- I'm Jim Kirchherr
and Living St. Louis' Summer of the 20th Century
is coming to an end. When we produce
the Decade series, at the end of the last century, we decided not to go
much past the 1970s because anything
more recent then, just didn't seem like history. So in this episode, you will
see a lot that's familiar, you'll also see a
lot that has changed. This time on Decades. St. Louis in the 1970s is
a model of urban decline. But as the region struggles with its national image
and internal squabbles, there are those who
look at the remnants of the city's glorious past and see the possibility
of a promising future. (soft music) - [Narrator] Decades
was co-production of the Missouri History Museum and the nineNetwork
of Public Media. - When St. Louis was
planning its worlds fair, Mayor Rolla Wells pledged
to create a New St. Louis, And just about every
generation since has said the same kind of thing. But in the 1970s, a
lot of people looked around St. Louis and
wondered if the city ever could be renewed,
reshaped or revived. (birds chirping)
(crickets chirping) In 1970 you didn't
have to look very far beyond the new
Gateway Arch to see not only that St. Louis
wasn't what it used to be, but probably never
would be again. When people who had
grown up here came back from their homes in the suburbs, they often didn't find
the old neighborhood the way they remembered it. And despite all the
improvements, even downtown wasn't what it used to be. (horns honking) People remembered a
downtown before interstates and shopping malls that had
stayed busy day and night. Back then, all the
big stores, offices, and hotels were here. So were warehouses
and even factories. Washington Avenue was
the center of the garment and shoe industries, and they
not only employed thousands of people every day, but
they also drew designers, salesmen and buyers. In its heyday,
downtown was a local, regional and a
national attraction. - Walmarts and the other big
chains didn't exist as yet. People came into the
city still at that time from all surrounding towns
where they had stores, owned the small department
stores, the hardware stores. And they would come in
to St. Louis to buy. When they were here, they
wanted to be entertained, they stayed in hotels, had
ballrooms with big bands. Dancing was very, very
popular at the time. - [Jim] By the 1970s, all
this was St. Louis' history. Some of what had driven
the downtown economy had moved to the suburbs. Some of industries that had
been centered in St. Louis for decades had gone
to different parts of the country and the world. Since the end of World War II, there had been extensive
changes in technology, energy, and transportation,
and businesses found they didn't need to be
tied to coal fields, to armies of immigrant workers or to railroad switching yards. (train wheels clicking) - Businesses found that it
was now cheaper to pick up and move to perhaps where
your raw materials came from. You could move where labor
unions were not as prevalent. You could even break
up your process now. Instead of doing
everything here, you could do only
part of it here. You could move another
piece of the process away and technology and
transportation enabled so much this to happen and
it just really transformed the face of urban America. - [Jim] At the turn of the
century, St. Louis bragged that it was Americas
fourth largest city. By 1970, the whole
metropolitan area wasn't even in the top 10 and was
being pushed even further down the list by the
newer cities of the
south and the west. The booming sunbelt. St. Louis was stuck
in the rust belt, where older cities were
hemorrhaging people, jobs, and money to the suburbs, leaving their inner cities
with growing problems of decay, crime and poverty and shrinking
resources to deal with them. In 1973, the Rand
Corporation, a think tank, took a close look at St. Louis and found a worst case
scenario come true. - It said in the end,
the only future we see for St. Louis is
that it will continue to be a declining city. It will be, whether it
wants to admit it or not, it will be a suburb
of St. Louis County. Rand was predicting in 1973, we can't see any way out of
this for the city of St. Louis. That's what got Civic
Progress terribly unhappy. Because they still
had that confidence that we could do anything
that was necessary to bring St. Louis back. - [Jim] And the view
from the downtown offices was still pretty good. The Gateway Arch and the new
Busch Stadium had brought a new look and new life
to downtown in the 1960s, and corporations followed with
impressive new structures. In 1976, Mercantile Bank opened its 35 story building,
the city's tallest so far, and other banks and
insurance companies followed with their own
showpiece headquarters. - That happens in every
town in the United States. If you got to Chicago and
one banks builds a building, the bank across the
street's going to do it five years, two years
later, whatever it is. I think I built a
better bank building than the Boatman's
and Mercantile. They probably think they
did the same, but oh, yeah, there's always competition
between bankers. - [Jim] The new skyscrapers
were giving St. Louis' a fresh, modern look,
but this building boom still could not come close
to what was happening in the sunbelt cities, and
the top St. Louis business leaders who belonged to
Civic Progress knew it. - The '70s was a time
where we were re-assessing what we needed to be
doing in St. Louis. We innately love it,
but we don't want it to be a big showy, flashy town. We're not showy, flashy
people and that makes it very tough for us to market
against cities like Atlanta. And that's why
Atlanta did so well in the '70s and
'80s compared to us. - [Jim] This is how
boosters wanted the rest of the country and the world
to see St. Louis, Missouri, but there were other powerful
images dragging it down. In 1972, demolition
began on the 33-building Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in the '50s as the vision of the future of urban America. It turned out to be a symbol
