- You were a Laker if you
lived in Spanish Lake. - Anybody asks me where
I'm from, I'm a Laker. Die-hard Laker. -To be a Laker is just, is pride. You feel something about it. You know, it's, like,
you know, I know people that almost wish
they were Lakers. - This is our Lakers
T-shirt they put out. I had nothing to do with
the people who did this. It's about, they've been
having a Laker party for a long time. Like you said, this is
probably one of the first years they ever did
anything specifically about Lakers-Lakers and that. - Basically, a group of people
that did grow up together. You know, it didn't matter if you were 15 years
younger than me, because I knew your brother
or your sister, you know. Your mom probably changed
my diaper at one time. You know, I mean...
- Yeah. - that's how close
this community was. That's - and that's what it was. It was, like, one big family. - The 6313, that's the
ZIP Code in Spanish Lake. - We have a saying that,
"Once you're a Laker, "you're always a Laker." So it's sort of like a little
Spanish-Lake mafia, I think. Something like that. (loud bang) (cheers and shouting) (music and crowd chattering) (meat sizzling) (loud rock music) ♪ (lyrics) And I live
any way I want to ♪ This is my life ♪ And I don't have to
prove anything to you ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ Whooaaaaa ♪ - This Spanish Lake
Reunion, I'll tell you what. I wish they would
do it every year. It bring back all 50
years of memories. It brings together
this whole community. - It really is. It's good to know that, you
know, there's other people other than myself that
have this kind of feeling about this area. You know, most of my
friends were older than me, and these seem to be a lot
more of the younger kids. Which, that's okay, too,
'cause I semi-remember some of them but... - All in all, I mean, it's
just good to see people. You know, people that you know. It's, like, you know,
some of your family you only get to see on
Christmas or Easter. You know, it's that, "Hey,
what've you been going? "How you doing?" You know, and it's just,
you see their kids, you see what they're
doing, and then, you know, sometimes you get to
see the real sexy people that have turned real ugly, and
then you get the ugly people that turned real sexy. You kinda get to see
all that in life. I'm a people watcher so I enjoy that part of it too. - You know, when
I come back now, it still feels like home even though, you know,
it's changed some and the people are different. - It's changed. It turned really dark (chuckles) and it's... Not that that's a bad thing,
but what comes with that is a lot of trouble. - Oh, some people like
to call it Somalia, but it ain't that bad, you know. - It's just rough. It's thuggish and you can drive through now
and things are tore down and buildings that were there
and business that were there are just, they're
starting to drop quick. - Coming back today really,
was really emotional, so... - [Man] Could you describe
to me today the emotions that you were feeling? - Oh, my old house. - [Man] Yeah, can you
tell me about that? - Somebody was moving
out (chuckles). We drove down the
street, and yeah. Somebody was moving
out of our old house. There was four of us
kids, and my mom and dad and we had a nice, little
house in the neighborhood on Farmview and somebody was moving
out today, so... It was kind of heartening. - [Man] Yeah. Yeah, I went through the same
experience when I came back and my house was empty, and
the grass was up to here and it wasn't taken care
of very well. - Right. - [Man] When you see that
as, you know, your home, and you come back and
see it like that... - And it's hard. - [Man] It's not only
different but it's not in the best of shape. - Right. - [Man] That, that
definitely was hard for me. - But the coolest thing was,
there was a tree that I planted and it's beautiful and big. (crying) Don't get this
guys, I don't wanna cry. It is so pretty. And I knew - when me and
my brother went down, and we knew everybody that lived at every house on our street. It was amazing. I'm sorry (crying). - [Man] That's okay, it's okay. - It's just... - [Man] I was very emotional
(inaudible), believe me. - It's really hard. And you know what? This was hard (chuckles). - [Man] Spanish Lake was always a somewhat rural community,
but they kind of wanted to take care of themselves,
less government, how some people feel today. - [Woman] People here in
Spanish Lake were worried about having more taxes, so they didn't want another
taxing entity on them. - [Man] I think politicians
took all the people when they tore down the
projects in the city and pointed to this area,
and that's how it happened. (dramatic music) - [Woman] When, you know, the
first black people moved in onto our street, I
saw the reactions. - [Woman] It's not because
black people moved in that white people left. That's not it. (dramatic music) - [Woman] I don't know, I think
fear is the biggest driver when people move out in
a mass exodus like that. (dramatic music) - [Man] The real estate
companies had a real role in this tragedy. - [Woman] I mean, you
have the housing industry. They want to keep
building houses, because that's their industry. (dramatic music) - [Man] Of course, the federal
government were all for doing what was going on. - [Man] Because it
shouldn't have happened. It could've been avoided, maybe. Maybe it was unstoppable. - The first settlement
in Spanish Lake was a Spanish settlement
called for Fort Don Carlos. And it was located
near The Confluence. Eventually moved up
the Missouri River to where Fort Bell Fontaine
became the first military fort. - The Grand Staircase
right here off to my left was built in the 1930s. As far as it's connection
to Fort Belle Fontaine, no, it was built way
after the, you know, the fort was, you
know, was gone. This is the Missouri River
directly to our North where Lewis and Clark
spent their first night out of St. Louis. - They spent that night
at Fort Belle Foutaine because in 1805, Jefferson had
decided that he would build the first American military
fort west of the Mississippi in Spanish Lake. - So it was meant as
a trading station, and I suppose as some sort
of a military presence against the Indians
and British coming down from Canada. - Almost every important
expedition that traveled to the west to explore left
from Fort Belle Fountaine. - During that time, this area
was administered by Spain. It was French territory,
but it was the Spaniards who administered it. - Now why was it
called Spanish Lake? Well, the reason is
that tradition says that the first Spanish
governor, Zenon Trudeau, had a summer home
up here at the lake. - It was originally
called Spanish Pond or it was called marais,
which is a French word for swamp or pond. Marais de Spania, like,
the pond of Spain. The swamp of Spain, obviously calling it
Spanish Swamp (chuckles) doesn't sound very well. (gentle upbeat music) - [Man] I think the
community was created due to The Confluence and
what The Confluence is is where the Missouri River
meets the Mississippi River. A close-knit community built
