of the early development of an ideal home district for people of modest means.” Indeed, this “ideal home district” did materialize – and my grandparents were among the many who worked at Wagner and lived within short walking district of the plant.

By 1913, according to labor historian Rosemary Feurer, Wagner’s Wellston plant was proclaimed the third largest and the most modern in the country. Wagner, she says in her book, Radical Unionism in the Midwest: 1900-1950, was a “burgeoning local enterprise with national market outlets” and became “one of the largest employers in St. Louis’s diverse manufacturing base.” Feurer describes Wagner’s products:

Wagner Electric’s first products were single-phase, alternating current motors used to power small appliances; the company also patented a range of electrical products, including transformers. . . . Wagner engineers also developed electrical components for automobiles, eventually producing generators, starters, and ignition and lighting devices.

To make Wagner competitive, company executives emphasized production speed. In her review of 1920s photos kept by Wagner’s personnel department, Feurer finds one image of an assembly line. Its caption? “Speeding Up Work.” And another photo captures a factory sign that declares, “Boys and Girls, You Have Done Fine!” Noting that workers “complained of intense speeding,” Feurer says:

Wagner boasted that its policy ‘encourage[s] speed, and slow men are discharged at the option of the foremen.’ Managers implemented payment systems of their choice, including ‘hourly rate, premium system, piece work, contract, or such other systems as we may devise in each individual case.’ Production manager C.B. Lord’s hated slide rule was used to institute a premium piecework system that managers touted as ‘scientific’ as Wagner speeded up production. Wagner’s premium system encouraged speed by paying workers a low base rate and then half of any amount workers produced over the standard.

Also essential to Wagner’s success was its policy of hiring workers from rural areas outside St. Louis. Reflecting on St. Louis’s history of unionized strikes, Feurer writes that Wagner had “a policy of hiring only workers from the ‘countryside between 16 and 22 years old’ and avoiding hiring native St. Louisans, who Wagner felt were too heavily influenced by local ‘radical’ union culture.” As Feurer states,

Management proclaimed St. Louis ‘an excellent market for intelligent, green help from Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Southern Illinois, as well as the more western states. They are trained readily, are subject to discipline, and [are] loyal Americans.’

Feurer goes on to say that “de-skilling” also gave Wagner “access to a labor market of young women.” Production manager C.B. Lord proclaimed: “We consider girls superior to boys but inferior to men, and cheaper than either.” By 1917, says Feurer, almost 500 women – “one-fifth of the production workforce” – “worked as timekeepers or punch press operators or in small arms war production.”

In short, though its “workforce was mostly white men,” says Feurer, Wagner “hired a substantially larger number of women and black men.” Indeed, “women made up one-fourth of Wagner’s labor force during the 1920s.” With Wagner’s emphasis on hiring young women and on hiring inexperienced help from rural areas such as Arkansas, it’s no wonder that my grandmother – a transplant from Bald Knob, Arkansas – gained employment at the Wellston factory. (See below: women working in 1917 at Wagner’s switch assembly.)

1917 Wagner Electric Switch Assembly

It’s worth noting that not everyone was happy with the intense emphasis on speed and on “de-skilled” workers. Working conditions throughout St. Louis were such that a long 1918 strike – what Feurer describes as a “strike wave” – began when 5,000 department store workers walked out until more than 30,000 St. Louis workers were on strike. Though strikes were happening across the country, Feurer says that, with this “community uprising,” St. Louis was one of the most turbulent cities and was “in the midst of an industrial war.” According to Feurer, a strike at Wagner during that time became “the central conflict of that upheaval,” with “women workers at Wagner [leading] the parade of strikers outside the plant.” (Learn more about this and other landmark events in St. Louis labor history by visiting Feurer’s online booklet, “The St. Louis Labor History Tour.”)

Despite the strikes, Wagner and other electrical companies enjoyed success (though Feurer notes that Wagner didn’t again reach World War I production levels until the advent of World War II). In Mapping Decline, historian Colin Gordon notes that “New economic development in the 1920s and 1930s (led by electrical supply and manufacturing firms such as Wagner and Emerson)” was “pushing employment and investments to the City’s western edge and across the county line into inner suburbs like Wellston and Clayton.” The metropolitan area’s pattern of continuing westward movement had begun in earnest.