of all that had gone wrong with Americas older cities,
and this image would be played over and over again
on national television and cited by the
commentators and academics. And then there was
East St. Louis, once the heart of the east sides thriving smokestack economy, now, in the shadow
of the Gateway Arch was one of the most
troubled cities in America. - East St. Louis was
experiencing in 1970s the kind of pain that
a lot of other places were experiencing in the 1930s
during the great depression. There were tremendous,
tremoundous amounts of job loss in east St. Louis. It was an old smokestack,
heavily industrial city and as those technology and
ways of doing business changed, businesses were pulling
out of east St. Louis, businesses that had been there
for a hundred years or more. (soft music) - [Jim] This had
once been a robust, ethnically diverse factory town, but it had all been set up
by industry and for industry. And when industry left, it
left behind unemployment, poverty, and crime
and few institutions that could deal with it. East St. Louis became
increasingly poor
and mostly black, an inner city with
no outer city. In 1971, voters
elected the first African-American mayor in
east St. Louis history. - East St. Louis was one
of those hollow prizes that blacks had struggled
so long for political representation and
political voice, and when blacks finally
came to control, and so many American
cities big and small. They were decimated cities. The were cities that faced
unprecedented problems and had the fewest resources
to deal with those problems. - [Jim] And yet at the
very time many Americans were shaking their heads at
the state of the American city, a St. Louis school
teacher was seeing something very different. In 1970, she was on a
group tour of the city which included visits to some of St. Louis' most
rundown sections. - The verdict of the
instructors was that St. Louis was pretty awful and that
nothing was being done about it. What the last stop on the
tour was Lafayette pPrk, and they pointed out what used
to be the beautiful mansions all around the park, but
their verdict there too was that nobody was
going to buy them even though one house pointed
out was available for $15,000. So the next day,
I began searching for a big house in
Lafayette Square. - [Jim] The Lafayette
Square neighborhood was built after the Civil War. The location on a hill
overlooking the city made it one of St. Louis' most
exclusive neighborhoods. But less than a hundred
years later it was marked as an area to be cleared
out for urban renewal. Most people thought that
moving a family here in 1970 was irresponsible if
not down right crazy. A decade later, Ruth Kamphoefner
looked like a genius. (soft music) St. Louis was living
with the consequences of the city-county split. The great divorce of 1876
had been the city's idea, but since the '20s, the county had been
rejecting reunification. Now it seemed even less likely with the city's declining
population, property values and tax base, and the
changing neighborhoods and schools that many in the
county had moved away from. After the Supreme
court decision of 1954, St. Louis was praised for
moving quickly to dismantle its segregated school system, but in the years that followed, the school board was
faced with the difficult if not impossible task
of trying to follow the law without
driving more whites out of the public schools or
out of the city altogether. - The St. Louis Board of
Ed was in a bad situation. I mean, there was white flight already going on from the city. So they were saying
they were going to strict neighborhood schools but they were drawing
the boundaries in ways that kept the
schools segregated. They were also doing something
called intact busing, where they would bus
African-American kids to the south side, but
they arrive at school at different times of the days. They'd be in separate
classrooms from white students. They'd leave at different times. So a lot of the praise that
St. Louis got in the '50s, was people began to
realize, really by the '60s that it was unfounded, that they hadn't really
been very forward thinking. - [Jim] The issue went
to the courts in 1972. The city school board
responded by opening the first magnet schools
to try to achieve true classroom integration,
but it wasn't enough. In 1980, the U.S. appeals court
ordered a district-wide plan to integrate the city schools. By then, white enrollment
was down to 23% and the court recognized that
any real desegregation plan would have to reach
across the city limits. The case was expanded to
put the suburban districts and their history on trial. - So, there was
a lot of evidence that the suburbs
had helped to create the segregation in the city. So before this case
even went to trial, the suburban districts
agreed to be part of the settlement agreement, and I think the
settlement agreement with the voluntary
desegregation plan was better than what they thought
would happen to them if they were found guilty, which would be a
metropolitan-wide
school district with mandatory busing
back and forth. And they didn't want to
lose their school districts. That was very important to them. - [Jim] The deseg plan was
implemented in the fall of '83, with voluntary
transfer of students between city and county schools. 15 years later, the
courts agreed the plan could be phased out. While area-wide
integration was limited, it was also unprecedented. But there had been
no permanent changes made in the structure
of school districts or in the 1876 line
dividing city and county. In 1979 that division
was as deep as ever, the county supervisor
and the city's new mayor were feuding over the issue
of a new sports arena. Supervisor Gene McNary
wanted to build an arena in the county but the
state bill he needed was blocked by city legislators. An angry McNary said if the city and county couldn't cooperate