around a Catholic church, St. Aloysius Catholic
Church for years. Originally, a rural
farming district. A lot of the family names
and street names of the area are from the farms that
were here many years ago. At the corner of
Coal Bank and Lilac is a place called
the Larimore House, and that was a big,
prominent family, and that's where you
see the name Larimore that pretty much runs through
the heart of Spanish Lake. A lot of the farms
have been bought up, but there's still, the Remigers
still do a little farming or produce. - A lot of vegetable
growers around at one time. I'm about the last
one. (chuckling) It was altogether different. We still used horses
and mules those days. And everybody mostly walked
to school and everything. (gentle upbeat music) In about 1950, it
started building up and just kept on from there. (upbeat classical music) - [Man] In the 1950s,
there the big boom of industrialization. I mean, you had just
came out of World War II and the Korea War, so wars,
people got put to work. Factories and things were built
and manufactured in America. - The people that came
back from World War II that were starting families. You know, the Baby Boomers, I mean, that was, like,
The American Dream to have that home. - [Woman] People
coming out of the city selling their city
homes and wanting to move out into the suburbs. - [Man] People who lives on
the North Side of St. Louis migrated north. People who lived on the
South Side of St. Louis migrated south. People on the West Side
of St. Louis moved West. - Now, see, I used
to live in the city, and they all started to
move to the North County. (gentle upbeat music) - People like the
communities that they know. And when they see change,
they get afraid, all right? And racial transformation is
one of those obvious changes that gets people very afraid. - Why, why did we have
white flight and why, in fact, did it occur
when it occurred? As the blacks were moving, the whites were also moving, and their fears were played
upon that their property values would go down, that the
schools would get worse, that racial intermixing of
their kids would happen. - [Dr. Bostic ] And it
caused families to start to look elsewhere
because they didn't want, you know, that. The didn't want to
have to deal with that. Whether they had
racist issues or not, and there was all this
ready-made housing, and so we started
to see this flight. -[Voiceover] And this is the
Bissell Hills Development in St. Louis. Here in the heart
of The Midwest, amid
the rolling foothills of the Ozarks, house siding is subject to
extremes of heat and cold, and here in Glasgow Village, neither high humidity nor
winter ice affect walls covered with asbestos
cement siding. And so it is, from New
York to Los Angeles, from Miami to Seattle, in every climate,
in every community, this new sidewall has
brought better homes. - When suburbia began to
be developed throughout The United States, real-estate developers
were looking for large tracts of land,
and so one of the first areas that was developed in
the county was the area of Spanish Lake. - And they were
building the basic two-bedroom/one bath house or
three bedroom/one bath house. - Most of these residential
homes were built and... - What brought 'em to
Spanish Lake, I guess, they got a really
good deal on a house. - They liked it because it was
very farm-like and country. - We were, like,
the ultimate point of the Northeast County. There is nothing north of here. - So we were really out
in what people thought of as the sticks then. - And then you had a lot
of construction workers and middle-class
Americans, basically, moved here to raise
their families. - If one sister was nearby, then the other sisters
seemed to follow, so they would all be,
sort of, close together. (children playing) - As I recall, being a
kid and coming in the car looking out, I saw
all these farm lands. I said, "Mom, nobody
lives around here." If I knew anything then about
Little House on The Prairie, I thought I was Little
House on The Prairie. - It was a vibrant,
youthful, growing community. - Well, there were
just kids (chuckles). A lot of kids. - It was like a small-town
atmosphere growing up next to a big city. We were self-contained. We had everything we needed. - [Man] It was, like,
Mayberry, kind of. It was a really cool
place to grow up. -It's kind of like a
bedroom community but we had several businesses. - I little country store up
here called Balbarts. - Yes. - Where the fire station was. - [Woman] That's
where I shopped, yes. - [Woman] And Old
Town Boy's Store. - Grenadier Drug Store,
Ben Franklin, Denier's. - Bomarito's Bakery,
which is not here anymore. - Going and shopping
Narkdale Market. - We never had a
lot of restaurants, even at the best of times. - Oh, the old chicken place! Charlie Chicken,
Charlie Chicken! Remember Charlie Chicken? Burger King used to be up
there on Belle Fountaine, and I remember as a
youngster really hanging out at Burger King, and we
could walk up to Burger King and get a dollar for
a burger and fries, and we would tear the place up, throwing french fries at each
other and ketchup and stuff. We were young. - Well, it was Burger
Man, wasn't it? Was it Burger Man
or Burger King? - [Man] I think it
was Burger Chef. - (both) Burger Chef,
that's it! (chuckling) - Cecil Whittaker's because
they had good deals up there on Monday nights and shit. We used to get
pitchers of beer and have hot wings and
pizza, you know. - We'd all end up at
Ponticello's as kids eating pizzas and the parents
would eat fried chicken. - Saullo's was my favorite pizza and favorite Italian restuarant. - Nothing but the best pizza.
- [Woman] No. - Everybody's gonna tell
you Ponticello's or whatever but, no, nothing but the best. - Spanish Lake has always
had kind of a negative perception from
people on the outside. - When we were kids,
we didn't have... There wasn't a lot of air
conditioners in Spanish Lake. - You know, my parents
didn't go to college. You know,they were really
young when they had me. - Wouldn't have fishin' poles. We'd just tie, like, fishin'
lines to regular, you know, a piece of stick or something
and put a hook on it, and that's how we fished. - We weren't poor, but
were in that middle class that you didn't get
things handed to you. - [Woman] During 1957, we came. The times there were
very family oriented, much different from today. - You know, unions were at
their peak of their power, so working-class people
made a similar wage, close to white-collar
workers did. - It was, father was at
work, mother was at home, and that's how we were raised. - We all knew our
friends' parents. You know, we went in and
talked to the parents. - [Man] You know, moms
would call you, "Hey." You know, call you by your name. You'd go over there and have
cookies or whatever as a kid. - And if you did
something wrong, you'd get your ass kicked
by the neighbor lady, and then she'd call your mom. - (chuckles) Exactly. - But it was safe. - Yeah. - You know, my doors were
always left unlocked as a kid. They were never locked.