And the growth between 1890 and 1930 was enough, says Feurer, to put St. Louis on the nation’s electrical industry map. The metropolitan area became a center of the electrical industry “independents” – companies like Wagner, Emerson Electric, and Century that stood apart from the major corporations such as GE and Westinghouse. These independents, says Feurer, carved out a niche in smaller motor and electrical products.

My research indicates that Wagner employed large numbers of workers – but the numbers I’ve located contradict each other. During World War I, says Feurer, Wagner employed 4500 workers – and according to a 1984 report from the St. Louis Electrical Board, the high point of Wagner employment was 8000 in 1953. However, Andrew Hurley says the peak was 6000 workers. I would be interested to know if any of my readers have other or more definitive figures.

In 1981, Wagner announced the closing of its Wellston plan. Says Hurley: “Over the previous two decades, the company had diverted production to factories in other cities, trimming its Wellston work force from a peak of six thousand to less than fifteen hundred.” Wagner retirees still gather for reunions, as evidenced in the July 2010 edition of the Welhisco Flashlight, the online newsletter for alums of Wellston High School.

What happened next made for a very sad chapter in Wellston history. Stop by for that part of the story next week.

For those who want to explore Wagner’s history further, I highly recommend Feurer’s online companion to her book. It’s full of photos and other images – as well as lots of information.

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“John Frederick’s Daughters”: Pearl, Amanda, Della

Linda Tate on February 7th, 2011

This week, I’ve asked an old friend to contribute the first guest blog post to The Wellston Loop. Nan Sweet has taught English – poetry, Romanticism, and women’s writing – at U.M.-St. Louis since 1981. She publishes widely on the newly recovered woman Romantic poet Felicia Hemans. Her poetry chapbooks, Mix of Securities and Rotogravure, embrace public scenes in an urban landscape and the intimacies of life managed on a literary budget. Her children work to make the city a better place, at Black Bear Bakery and Citygarden. Her (sequential) life partners have done so too, through philanthropy and public education. I was pleased to know and work with Nan when I was a graduate student in U.M.-St. Louis’s Department of English, and I’m very pleased to reconnect with her over our shared love of Wellston. You can reach her at sweet@umsl.edu.

Linda Tate’s Wellston project has drawn me since her first web version – which thankfully is being recreated here, with a book to follow. Her absorbing memoir of the hidden mid-South, Power in the Blood, is a forecast of what this new book may be like.

Linda has invited me to post my own work on Wellston – the trio of poems “John Frederick’s Daughters.” Some readers may want to go directly to those (below) and return to the following musings afterwards.

Wellston has always been a place that straddles time and its human jurisdictions. In this way, it is like Linda’s “land between the rivers” in Power in the Blood that crossed the Kentucky-Tennessee state line and gave uncertain refuge to the region’s hybrid peoples (darker “old people” intermarried with newcomer whites). Wellston has been home to waves of ethnic and native-born groups “covenanted” out of more fashionable city neighborhoods. As a district it straddles St. Louis City and County: Wellston’s troubled future as a community may have been collateral damage of the infamous City/County division of 1876.

Whenever I perform my trio of Wellston poems, “John Frederick’s Daughters,” I identify its “streetcar loop” as the Wellston Loop. Otherwise, listeners think only of Delmar’s University City Loop, which has captured the term for its own. But the Wellston Loop on Easton Avenue, now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, was a much bigger shopping district. Its large buildings are still in evidence, including one that was a J.C. Penney’s. My poem puts the “streetcar loop” in the County, but Linda’s web links show the station straddling the City Limits. Most of Wellston’s major stores were in St. Louis City. Along with streetcar lines like the Hodiamont and Easton Avenue, Jewish entrepreneurs made this commerce possible.

The County side of Wellston achieved hard-won incorporation in the twentieth century and has for me the slightly lawless flavor of all North County’s balkanized fiefdoms. It may have been the first of these. Wellston drew my free-thinking great-grandfather John Frederick Meyer to recreate the German idyll of his youth on Audrey Avenue, complete with vineyard and pet livestock – a calf. His sharp-tongued daughter Amanda lived there too and eventually her hapless husband Emil; and for a time his daughter Della; while Pearl lived two blocks away.