then they could compete. Mayor James Conway said
he needed to protect the city's interests
and that included its three sports facilities. City and county were
dependent on each other but neither leader was
willing to take a back seat, and the crisis threatened
regional cooperation on transportation, tourism, and support for the
zoo and museums. But the city-county rift wasn't Conway's biggest
problem that year. That was the closing of
Homer G. Phillips Hospital, a decision that
may have cost him his job in the next election. Conway needed to cut
services and budget, but on the north side, Homer
G. was more than a budget item. It had been built
during the depression as the city's segregated
Negro Hospital. It was a source of pride and
jobs for the black community back then, and in the
1970s, it still was. - It was a major
anchor in a city where we had no other anchor. You know. And anchors are what give
people a sense of community. To close that hospital shattered and in effect
destroyed a community, and it'll be a long
way to recovery. Because it was a way that kept our people feeling
a part of this city. - We're not going to allow this
to happen in this community. (people cheering) - [Jim] Community leaders
fought the closing. There were demonstrations
and protests. On the final day of
operation in 1979, police had to be called
out to clear away barricades and make arrests. The last patients came
out under police escort, transferred to city
hospital number one, which itself would shut
down six years later. But the huge Honer G.
Phillips building remained, not just a monument to
this community's past but also a hope for its future. At least they
hadn't torn it down. (soft music) St. Louis had spent a lot of
years tearing down buildings thought to have outlived
their usefulness. The riverfront was
cleared in the 1930s, the Mill Creek
neighborhood in the '50s. The mansions of the
once-fabulous Vandeventer Place were torn down for
the new VA hospital. The massive Merchants
Exchange building didn't fit into the plans for
the new downtown. And bulldozers had cleared
wide pathways through the city to make way for
the new highways. Laws would be passed
in the mid 1960s protecting historic sites and structures, but before that, it was only the local
citizens who stood between the landmarks
and the bulldozers. - There was specific
concern over individual high-art pieces of architectural
the DeMenill House, the Bissell Mansion
on the north side. And so, landmarks was
incorporated in 1959, and I think that parallels
a lot of activity throughout the county in
cities with tremendous amounts of 19th century
historic resources that were being blown away,
not building by building but in huge clearance programs. - [Jim] Lafayette Square
had been one of those areas once slated for likely
clearance and replacement with something like
a housing project or a trucking terminal. But Ruth Kamphoefner and
a few others could see beyond the crime
and obvious decay. She moved her family
here in 1970 into a house that cost her just $2,700. - The particular house that
I bought was absolutely the worst house that
could be bought. It was just crawling. I could pick up a piece
of wallpaper in the corner and click, click, click, the roaches would
come swarming out. So it wasn't a very
nice thing to be doing, but we all pitched in, got
busy and did what we had to do. And to get a repairman to
come into our neighborhood was almost impossible. They wouldn't come near us. The place had such a
terrible reputation. They didn't want
their trucks stolen, they didn't want their tools
stolen, so they would not come. - [Jim] It would
take years to bring about the transformation
of the neighborhood and to change attitudes,
not just of repairmen but of bankers,
real estate agents and city hall politicians. Their first big victory was
convincing their alderman to have the
neighborhood declared St. Louis' first local
historic district. The preservation
movement had first looked at the old mansions
of famous families. Now it was now looking
at whole neighborhoods LaSalle Park,
Soulard, Hyde Park, the Shaw neighborhood
and the west end. And when new federal laws
started giving tax breaks for saving instead of
tearing down old buildings, preservation became
good business. And St. Louis was
soon recognized as
the national leader. - It is an old city. A lot of it was still around, even though a tremendous amount
of it has been destroyed. A lot of it was still around. A lot of that had
been documented. A lot of it was on
the national register. So the combination of
a willing bank or two, some developers with
imagination and creativity. All that came together to
boost economic development through historic preservation. So, St. Louis was
poised to be able to take advantage of laws that looked as if they'd
almost been written specifically for this community. (soft music) - [Jim] In the 1890s, this was
the sign of changing times. Big important cities built
big, impressive train stations, and St. Louis' Union Station was one of the grandest and busiest. It had served the city
well for many decades, but the building designed to
handle a flood of travelers was handling just a
trickle in the 1970s, and finally it would be
closed, a relic of the past. But at least you could
look down market street and see the symbol
of the future. Just as interstate highways
had helped kill Union Station, they had sent carloads
of vacationing families criss-crossing the country
in their station wagons. A lot of American cities
had empty train stations, but only St. Louis had an arch. - I remember Stuart
Symington saying, we got that pork barrel which
it was for only $28 million and think what that has
done to this community. It makes it fairly easy to do
it from a marketing standpoint to identify it in terms of
pictures and things like that. Like Paris, you see
the Eiffel tower. Seattle, they have their
tower, and we have our arch. And it's just been
a great thing. - [Jim] Whatever St.