- All of our doors were left unlocked. - I mean, when I grew
up, people talked about not locking their doors, but
everybody locked their doors. I mean, people say that. They look back and say
that in an idyllic way that "Well, we didn't have
to lock our doors." Everybody locked their doors. -The crime's always been here. I grew up around (inaudible). I mean, I went up
there one time, like, "Hey, let's go out
and go party today." And I went, "No." He goes, "Why?" And he goes, "Give
me one good reason." And I go, "How many times
did you get arrested "out of my car this week?" He said, "Only three." Well, that just
proves it right there. - One time, Mary Ellen
and I found a dead cat in a trash can, and we decided to roll
the trash can over and give it a proper
burial in the sandbox. And somebody told on us,
and the ranger came out and we lied and we ran. I mean, I ran like I've
never run before back home, worried that we were
gonna get caught. And we remembered
where we had buried it, 'cause we had lined it up
with a certain, like, tree or whatever. We went back later on,
you know, and it was gone. And we were, like,
"Oh, my gosh." You know, but I'm sure they had excavated or whatever they did. - Everywhere we
went, Dondie and I, we was bored, and we'd hitchhike
up and down Belle Foutaine just because we was bored and
just so we could meet people. (both chuckling) We'd get bored standing on
a street corner and fight to draw attention to ourselves. (both chuckling) - I had my 16th birthday
party right back over there. You know, my mom and
dad had it for me. They bought us little
8-ounce Budweisers, and were sitting over there
acting like we were grown ups. - Most of memories take place at a bar called Larimore Lounge. It was over on Coal
Bank and Larimore, because that's where I
spent most of my life. My dad was an alcoholic,
and if he wasn't at work, we were at the bar. And Dave and Fred Reichert
lived right behind the bar, and they were kinda
like big brothers to me. So a lot of times,
I'd leave the bar and go over there and hang out. And they taught me how
to work on cars and I'd hand them tools and
I was always the tomboy, one of the, you know,
one of the guys. - In the St. Louis
Metropolitan Area, we have a population
of close to a million, and it surrounds the
City of St. Louis. We have, in St. Louis County, roughly 93 municipal
governments. So there's small and
some big municipalities with their own forms
of government within
St. Louis County. - Spanish Lake is
unincorporated. If we were to be incorporated, we'd be the 10th largest
city in St. Louis County. - We don't have a mayor. Spanish Lake does not
even officially exist. It is a name on a map at
a census-designated place, but it is not a city;
it's not a municipality. - Folks that lived here didn't
want to be incorporated, and it was truck farms. A lot of this was truck farms. There was no need. - They did not want government. The did not want
government to tell them you could only have so
many cars in your driveway. You couldn't park on streets. - I think a lot of
people were against it because they didn't want
restrictions on everything. They had no idea
that it was going to turn out like it, I guess. (gentle upbeat music) - And this administration
today, here and now, declares unconditional
war on poverty in America. (applause) (gentle upbeat music) If their bodies are
stunted from hunger. If their sickness goes untended. If their life is spent
in hopeless poverty, just drawing a welfare check, so we want to open the
gates to opportunity, but we're also going
to give all our people, black and white, the help
that they need to walk through those gates. (gentle music) - [Man] Because there
was no city government, we were governed by the
rules of the county. So the county could
do whatever it wanted, especially with
regards to zoning. - Quick explanation of zoning
is classification of land use. That's the very
quickest explanation. - So communities definitely
try to "protect themselves." Some try to protect themselves
from lower-income people. Some try to "protect
themselves" from people of various ethnic backgrounds. - I think that the
people who rule us, that they looked into the
future and they just designated Northeast County to
be a dumping ground. It's right smack in the middle of a residential and rural
area, and it made no sense to zone it multifamily. It just didn't. - And that is because St.
Louis County in the '60s made a decision
that they would put large apartment complexes
here in Spanish Lake. (ominous music) - [Voiceover] In the middle
'50s, St. Louis thought it had solved its
low-cost housing needs with the 2,800 apartments
Pruitt-Igoe Project, but instead, a
monster was created. - [Man] As whites
left the cities, blacks moved into
these projects, and the central
cities deteriorated as the whites went
to the suburbs. The public housing
deteriorated with the cities. Some projects became
breeding grounds for crime. Government planners
promised this would lift the poor from streets. It did. Right into vertical slums. - I think Pruitt-Igoe, as well
as Cabrini-Green in Chicago, all of those places are too high of a
concentration of poverty, as well as single-parent
families that, even when they worked,
they didn't have the time to dedicate to the youth
to be able to give them the direction that they needed. - Now it's interesting,
if you look at large public
housing developments, understaffed, underfunded,
under maintenanced. It becomes difficult
to enforce those rules, and it makes it easier for
the culture to really evolve to something different. - [Voiceover] When
the temperatures
dropped below freezing earlier this week, water lines in several of the Pruitt-Igoe
apartment buildings broke, and a subsequent flow
of water turn into ice. Elmer Hammond, Chairman of The Human
Development Corporation Neighborhood Advisory Council,
has tried for three days to get city and housing
authority officials to help remedy the plight. Well, I have tried to. I have talked with Mr. Meeker. I have talked with
Bard Wilson of Housing, asked them about this here
situation for the last two days. And Mr. Meeker called me
and said he'd talk with... - [Man] He's in the
Mayor's Office? - Yes. And he said he'd
called Mr. Klein and Mr. Klein was supposed
to send someone in, and no one ever showed. - [Voiceover] In St.