Wellston would have seemed a place of retreat for the Meyers when they first arrived about 1900, and it became even more so. Ahead of them lay the First World War, with its training camp down St. Charles Rock Road on the site of the present Memorial Gardens. During the war, “Grandpa Meyer” was stoned in southern Illinois while delivering copies of the German-language Westliche Post. He was purchasing agent for this paper, once headed by Carl Schurz, the German-American Senator whose words about democracy are inscribed on the former Kiel Opera House in downtown St. Louis. Joseph Pulitzer began his newspaper career on the Westliche Post.

The Meyers trended political. Amanda (“Mandy”) was a leading figure in the local Rebekah lodge. She forged a crony relationship with Wellston’s long-time Democratic mayor Leo Hayes in the 1950s, canvassing for him and receiving favors. If Hayes made “sweetheart deals” with industry, as I suggest in the poem, perhaps those were no worse than today’s TIFs for Walmart.

John Frederick Meyer died in 1929. His funeral at Oddfellows Hall across from the Loop was followed by burial in Bethany Cemetery across from Normandy High School. Amanda and Della are in Bethany too. Pearl was the eldest and sweetest of the poem’s three sisters: she and her dear Johnny lived at  6407 Wellsmar (all in the poem!) and are buried in Zion Cemetery on St. Charles Rock Road at Pennsylvania. 

My grandmother Della’s whirlwind dancing career and circus marriage (all in the poem!) tossed her from the streets of downtown St. Louis to a wealthy home in Cincinnati and back to her father’s small home with privy on Audrey – her three children in tow. Della’s bright, thoughtful ways gained her work in a children’s store on Easton – enough to keep her family ahead of the rent collector in flat after flat of the old West End along Page Avenue.

Her daughter Louise, my mother, married a small-town boy who gained success as a civil engineer. They settled in Webster Groves. From time to time we visited “Mandy and Pearlie” in Wellston, first on the streetcar, later by car. Or I shopped with my grandmother on Easton Avenue in stores owned by Jewish proprietors whom she knew – but did not always trust. “Mandy” would phone us from her Evergreen exchange, never saying hello but plunging unceremoniously into her business. Every year when Derby time came, she gave Della access to her bookie and the bets were on.

Mandy and Pearlie assumed the role of “poor relations,” receiving my father’s unpretentious kindnesses on our trips to collect them for holidays. The resulting scenes at holiday dinners ensured that we would not forget these tenuous homesteaders in Wellston, whose houses perished with them.

Teaching at U.M.-St. Louis, where I met Linda Tate in the early 1980s, led me to a commute I still favor: from the City Limits at Hi Pointe north through Wellston (sometimes by bus in early days). When I circle the streets, I find the lot at 6327 Audrey occupied by a “Habitat for Humanity.” Occasionally I stop to use the mailbox on King and Keinlen, or to buy BBQ just west along King. I visit Bethany Cemetery, over the line from Wellston in Pagedale; there is a plot there for me. I believe the neighborhood is still solidly Democratic.

These poems are posted thanks to Rebecca Ellis, publisher of the chapbook where they appear, Rotogravure from Cherry Pie Press. Rotogravure features other North City/County scenes as well; copies are available at Left Bank Euclid, Dunaway’s, and the UMSL Bookstore.

JOHN FREDERICK’S DAUGHTERS
Nanora Sweet

Pearl

John Frederick’s eldest girl, so small
and always lame, you married Mickey first,
the Irishman who boxed for cash, then beat
you up at home. Your father had the vows
annulled and brought you home to tend his grapes.

With ads and sales and crafty deals, he kept
Carl Schurz’s German paper in the black,
a petit-bourgeois factor in a world
where Hegel and freethinking had their day.
But World War One would put an end to that.

Along came Johnny Glas, the carpenter.
He built a shotgun house for you, his bride.
His plans were true enough; but ages past
that other German war, his floors had warped,
and pinups lined his musty back-room walls. 

We kids came giggling home from visits there,
the wurst and sauerkraut you served for lunch
still heavy on our stomachs, topped by chunks
of chocolate from the crock still labeled KRAUT
(but, oh, the ants I saw there once).
                                                               Your crock
is gone, your house bulldozed, its small proceeds
spent long ago to keep the family drunk
afloat. And yet your house still furnishes
my life and greets me in the chairs and couch
of my ex-spouse; and Johnny’s tools still hang,
a stepson’s gallant try at home decor. 