Louis wasn't anymore, it was still smack dab in
the middle of the country. And that could only
help bring people to the tourist attractions, and visitors and
conventioneers to the brand new convention center that
opened downtown in 1977. And it was location that brought the Six Flags company
shopping for land. It had looked at 13
possible locations around the country for
its third theme park and chose a sit
off Interstate 44 in far west St. Louis county. The company said more than
70 million people lived within 500 miles of
their new Six Flags over Mid-America, which opened
for business in June of 1971. While is was far from
the city's center, the company said St.
Louis' rich history was an important factor in
picking this location. History gave the park its them. The brand new buildings
and rides were built to look old and historic. By then, a lot of St. Louis
civic boosters realized it was time to stop tearing
down the real thing. - What cities have to offer
and what began to be apparent in the 1960s and 1970s
that they had to offer that no suburb could
offer was the past. An interpretation of the past, and that past could be
seen in an environment of grand architecture, of
street patterns and amenities. (soft piano music) - [Jim] You could see
the city rebuilding on its historical foundation
on Laclede's Landing, a section of the old riverfront
that hadn't been cleared out as part of the arch project. Warehouses that had served
one kind of economy, were being turned into
offices, restaurants and shops for a new kind of
economy, entertainment, tourism, conventions
and business meetings. - It's a historic city
with a great architecture and a past rooted
in the 19th century, of river trade and industry. So it has a lot to sell
and that's what cities do sell for the most part. Unless you're Las Vegas, and you sell something
else entirely, like gaming, you're going to sell heritage, you're gonna sell past, and you're gonna sell an
interpretation of culture. - [Jim] In 1979, an
East Cost developer made a chance visit to the
empty Union Station and began to see possibilities, first as the site
of a new hotel. But then the plans
grew much bigger into a new kind
of urban shopping, hotel and tourist complex. And as the work
began, it was clear that the success revolved
around the careful restoration of the building's past glory. This was one of the
largest projects of its kind in the county, and it wasn't the only
downtown project underway. 1985 would be a year
of grand openings. (people clapping) First there was the
new St. Louis Center, and while connecting two
big department stores with a suburban-style mall
would eventually fail, it opened with huge
crowds and great hopes of revitalization
downtown shopping. (upbeat band music) That same summer, the brand
new Union Station opened with great fanfare. And once again there was
talk of a new St. Louis. - There was a lot of
popular understanding and information
about neighborhoods,
historic buildings, tax credits and that
all worked together to people's surprise, in
other parts of the country, culminating almost
with Union Station, which wasn't just a gosh
gee, look at St. Louis from the outside, but I
think even more importantly, a gosh, gee look at St.
Louis from this region. When fireworks are going
off on national television with this marvelous project that is getting
international publicity, I think the community has a
different feeling about itself. - The following year, congress
rewrote the tax laws again. The incentives for
historic preservation that had fueled St.
Louis' rehab industry were drastically cut,
and this golden age of urban restoration was over. But St. Louis had
resurrected parts of a decaying city that
a previous generation had thought could only be
saved with a bulldozer. (soft piano music) Our first Decades program
began with the year 1900. Then we did the teens
and '20s and so on. But when we hit the
'70s it just didn't feel so much like history anymore. 20 years wasn't enough time to adequately assess the
triumphs or the failures. But we were confident
in borrowing from Mark Twain in
saying that the reports of St. Louis' death had, in
fact, been an exaggeration. For Decades, I'm Jim Kirchherr. (soft music)