Louis, the tenenants of a large public housing
project have been engaged in a rent strike. - Well, we're going
to keep rent striking until they'll do
something, because we know that somebody can do something. They're saying that
they are bankrupt. We are too. They're saying they
can do any more. We can't either. The tenants don't
have any money. They cannot pay this
kind of rent and eat too, but I'm telling the people
to eat and damn the rent. - [Voiceover] No one here in
St. Louis has any real hope of solving the public housing
problem, only easing it. And this is fairly typical
of public housing programs in 82 cities across the country. Two-thirds of all
these programs are in serious financial trouble. Fifteen have been
declared insolvent. And, like St. Louis, they're
all looking to Washington for salvation. (somber music) - Actually, in the early
'70s, there probably weren't many signs of the area changing, but the seeds were being
sowed for the change, I think. - [Man] There was no Black
Jack back then. - [Man] Right. - I mean, it was just an
area of unincorporated area. - The Nixon Administration,
the mayors of big cities, and others are concerned about
whatever federal pressure there might be, or ought to
be, to move black families from the cities
out to the suburbs. -Mitchell and Romney
announced a lawsuit against Black Jack, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb which
rezoned to keep out an integrated housing project. - A year ago, the Federal
Government guaranteed a loan of almost $2 million to
a developer, who wanted to put up the project
in Black Jack, Missouri. Opposition arose immediately. The area had been
unincorporated, but the residents at once
incorporated themselves into a city, and then they
changed the zoning laws to eliminate all
apartment housing. - In recent months, tiny
Black Jack has found itself not only a city, but a
symbol of suburban resistance to federal pressure. - We're hard-working people, and I have nothing
against blacks. They keep making a
racial issue out of it. Well, I told you before,
we've got colored in the back of us. Those lovely people. The children play together, and that's why you
don't hear any trouble because they've moved in. They've been accepted,
and we don't have any big deal about it. And I think that's
the way it should be. And if the government
were to ever wake up to this fact, we'd
have integration without all this trouble. They're forcing things
on us we don't want. - The people who are out here are middle-income, behave
like middle income. They worry about their schools. They worry about their lawns, their property, so we have a
very quiet racial integration been going in North County. And no problems with it. - [Voiceover] The people
of Black Jack are afraid. And what they are
afraid of is visible only a few miles
away at the giant Pruitt-Igoe Housing
Complex in St. Louis. This federally sponsored
low-income development was allowed to
deteriorate to the point where some residents were
moved to other projects in the city. The citizens of Black Jack fear that a project in
their neighborhood might become a
suburban Pruitt-Igoe, destroying their property
values and their safety. - The residents say this
peaceful, country suburb 12 miles from Downtown St.
Louis is not accessible to jobs and that the people
who would come here would put an undue
burden and strain on the local school system. - and in the Black Jack case,
you know, they incorporated. Right? They said, "We understand this." "We're going to make ourselves
much more difficult." And this becomes an issue
of politics and power and resources and lower-class, poor people
don't have those things. - The people of Black
Jack did fight back. It was a ten-year legal battle. They ended up losing but at
least they made their point. - President Nixon said today
that the Federal Government will not require wealthy
suburban communities to accept the construction
of housing projects for the poor. - They forbid
discrimination for racial but not for economic reasons. - I think that you can
argue that a higher, that more affluent
communities don't do as much, and they don't bear as much. - If anything, it sounds
like it was more economic than racial in the sense that, you know, I think I'm
not going to answer. - [Man] (inaudible)
- Yeah. - [Man] (inaudible).
- Yeah, it's way hard, yeah. - Any kind of integration can work. But it has to happen in
a fairly specific way such that the folks
who are moving are not moving to a place
where they are, perhaps, even more isolated
than they were before. - I heard, you know,
that's hearsay, that it started in Black
Jack and they looked at it and said, "Oh, let's here.
Let's put 'em in Black Jack." And that's when the
apartments really started, like, there, and that's just,
you know, down the road, and then we were unincorporated
so they, like you said, kind of free reign. - [Man] The government at
the time allowed, I think, a saturation of
apartments to be built. - [Woman] Three-thousand
apartment units, more apartment units
than any other ZIP Code in the county. - [Man] I mean, they
knew that this housing, this low-income housing
had to go somewhere. - [Man] These are way
too many apartments for such a small locale area. - Why they put these
apartment complexes here, I'd like to know. - [Man] In St. Louis,
Missouri, today the health of an
ailing neighborhood got some long and
badly needed treatment. - [Woman] Pruitt-Igoe
looks like a battleground. Most of the tenants
are children. Children living with a
mother and no father. They have caused much
of the vandalism, but they have also been
the victims of crime. The St. Louis Housing
Authority recommended that Pruitt-Igoe's 33
buildings be torn down. The Federal Government said, no, the project should be remodeled
and the way to do this, says the government, is to
begin a demolition study. - Well, we've been
planned to death, and this demolition study's
the best thing that can happen because at least some
of the tenants can see, but if they don't hurry
on and do something, people will think it's
just a lot of bologna like they've always done before. - The problem is, you've got
to take care of the people. You can't just wife
these buildings out. I could come down here
and inside two months, I could have all these
buildings flat on the ground, and if they wanted, they
could ship the people someplace else, but
you can't do that. These are human
beings, and you have to deal with them accordingly. - [Woman] Today, the
demolition study began. (explosion and rumbling) - I know a lot of my friends, when they got their
first apartments, like, out of high school or college, they lived in Spanish Lake. - It was a treat to go to,
like, Raintree Apartments, and if somebody's invite you
to go swimming at the pool. It was really neat back then. - When they were built, they were very, very
fancy apartments. Fireplaces... - [Man] I remember when
Sierra Vista was so nice, even we couldn't get into
it 'cause it was so rich. - One of my daughters,
my oldest daughter, she babysat for ball players
that lived in Countryside. - [Man] I mean, it was
a pretty classy place and just a really good
community to live in. But they were large. They were for, like,
500/600 units, and that that makes things
difficult sometimes when you've got that many
people living closely together. - What happened,
Pruitt-Igoe was torn down, and the Federal Government,
HUD, granted a lot of vouchers. (downbeat music) - The concept of the
Section 8 Program was it allowed an individual
to seek housing anywhere they then
wanted to find housing. The relationship of the
housing was between the tenant and the landlord. - If what the
Voucher Program does, is gets people out of more
slum type of environments and moves them into
a safe, decent home, that's and improvement. - Many of the people from
Pruitt-Igoe were moved out here into Countryside. Those apartment complexes
up to that point were overwhelmingly white, but I
think there was an intentional movement. - And it was just one of many
things that kind of conspired as a perfect storm to kind of
cause the area to go downhill. - You know, I agree
that it would've been a an interesting integration
for all concerned. - I was in fifth grade,
so I don't know what year that would be. That'd be about '73 and... I don't know if I
can say this on tape, when the first blacks moved in, and that's when the
fighting started. - Section 8, that
Countryside Apartments is when they started...
- But I remember when the first black kid came to our class,
and everybody freaked out. Then the family moved in
across from Tillman School. I remember when the sister
ganged up on me and beat me up. And Donde took care
of 'em the next day. (both chuckling) - 'Cause Jeanie was there,
and she wouldn't help ya. - Yeah, all my friend were at... The police pulled up,
and all my friends ran and left me there on the
ground getting beat up by three black people. And that was in 5th grade.