And in my basement hides an entire house
that Johnny built, a shotgun made to scale
for dolls. The steps are split. The walls spring out,
the windows lose their cellulose. The paint,
undaunted, keeps its lead-based reds and greens.
(And oh, the sauerkraut that I keep now,
for me, all briny in a tub designed
for frozen yogurt.) Pearl, this all seems right.

Della

The last child of John Frederick and his wife,
you were my parents’ only parent and
you lived with us when prices got beyond
a pension dating from the Cuban war.

At sixty-five you tapped a buck ‘n’ wing
in granny shoes and pranced a cakewalk in
a pantomime of skirts and eyes. You proved
you’d been in vaudeville with those photographs
of you on stage and posed in taffeta
and velvet costumes that your mother made
(before the carriage dragged her to her death).

You went on tour before you turned fifteen,
that diamond in your smile no doubt the work
of dentist brother – Al? or Harry, George,
or Julius. . .brothers vanished into scrapes,
or other towns.
                            Then Ringling Brothers took
you on; you danced a sideshow serpentine.
Your china eyes and bisque complexion gained
the love of ring announcer, dashing Brad,
a courtship on the circus train’s caboose.
But Brad had run away before – to war,
the minstrel show, and now the circus life –
one day he ran away again, from you.
What yellow fever couldn’t take from him,
he’d lose at Hialeah. . . .
                                             Evil words
were not your way. I can’t say all you were. 
You loved us all, each generation’s black-
sheep boy the most. Of course John Frederick brought
you and your children home. He taught your girl
to waltz and nursed her past the Victory flu.
He made a worker of your elder boy
and left the world to work and love and you.

Amanda

Your father loved a waltz and grew the grapes
for his own heavy wine. You loved a boy
whose bride could only come from Italy.
In time you married Emil, coarse and drunk
enough to keep at home. The Great War came,
and sales of German-language news and ads
no longer kept John Frederick’s home afloat.
The family dog called Kaiser finally left –
he joined the troops camped down the old Rock Road.

Your town was nothing but a streetcar loop
outside the City Limits, ripe for sweet-
heart deals between the factories and the gang.
The neighborhood went Irish. John Frederick
died – you sold the calf but kept his house,
its privy under code by any rules.

You worked the precinct while, with hat in hand,
the mayor junketed to Asia well
before the fashion. Thanks to you, the dolls
he brought from China and Japan were mine.
Like Pearl, you had no children of your own.
Her Johnny ran insane, was taken in
at County. Your Emil spat himself to death.

We gave you Christmas dinner, drove you back
and forth. You slept until we came. Then while
we stood, you wrapped some thrift-store slip
or scarf in last year’s box. Your barbs were your
protection, saved for dinner, passed around
with Della’s pickles in the dining room.

Back in the Loop, the neighborhood went black
and stayed Democratic; you still worked
the polls. When death and the bulldozer came,
who recognized John Frederick’s rural place,
his German arbor by the streetcar loop?
All gone, except in your last look of scorn.

Text and poems © 2011 Nanora Sweet

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Collage

Linda Tate on January 31st, 2011

Collage.

This was one of my grandmother’s favorite words.

Out of the blue, she’d say, “Linnie, there’s a word I’ve come across and I’m not sure what it means. Collage. Do you know this word?”

I’d go on to say that it was a collection of seemingly unrelated objects.

Sometimes, she’d tell me that she’d looked the word up in her dictionary. We’d ponder the word together, I always wondering (but never asking her) just where she had come across what to her was an unusual word.

With that word lodged somewhere in my consciousness, I was beyond delighted when I heard John Edgar Wideman give a talk on collage at Iowa State University’s NonfictioNow conference in November. Throughout the talk, Wideman projected an image of a Romare Bearden painting, Farewell Eugene, a collage based on Bearden’s boyhood experiences in Pittsburgh. Farewell, Eugene pays homage to Bearden’s friend, Eugene, who introduced him to the drawings he’d made of his mother’s brothel.

As Wideman indicated in his talk and as he has made clear in numerous publications and interviews, Bearden is one of his “aesthetic heroes” – particularly because of his interest in collage. Indeed, one of Bearden’s collages graces the cover of Wideman’s 1981 collection of short stories, Damballah.