- Yeah. - That's when I
remember it changing, and they had a black
Santa Clause on the roof that came in and out. And it got shot off the roof. - (laughing) - I remember that happening. - Yeah, and I remember
when it was 6th grade, when me and Brandy got in
a fight, remember that? - Well, it was 6th grade
- it happened right after the thing with me. - And me and this other
black girl got in a fight, and the little sister
was on my back, and I didn't even know it. - She didn't even need my help. - David Keithy pulled
the little sister off my back. (chuckles) - If you've talked to other
people in Spanish Lake, there's a Spanish Lake cliché
that I grew up hearing. I don't have a problem with
black people, it's niggers. I never heard that until
about a year or two before Pruitt-Igoe
got torn down. About the same time
that apartment complex
was going in... - If you were white, you
were living in a house. If you were black, you
were living in Countryside. It was a given
for the most part. - Yeah, in 6th grade in Tillman
- Yeah. - I had one black kid,
Terrance Small - Exactly. - in class. - (chuckles) Exactly.
- Yeah. - And he was cool as hell. I loved him.
- Well, he had to be... - Well, yeah. - At once, the number
the students in
grades seven and eight doubled in four months, and they had no time
to do new construction. We had classes
meeting in hallways. We had six different
classrooms subdivided out of what had been the lunchroom. They had to subdivide
the gymnasium. We had to give up the
gymnasium for classroom space. - The '70s was when we started
going to school with blacks, you know, and we didn't
have no problems with 'em, you know, and... - Except for, like
the last year there when we had that riot. - Oh, yeah. - Things started, race
riots, then it was terrible. - A couple of white guys
jumped this black dude and then it's, like, every black dude
in the school was just whoomp and jumped on them and
then more whites and it was, yeah, it was
what do you call that? A melee. - [Man] It was a bad. - Yeah, it was bad.
- I remember that. - People would come up to me, people I didn't even
know, would come up to me and ask me if I was going
to be in the race riot, if I had plans, you know? Did I know that next Tuesday
is going to be the race riot. After the first time, the teachers knew. The bus drivers knew. Everybody knew. They might as well have put
it on the school calendar. - I think it was both
a little bit of both. It's like, okay, we're here,
but we have to be here. And so we just wanna
be treated fairly. But then you have, you
know, the African Americans who would provoke, you
know, certain things, 'cause it's, like, we're here
and we're hostile environment so we just react. - You know, people that
were starting to be afraid of who was at school
and who wasn't and what happened afterwards. - And being afraid of really
a lot of the racial mixing, you know, so now all
these handsome black guys are gonna start to
coming to the school and my daughters are
gonna start looking at 'em and it's, like, oh no. - People talked all the time
about how dangerous the animals in Cordova Apartments were. But that's almost all the
effect I ever saw it have was a lot of fear
and a lot of talk and not a lot of action. Houses still came up on the
market at the usual rate and they sold at
about the usual rate. - But there was not
a mass exodus then. Nobody moved because of that. - It wasn't sudden. It wasn't like Spanish,
like, suddenly went downhill. You know, it was a gradual
process, but unfortunately, a process that proved
to be irresistible. I think when black
people started moving in this area, people sort
of tended to flip out, and they think that everything
is getting horrible. The neighborhood's
filled with crime. There's drugs everywhere. - [Woman] There's always
the first people to move out because of somebody they
don't want to have there. - I think we started to see
a change in the neighborhood and said, "It's time to go." You know, and we kind of
saw the writing on the wall and decided to venture out
west, and everyone followed us. - Just like anything else...
- The mid- to, yeah, mid 80s. is when thing started
going (raspberry). - As the desirability
of the area went down, the demand for people
moving in went down. In order to fill the units,
some of the apartment complexes had to go Section 8 or felt
they had to go Section 8 in order to make money. - The Section 8 housing
brings in people who you'd probably
rather not have, you know, in your community. - I understand the
concern about Section 8, but I never want to
stigmatize anybody who has need of a Section
8 housing voucher. The need for affordable in
this country is critical. - There are a lot of good
people on the program, a lot of good people. - But there are a lot of people that are on Section
8 or have vouchers, they don't care about
their environment. - If you don't own something, depends on your character, you don't care. You don't have to
pay for it, right? - And my husband was in a
wheelchair for five years. And people in my building
were mostly black, and when they would see
me get my wheelchair out, they would help me
with my husband. Helped me put him in the car and put the wheelchair
in the trunk. Now, why would I
move out of here, when I had neighbors like that? - I don't see Section
8 as an opportunity. I see Section 8 as a
solution to homelessness and do we want more people
out on the streets. I don't think so. - So we don't identify
with people who have issues that don't allow them to work or even maybe psychologically
because of the evironment that they've come out of that they have to be changed. They have to be
around around someone who is happy to work, for
them to learn how to be happy to work and they've
never had that in their family. (birds chirping) - Not just in North St.
Louis County and Spanish Lake but throughout America,
you had a building boom of homes in the late
1990s and early turn of the century 2000. - And the developers found
that they could buy land more cheaply the further
out that they would go. - I mean, you have
the housing industry. They want to keep
building houses, because that's their industry. So they're going to constantly
keep developing out. - They'll do whatever it
takes to influence a senator to pass a law so that you can
build a whole lot more houses so that the home builders
can make more money. (tense music) - I worked at a bank
in Bell Foutaine. The loan officers were
encouraging people to get loans there,
and they were, like, tell them about all government
programs that existed that would help them buy houses, and it seemed like they
were always black people that he was talking
to, and I don't know... I don't know why or
how that happened. - And when I came in
here to look at homes, I saw for sale signs
all over the place. - You know, the whole sell
your house for a bunch of money and move, everybody
was doing that and running out of her 100
miles an hour for some reason. - [Woman] St. Charles
is across the river. It wasn't very developed
when I was growing up, and then it started
to get more and more developed out there. - [Woman] People used to
refer to that as just, like, way too far away to live. It was almost, like,
seen as the country - It started out
just like this area. Farm land, there's still
farmland out there. - I think they just moved out
there because it's starting to be a different culture moving in and some people,
you know, maybe had prejudice. - The first time they even heard about a black family
moving on their block, instead of them getting
to know them and see if they were the type
neighbors they would like, I have heard of people
putting a for sale sign up in front of their yard,
the first black family they knew moved on the block. - It was, like, in a period
of four or five years, like the whole neighborhood
just emptied out. - They automatically assumed that if a black person moves in, oh, there goes
your neighborhood. - It's not a good feeling. Even though you know that's
not necessarily true. I wouldn't say degrading, but it's kind of a
misleading perception that kind of
devalues that person in that particular area of a community. - So one thing that affects
discrimination is what's called "block busting" and "steering,"
and what this refers to are the way in which
real-estate brokers will lead people
to certain areas and for the people who
are in those areas, they will be preyed upon. - From the '60s, there's
been this northern push of African Americans. You migrate north. You could see it
starting in the city and going neighborhood
from neighborhood. So as a property owner, you see what's coming your way, you want to get out while
you still have a chance to sell your house. - You know, if they were gonna
show a black person a house, they brought 'em up
in the North County to show 'em houses instead
of showing 'em other places 'cause people didn't
want 'em by there. But they screwed up. I've got wonderful
people around here. - I mean, if one or two black
families had just moved in, you know, at a time, I
don't it would've mattered. - There's this term
"blacklisting," you know, like, when the real estate agents
go around and tell you how bad everything is,
and you better get out. The people themselves
start repeating that. So at some point, the real
estate agents don't need to say anything, because all the other people
start saying things. - The real-estate
companies would buy a home on some of the
blocks in North St. Louis. They would move a black
family in with no rent, and then they would go
to the white families that lived right
next to them and say, "You know a black
family just moved in. "Your home is going to
be decreasing in value. "We'll give you 25,000 now, "and your home may
only be worth 15,000 "the next month." - And on the part of
the black consumer, he or she are sold
the house at a price that is higher than what what
the person who sold is getting but still affordable for them. Sometimes this happens
with government approval. - When we sold the house, we actually sold
it for $7,000 more than what we were asking for because the real-estate
agent said it's the neighborhood now. It's the people that are
buying in this neighborhood. And so I guess they got
7,000 extra dollars, and I said, well, that's fine, but I'm not paying the
real estate, you know, money for extra the
$7,000 commission. She's, like, okay. So they get, like, $7,000
extra than what we were even selling the house for. - As they saw opportunities, and if you can "capture
a neighborhood," then the sale of all of those
homes becomes yours, right? And you then benefit
by these transitions and trying to orchestrate them. - You know, Phillip,
I have to say that all real estate agents, anyway,
this one, is color blind. Totally. - [Man] But is that something
that other realtors, perhaps not from your
experience but would play upon? - Well, I think they're
pretty well policed... - [Man] Are they? - By the board, if they are. -[Milton] There was a lot of
redlining going on back then by the realtors. There was no way
to stop it because I think there were some
cases brought to court, but it was always thrown out. It's such a hard to prove, you
know, that that is going on. Of course, the Federal
Government at that time was really strong against
anybody being acccused of doing that because
they were all for, you know, doing
what was going on, trying to move people. - Well, it was kinda scary, because to be honest, when
my house was up for sale, the house two doors up and
the house two doors down, there were three right in
a row, were also for sale. And we looked at the other ones, and the real estate agents were very interesting
in their answers. You know and I'm not saying
that they were lying, but, you know, these
people, they had triplets. The house is too small,
so they're moving, okay. The house up there, the
woman had passed away, and the son was
selling the house 'cause he lived out of state
or whatever the excuse was. Okay, okay, okay, so you
know, we bought the house. And probably within a
month, across the street, three houses went up for sale,
and it was the same deal. There were, like,
three in a row. - It was more of an issue for for me looking at this
is the most you're going to get out of your house. You better get out while
the getting's good. - Everybody's home is their biggest investment,
and to see your home go into something
like this eventually, and knowing that this is
how it's going to end up if you stay, you know,
that fear is enough to drive you away no matter how
much you love the community. You have to go because you have
to protect your investment. - Some of it was,
like, people kinda knew it was just maybe
not legitimate fear but who's gonna stay when
everybody else starts running? - That these people
were ashamed, and they were scared, and they
sort of panicked and fled. - The neighbors started
out making a promise that you wouldn't
sell to any blacks, but then they started
selling to 'em. My family ended up
selling to a black family, which was a very nice
family, you know, there's white trash too, but... - Right, it wasn't
only only blacks. There was a lot of white trash
that started moving in too. - Now the agents, because they understand
the processes better than a family who maybe
they buy a home maybe once or twice in their
whole life, all right, so they don't know what
the information set is, and it's easy to take
advantage of those things. - Now, not all the
agents were in on that. They were just helping
them make the transitions, but it only took a few to
get the herd to running, and I think that's what
happened in North County. The herds just started
running, and that's how St. Charles just exploded
then, out of fear. - And so when they move,
they feel like they've sort of elevated themselves. So even though this might be
their roots in their community, they had to get out because
it was getting so bad, and then they left, and
now everything can be fresh and wonderful again. (birds chirping) - In 1990, the population
in Spanish Lake was 80 percent white, and most of
the residents were over 50. Well, the ten years
following that, the population shifted
from the majority white to majority black. Most of the households
along with that shift were majority
single-parent household, with a huge percentage of those being under the poverty line. - So the number of