In a 2008 interview with Open Source at Brown University (where he teaches), Wideman describes his debt to Bearden this way:

His main mode or form was collage. And certainly collage is a very suggestive art form, because it means you take bits and pieces from every damn thing and start throwing them together, and if you do it in the right way, maybe something new is created. Maybe the parts become greater than the whole, and whole greater than the parts, and suddenly you’re in the presence of something new.

Wideman’s NonfictioNow talk was in the form of collage – bits and pieces of Bearden’s life mixed with Wideman’s own reflections about his mother and with excerpts from his 2008 novel Fanon. He quoted from Fanon:

Romare Bearden’s collages remind me of how my mother, another one of my idols – a life-saver like Fanon – talks. Her stories fatten and flatten perspective. She crams everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a Bearden painting.

While Wideman talked, I scribbled – words and images that make up the Hodiamont collage I am creating. When I returned home from the conference, I looked up my grandmother’s favorite word in my favorite dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary. Here’s what I found:

col·lage (k -läzh , k -)
n.
1.
a. An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.
b. A work, such as a literary piece, composed of both borrowed and original material.
2. The art of creating such compositions.
3. An assemblage of diverse elements: a collage of conflicting memories.
v. col·laged, col·lag·ing, col·lages
v.tr.
To paste (diverse materials) over a surface, thereby creating an artistic product.
v.intr.
To create such an artistic product.

So this is what I’m doing, Grandma: I’m creating a collage of all things Wellston, all things Hodiamont. My blog is such a collage – an assemblage of diverse elements, a work featuring both original and borrowed material (always with attribution, of course!). And let’s hope there are “unifying lines and color” – something that holds it all together. I hope that you, like me, look forward to seeing the picture that emerges!

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Urban Prairie

Linda Tate on January 24th, 2011

I’m intrigued by the phenomenon of the “urban prairie,” what photographer/writer Camilo Jose Vergara calls the “green ghetto.”

“Urban prairie,” says Wikipedia, “is a term coined to characterize large swaths of vacant city lots, typically covered with grass or untended weeds and litter. Urban prairie results from widespread building demolition, common in areas subject to extensive urban decay.” Importantly, the Wikipedia entry notes, “These areas are not the same as a true, natural prairie” – and thus they are not cause for celebration.

Below are two aerial photos of urban prairie taking over the Wellston block where my family once lived. The 6300 block of Lenox Avenue – between Ogden Avenue and Stephen Jones Avenue (formerly Delaware Avenue) – was once the site of numerous houses, but now only a few remain. One lot – seen in the close-up – has been taken over by trees. Could this, in fact, be the former site of our family home?

Urban Prairie in Wellston, Large View

Urban Prairie in Wellston, Close-up View of Lenox Avenue

In The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1965-1999, Ray Suarez describes urban prairie in Cleveland:

Today, there are vast stretches of Euclid Avenue with no buildings at all. It’s land that has fallen from the peak of style to dereliction, pausing briefly at all the stops in between. If you have forgotten just how long some of these lots have been vacant, nature provides a clue. Almost three decades after rioting left so many vacant lots, some of the trees in the lots are large, mature, and shady. It’s been a long time since 1968. Only the massive churches sitting like islands in a contextless sea of grass tell you that something big has happened here. By the late 1990s, a few things could not be changed about Hough. It was all black. It was very close to downtown. There were vast pieces of empty land. Off the beaten track, less visible from main streets, the land had returned to an urban bush. The empty lots sported a thick growth of shrub-sized specimens of weeds usually nipped at a few inches by even the most laissez-faire gardener. (163)

While urban prairie is a devastating phenomenon wherever it occurs, urban prairie is a crucial problem in some areas of St. Louis.

As “Exploring St. Louis” blog has documented, urban prairie is a crucial problem in some areas of St. Louis. In an outstanding post, blogger Paul Sableman (“Exploring St. Louis) focuses on the intersection of North Market and 23rd Street – and includes stunning photographs as well as a historical map that can be used as a yesterday-today comparison.

Also useful in thinking about urban prairie in St. Louis is Built St. Louis’s feature on “The Slow Death of a City Block,” which examines the 1900 block of Montgomery Street in North St. Louis. Written by Robert Powers, the site says:

A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 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. . . . What’s happened here is a microcosm of much of St. Louis: the disintegration of urban fabric. Urban design is about creating a series of interconnected outdoor rooms; it is about defined space, spaced scaled for human beings and densely populated with them. Here, the space has lost all cohesion, all definition, all population. The intricate patterns of urbanization are destroyed. The surviving houses sit lost in an amorphous void, their brick party walls standing exposed like raw wounds. . . . The sense of defined, controlled space has vanished. This is now an urban desert – barren open space punctuated by lone survivors. The vacant lots are not an asset. They are not ‘green space.’ They are wasted space. For the city of St. Louis, they are black holes, sucking the life out of the place. Every missing house represents lives gone elsewhere, creativity lost, connections never formed, tax base decreased, vitality diminished. They are a squandered opportunity that the city cannot afford. But the city is full of such places.

Urban prairie is a particular problem in Wellston. As part of his Built St. Louis website, Powers offers an extraordinary photographic tour of this “green ghetto.” All of these shots were taken in the exact neighborhood where my family lived (each within two or three blocks of our family home on Lenox Avenue). Continue onto subsequent pages for more views of present-day Wellston. You can go on a “tour” of urban prairie sites in Wellston by following the tips found in this post. It suggests particular addresses to search for with Google Earth.

But there’s hope – slim though it may be. In Detroit, where urban prairies are particularly striking, urban farming is beginning to emerge. Read this powerful account of the Motor City’s abandoned tracts – and be sure to check out the great photos.  Then read this story about GM’s vacant lots becoming urban prairies and the current efforts to reclaim these lots by “greening” them. See also this article about gardening projects in Motown.

Finally, visit the Urban Farming website to learn more about these efforts. The website describes the group’s mission:

Urban Farming’s mission is to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting gardens on unused land and space while increasing diversity, educating youth, adults and seniors and providing an environmentally sustainable system to uplift communities.

Could something like this work in St. Louis?

Finally, to wrap up your exploration of the phenomenon of urban prairie, read preservationist Michael Allen’s provocative insights in “The Empty Space,” a reflection on what’s missing (and what endures) when a building disintegrates or is demolished.

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Disintegrating Buildings: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Urban Alchemy

Linda Tate on January 17th, 2011
Collapsing House, Decaying Building in St. Louis

Photo courtesy of Michael R. Allen, Preservation Research Office (click photo to see original post, “Row House on Lafayette Avenue Slated for Demolition,” September 10, 2010)

For years, whenever I have dreamed of St. Louis, I have conjured images of buildings half-standing, half-open to the world. Invariably, the back wall of the house is missing, and I can peer right inside to the remainder of the house. There’s a mix of danger and excitement in these dreams: danger for I know that a neighborhood with disintegrating buildings is not safe for a white woman exploring on her own, excitement because I can see into the houses, see the lives people are leading in them. For make no mistake: though they are missing back walls, these houses are still occupied. To look at them from the front, you’d have no idea they’re crumbling.

Imagine the shock of recognition I felt when I first stumbled across Robert Powers’s striking photos of disintegrating St. Louis buildings. Check out some of them here, here, here, here, and here. Over at the Preservation Research Office, Michael R. Allen also has some powerful photos of buildings that have been hit by brisk rustlers (watch for a future post on this phenomenon). Check out Allen’s photos here and here.

Then imagine my true delight when I came across the work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978). According to Wikipedia, “He is famous for his ‘building cuts,’ a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.” Matta-Clark described his process this way:

I made a series of visits to the ghetto areas of the Lower East Side and the Bronx visiting buildings occupied primarily by packs of dogs and periodically by junkies. Many of the buildings had suffered heavy arson and were the epitomy [sic] of urban neglect. These first works simply involved moving into spaces with a handsaw and cutting away rectangular sections of the floor or walls to create a view from one space into another. The sections were carefully removed from their original positions to an art gallery. The working conditions were always the most adverse I can remember. We were not only stopped by the police on several occasions but also by roving gangs from the neighbor-hood [sic]. There was always an acute sense of paranoia that accompanied this work.

"Bingo," Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004. Installation photography © Francois Robert Gordon Matta-Clark works © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Recently, Matta-Clark’s art was on exhibit at St. Louis’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Titled Urban Alchemy, the exhibit featured installations (such as “Bingo” and “Bronx Floors: Double Doors”) as well as photographs of his “interventions” (such as “Splitting” and “Untitled [Anarchitecture]”). The Urban Alchemy exhibit catalog (available for purchase) describes Matta-Clark’s work this way:

Gordon Matta-Clark used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings in order to reveal their hidden constructions, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments.