children in Spanish Lake living in poverty increased
200 percent in ten years. - There was not a
response to that change by St. Louis County. Sidewalks were not built. There were not enough schools. - There were no,
zero, nada, not one, social service agency
working in Spanish Lake. Now that is for
23,000 residents, for a population that has
changed so that one-third of it is below the age of 18. Where you've got a population
of about 11 percent, I think it's 11, in poverty. Not one, not one
social service agency. - So you had younger people. Lower economic status. A lower level of opportunities
in terms of their educational base, and a
lack of parent involvement created a whole dynamic
that contributed to the crime that we see. - Well, when people leave,
there's nobody shopping at the businesses, and
they begin to close. And then the people
that are here are forced to go outside of the
community to shop. - [Man] It was a community
and everyone was, like, you know, loyal to two
places, and once they're gone, the businesses that rely
on customer loyalty, you know, they fold. - Taco Bell was my favorite and it up and left too, and
I was there the last day. I said, "This is, like, The
Last Supper." (chuckles) I was so upset. I was. They knew me. They knew my dog when I
went through the drive thru. They gave him a treat too. - I didn't know a Taco
Bell couldn't be successful in any environment,
and obviously, it has. -Government dollars,
infrastructure, it seems like it
gets depleted and that's what I'm talking
about when I say when the blacks do come
in this neighborhood, when other black
couples come in here, we have to say to
our congressman, we have to say to our
councilman, "You know what? "You need to do your job "and get businesses here." - Yeah, they've got a liquor
store right around the corner. Now that's still there. You've got too many folks
sitting at the corner begging you for quarts,
nickles, and dimes. If I wanna go to
a grocery store, I've gotta go, what? A mile, what is that? A mile, a mile and a half? - And to be in Spanish Lake
without your own transportation means that you're
somewhat isolated. - The old saying is birds
of a feather flock together, and you feel uncomfortable if
you're not with your own kind. - I, pretty much
every friend I made in grade school moved away, and by 6th grade, all of
my friends had moved away, and I had no friends, and so
I just had to remake friends. - I mean, God,
I'm the salt stuck in the middle of the
pepper now, you know? I mean, it's changed. You always get a little
bit, kinda weirded out when you're around your unknown. When's the last time
you seen a carload of four or five white
people drive by the house, except for you guys pulling
up in front my house now? - But there was a lot of
friction in these schools, a lot of white students
were victimized by blacks. And the parents just got fed up. - Most of the neighbors
that we've lost has been because of schools. - We went to school with it was probably 85
percent black people, which is fine. We were friends with
the black people, but there were some that didn't
like white people, I guess. I got called a white
girl, a cracker. I was an easy target, I guess. I didn't have any
friends to back me up. - You know, the black
kids would be in one area, and everybody else
was in another area, and you knew the difference. You knew that it
wasn't a togetherness. - My son got, two black
kids jumped him and drug over a fence, and he come
running in the house. He's, like, "Call the police!" And he's all beat up, you
know, and I'm just, like, You're - you're, I didn't
wanna call the police. You know, I didn't wanna
get all that going. So, he just didn't go
out for, like, I mean, he's the quickest
typer on the computer, 'cause he didn't go out for,
like, three or four years. My other son, he bags his pants. He knows all of 'em. (laughing) You know what I mean? But, Nick, he's - they're
just two different people. You know? He kinda just stayed in. - When I see Spanish Lake,
when I see it on the Internet, it's a great, fun
place and all that, until I got here. Then it was different story. It was totally different story. - St. Louis Police
are cracking down on an apartment complex. It's a magnet for
criminal activity. - [Woman] By day,
Countryside Apartments on Belle Fountaine
Road seem safe. We see tenants
spend time outside. But by night, the flashing
lights tell a different story. - Countryside, that's
so damn dangerous, they had to put in a substation. They're always having shootings and gang problems
going on up in there. - [Man] And there was a
couple murders probably back in, you know,
early last year. - Pizza delivery
stopped coming in there. They'd be waiting in
an abandoned apartment, and they'd take the
pizza, take the money, and go out the back door. - And you couldn't
walk down the street without somebody robbing
you, knocking you in your head, doing
bad things to you, breaking into your
houses and all that. - You've got whole
bunch of single parents trying to do what
they can, you know, to better raise their
children with what they can, you know, and what
we ain't lacking then we turn to the
streets and get it. - It was nice when
we first moved over. I don't know what
what happened to it. - [Child] Mom, somebody
broke the swings all. - Yeah, they tore
that playground up. - [Woman] St. Louis County
Captain, Troy Doyle, said in a year and a half,
this single apartment complex generated more than
3600 calls for help. - That helicopter that
you see flying around, that helicopter
comes from there. That's where the
police department. That helicopter flies over
her to watch what's going on. - That's near Countryside. That's not a good area. And then we have another one
by the lake that's not good. So that has us in the
middle of all of this. - Desperate people
do desperate things and so a lot of Section 8
people, I think, do that. - That's the area. It's where the
crime is really bad. But then that flows
over into the areas where the economic level
is on the higher side. - A lot of 'em have
moved to renting houses. You know, because
there's so many houses for rent really cheap. I mean, the banks are willing
to rent 'em really cheap. - A week before Christmas,
someone stole my car right in front of my house. - A .22 bullet when
right by my mom's head, went into the siding. Their house got broken into
while they were at home. - Back in the days,
they break in your home when you're gone. Now they'll wait 'til
you get home before they break into your house. They wanna get it all now. - You know, it's different
when people want to move or want a bigger house,
but I didn't want to move. I felt like I had to
move at that point. - If an apartment operator correctly manages
their property, correctly screens their tenants, you can make it work
whether you have Section 8 tenants or whether
you have no Section 8 tenants. - You know, what happened was,
whoever was running the show in the apartment complex, obviously wasn't
doing a very good job. Either they didn't spend
the money on the complex to improve it, or they
didn't do a very good job of who they accepted
into their community. - It's when the concentration,
you know, reached I don't - a tipping
point or whatever, there was just no
infrastructure to support it. - [Woman] We spoke
with some tenants who say they appreciate
the police presence and fear for their safety. Others who are skeptical. - It ain't gonna change. They've been doing
this for years. Police tried to ride through
here and stop people. It's still happening, obviously. - It's mostly people
that be breaking into some people's
houses and stuff. There be a lot of youngsters
around who are cussing. - [Woman] Yeah,
we do have a lot. But that's just in here. I mean, outside of
Countryside, it's okay. You know, you can take
a walk or whatever, but it's just in here. - Like, this part of the
town, they forgot about. Like, they forgot about
this neighborhood. - Someone has compared that
to, I don't know if I can say, to Pruitt-Igoe, because Pruitt-Igoe
went straight up and
these are low rise. - Just because it's ... It's lower buildings
doesn't mean that the density is lower. - We're basically doing the
same thing we did before, just in a different place
that, left it its own devices, is not going to be
able to solve it. - It was about the environment, so if we take down
the high rises and put 'em close to
a river and trees, that we could