Although Matta-Clark did not construct any of his art in St. Louis (most of his pieces focus on buildings in and around his hometown of New York), the pieces on display at the Pulitzer nevertheless resonate with the St. Louis urban landscape. As the Urban Alchemy curators note, the Pulitzer exhibit “builds upon Matta-Clark’s desire to give abandoned objects and buildings new meaning by connecting the artist’s social activism to present-day St. Louis.” In fact, the Pulitzer hosted a series of “transformative” events in conjunction with the exhibit, events designed to “reactivate Matta-Clark’s legacy of socially-engaged art drawn from the urban environment and the people who bring life to the community” – and to do so in a way that would be relevant and particular to St. Louis. “By engaging the community in acts of individual and collective transformation of all types,” says the Matta-Clark Transformation website, “the Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark’s legacy into the 21st century and inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts.” At the website, you’ll find videos of St. Louisans reflecting on neighborhood, highlights of St. Louis’s version of Matta-Clark’s famous “Garbage Wall” installation, and excerpts from a panel discussion of leading St. Louis thinkers.

The Urban Alchemy exhibit catalog is chock full of statements from Matta-Clark as to what he was up to in creating his “anarchitecture.” “As an artist I make sculpture using the natural by-products of the land and people,” he said in 1970. “I am interested in turning wasted areas such as blocks of rubble, empty lots, dumps into beautiful and useful areas.” And in 1975, he described his artistic efforts this way:

Work with abandoned structures began with my concern for the life of the city of which a major side effect is the metabolization of old buildings. Here as in many urban centers the availability of empty and neglected structures was a prime textural reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernization. The omnipresence of emptiness, of abandoned housing and imminent demolition gave me the freedom to experiment with the multiple alternatives to one’s life in a box as well as popular attitudes about the need for enclosure.

Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford, says that, as a self-described urban archaeologist, Matta-Clark “saw what he was doing as transformative, using what no one else wanted.” In the 1970s, she says, “New York City had many derelict buildings and neighborhoods. Gordon would move into a space and transform it the way an alchemist might. . . . [H]e liked the idea of taking the sow’s ear and spinning gold out of it.”

You can learn more about Matta-Clark’s work by reading this New York Times article, this artnet feature, and this ARTINFO.com article on a 2007 Matta-Clark exhibit at the Whitney. See also Stefene Russell’s St. Louis Magazine article, “Cameo: Space Man,” as well as St. Louis blogger Michael R. Allen’s thoughts on the Pulitzer show. “Out of his brutal dissection,” writes Allen, “emerged works that raise more questions about the contemporary urban condition than can ever be answered.” Allen draws particular parallels to the devastation the St. Louis urban landscape is currently facing.

To view Matta-Clark’s work, visit the Urban Alchemy website. If you Google “Gordon Matta-Clark” and click “Images,” you’ll find a treasure trove of his pieces. You might also want to check out his video, “Conical Intersect,” which details the cuts he made on two Paris buildings.

 “When you’re living in a city,” Matta-Clark said in a 1974 interview, “the whole fabric is architectural in some sense. We were thinking more about metaphoric voids, gaps, left-over spaces, places that were not developed.”

Voids, gaps, left-over spaces . . . the St. Louis images that haunt me in my dreams.

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Remembering Wellston’s High School, Part 2

Linda Tate on January 10th, 2011

In my last blog post, I reported that the Wellston School District has been shut down and that Wellston students now attend Normandy schools. Before the school district closed, a group of students at Wellston’s high school – known most recently as Eskridge High School – worked with StudioSTL to document the history of the school and the Wellston community. Together, they created a series of videos about their lives in Wellston. KSDK produced a report on the video project.

Among the student-produced projects is a video telling the story of the Wellston/Normandy merger. Videos commemorating the original Wellston High School include “Wellston High Alumni” (Ashley Ambus, CJ Hall, Alexus Shockley) and “Remembering Old Wellston High” (CJ Hall). In other videos, Eskridge High School Principal Charles Shelton reflects on “What I’ll Miss” (Deanna Ivy, Demond Outlaw), and “Teach for America” teachers reflect on their experiences at Eskridge (Jennifer Simpson, Sharita Allred, Ashley Ambus). Extracurricular activities are also featured. “Mr. Crockett’s Blues” (Alonzo Davis, Ranise Baldwin) tells the story of Eskridge High’s music program, and two other videos – “This Is It: Basketball in Wellston” (Kevin MacLemore) and “The Albert Sisters” (Najae Jordan, Shandreyia Payne) – profile the school’s sports program.

“The Old Wellston Loop” (John Kennedy) reflects on the days when Wellston was a thriving transportation hub. Other videos tell the story of “Bada Bing Pizza & Wings” (Roderick Reed, Terrence Scott, Shanika Price, Javonte Scott) and “Clay’s Corner Store” (Alexis Cole, Kashonna McGee, Decarla Latchison).

Perhaps most compelling are the videos that describe everyday life in Wellston. Wellston community member “Stanley Dooley” (Cameshia Mays, Demond Outlaw, I’esha Davis, Tinesha McClemore) reflects on the difficulties of life in Wellston.

Alexus Shockley’s video poem opens with the lines:

People dying
Kids crying
Hearts breaking
Souls taking.

Later in the poem, she says,

Gang violence is all outsiders know
Caring and love they choose not to show. . . .
You watch the news – it’s just bad things
They look down on us and crush our dreams.

Similarly, Jamie Davis’s video poem, “A Typical Day in Wellston,” talks about the harsh living conditions in her community:

Wind blowing, felt as if a tornado came upon me
Ears red, frostbit fingertips, and the worst – teary eyes
Having questions flowing through the wind
What’s wrong?
Have you been crying?

She compares her school bus to “a slave ship in the old days.” Her poem ends:

Thoughts so familiar, conversations so old
But we never seem to look beyond what we’re told.

The piece that stays with me, however, is “The Streets of Wellston,” a rap by 15-year-old Antonio “Eagle I” Pulliam (you can watch the video below). His piece goes like this:

I grew up out here in Wellston
Middle of the city
Plus I been through hard times
So you can’t show me no pity
Now the things are busting up
And the state gave us no pennies
Acting like they care for us
They should have won the Emmy
Kids in the fast lane
Moving like the Indy
Blowing all their future plans
And getting kind of windy
Make it out the slums
Man, I know I got it in me . . . .

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Remembering Wellston’s High School, Part 1

Linda Tate on January 3rd, 2011

As many readers will know, the Wellston School District ceased to exist at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. Because Wellston schools had lost state accreditation in 2003 and were struggling with infrastructure problems, the state board of education made the decision to merge Wellston schools with nearby Normandy School District, home of Wellston’s athletic arch-rivals.

KWMU reported on Wellston schools’ preparation for permanent shutdown. The St. Louis Beacon published a feature story on the final Wellston high school commencement. STLtoday, the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, focused on the first day of the 2010-2011 school year, as did KSDK in this video report.

Though the first day of the merger went smoothly, Wellston alums and students mourned the passing of Wellston schools, particularly the role of the high school. Built in 1940 and located at Wells and Evergreen, Wellston High School was a beauty of a school – and enthusiastic alumni still reminiscence fondly about their years at the school. Wellston High School closed in 1962, replaced by a new high school with a new name: Halter High. In 1979, the school was renamed Eskridge High. You can learn more about the history of the high school by visiting The Flashlight, the alumni newsletter.

On April 9, 2010, the last graduating class – the seniors from 2010 – hosted a “social” for alums from 1942 through 1969. KSDK featured a lively report on the gathering: “As Wellston nears closing, Alumni Return for Get Together.” In the interest of full disclosure, I should report that one of the featured alums – Louise Landsbury Overbey – is my aunt. (Hi, Louise!) Louise summed up everyone’s feelings when she said, “I look around and think, wow, ‘What’s going to happen to this building?'”

In commemoration of Wellston High School, construction company owner (and family friend) Ben F. Blanton ’56 is spearheading a full scholarship to Lindenwood College for a Wellston or Hillsdale student.

To trip down memory lane with former Wellston students, visit The Flashlight, the online alumni newsletter. (Note: The link will take you to a directory of Flashlight newsletters.)

Next week: Eskridge High School students document the history of Wellston schools, tell the story of the Wellston community and reflect on daily life in Wellston today.

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