probably just kinda let the environment raise 'em, and it wasn't about
the environment. It was about the
family structure. - A lot of times,
we don't do better because we don't know better, and you have babies
raising babies. And a lot of times,
like, as in my home, when I was growing up, my mother worked
two or three jobs, and then I had
two older sisters. So my oldest sister raised us, when we didn't raise ourself. So she was a baby
raising a baby, because mother had to
go out and, you know, make it happen for
the whole family. - You've gotta
educate the people, and people are not getting that. Just 'cause you redo
a apartment complex and you make it brand new again, that don't mean nothing. If you don't educate the
people in that building, it's gonna tear it right
back down and become the same way it
used to be at first and that's what happened to
all these places out here. - Whenever you concentrate
that many apartments and potentially so many
poor people in a area, it consumes those areas. What really upsets me is
that when have liberals from Clayton, and Lado
and those places say, "Well, how can you say that? "That is racist." I say, "Here's what we'll do. "We're gonna make
every ZIP Code area "in the St. Louis Area "take an average of
Section 8 housing." If you think that
it's so wonderful having poverty
consuming our area, and you look down on us
and you say means things about us and then you
dare to call us racists when we are concerned
about our property values, our safety, our children. Let us see you take
your proportionate share of poor, and then
we'll see what you say then. Until then, do not
dare to call us names, because we will not tolerate it. (tense music) - I'm a volunteer member of the Spanish Lake
Community Association, which was formed as a way
to connect to the county. - They have different
goals and initiatives and they make partnerships and
they really go out and try to try to do what probably needed
to be done many years ago. - When the association
was formed, the county was providing
basically nothing to Spanish Lake,
and I'm not kidding. The programs, neighborhood
preservation, et cetera, they weren't active
in Spanish Lake. It took our group to
get things moving. - Without Dora, this
community here, I think would be, it'd be struggling
a little bit different than it is. - We look at development, and if we think it's not going
to be good for community, like a casino... - They tried to
bring a big casino in to the Spanish Lake Area,
and I was one of those people vocally, would do whatever,
saying we don't need this. Well, the county is
looking, I think, sometimes that this is just income, but until we rose up, Spanish
Lake Community Association and a group of
citizens and said, "Look, St. Louis
County, help us. "We don't want this." We got the county's
attention, no doubt about it. - We've got a brand-new facility
being built in Spanish Lake It's the National Archives
and Records Center. It sits on Dunn Road. It's a $100 million building. It will be the
largest repository of national archives
record in terms of military personnel and
governmental personnel outside of Washington D.C. But that was something we
could stand up and say, "This is an example of
really good development." (birds singing) - I don't know when the
Scientologists bought that but everybody was a
little bit leery of it. You know, what's
going on out here? Who are these people? And then Scientology comes in, it's, like, hmm, you know? But they seem to be
good neighbors, so they don't cause a
disturbance or anything. They keep the place up. They keep it very nice but I know Tom Cruise
came in when they opened the building up. He, you know, sort of broke
a bottle of water over it or something like
that, you know. (gentle upbeat music) - You know, I was just
saying to my husband the other day as we passed
the Oak Park Apartments, you know, we used to
hear about all the things that took place in
there, and those things have just kind of ceased
over the last year or so. - Our goal here is to, you know, get it back to where it
was in the '70s basically. - And now, if you've
got rental issue you've got the police
right around the corner. They put cameras where
you first walked in, where you all first pulled in. -[Woman] But the police
sort of, you know, patrol a lot and they got
a 11 o'clock curfew so a lot of people, you know,
they don't be out like they used to. - As we continue to improve, you reach a point where
the Housing Authority says, "No, this is our - you
know, we won't pay you more "than $475 or $500
for that apartment, and we're able to lease
it for $550 a month to a market-rate tenant. - I'm just grateful, so
I'll tell the manager man, keep it up, man. Y'all doing A1, you dig? - [Man] All right, please
state your name and what you... - Jim Satori, lead guitar. - I'm John Laker,
vocals and guitar. - Janette Robin, bass guitar. - I'm Julio, I'm lead guitar. - Mike Foster, I beat on
these things. (chuckles) Drums. - Dan O'Brien, rhythm
guitar and keyboard. - This song is called,
"This Is My Life." (guitar strumming) (rock music playing) - We are the Hookman. We started last year actually. - Yeah, in February. - February 28th
- Twenty eighth. - We were just
gonna play for fun. - A concept band. - Yeah, it was just, you know,
I had some original songs that I'd written about
Spanish Lake, you know. - [Man] What motivated
you to start this reunion? - You know, being on Facebook, you look up a lot of
old friends and stuff, which, I've got a lot of
'em on there, you know, because they know me
and I know them and... And there was groups
on Facebook before you know, Spanish Lakers, there's actually
several of 'em, groups. But they started that
new group thing where people don't have to join, but you can actually
just add them. So I just made a group, and I added 'em all to
it, and then they added all of their friends to it,
and their friends to it, and their friends to it. And then I was
talking with a friend. We decided that we were
going to have a party. So I think we're going to do that every
year, first Sunday in May is going to be Laker Day. - And here we are
in the breezeway. That's what we called
it when I was a kid. And it's smaller now than
it was when I was little. I used to sit here and
throw my baseball up against the bottom of the house
before baseball games. I busted my head open on this
- that's the same fence pipe that's left there. That was the one I
busted my head open on, but it was a little
taller back then. And these, these poles
here for laundry, my parents put those
in, what, 1960, 1959. Somewhere in there. This was an add-on to the
garage that my parents put in. - I was just out here
about three months ago, and I drove down the street, and the people who lived
there were outside, and I stopped, and they
stopped and looked at me, and I said, "Oh,
I was just looking "at what you've
done with the house. "It really looks nice." I said, "I grew up here." - Wow. (gentle music) Yeah, I definitely don't
remember it looking like this. We didn't know what
abandoned houses were, boarded up, and you
know, you see fire marks and all this stuff. You see that now. And it.. It hurts me to see that. - And my mom and dad, oh,
my, they had to take out an extra load to get the siding, and I noticed that
it wasn't kept up, and I thought, "Oh,
mom, is rolling over "about the siding." - When I go there, sometimes
I get kinda sick sometimes. You know, it's a little
turn in my stomach. You know, it's just,
it's not the same. - These patio blocks, my
parents put this patio in. This is - these are the same
patio blocks that were here when I was a kid. And we had a shed right here. A swing set that was right here. - It's sad. My home, you know, I had
a lot of good memories and I see it surrounded by trash, by unkept homes. - It was heartbreaking. It is every time, and I almost didn't want
to go by down the street. - We don't come by very
often in this area. - It makes me nostalgic
in some regards. But mostly sad and mostly angry. - When I look at it, I think we could all still be
here, but we're not. - Wow, this brings
back lots of memories. Good memories, really,
even though looking at the place now, you know, I
still remember it as it was. Not as it is. And that'll probably
never change, you know, 'cause I don't wanna
remember it like this. - It's awesome. I wish I could just
play one more time. That's what I feel like doing. You know, going down
there and running and checking everything out. Ain't that what we all
did growing up here? Wake up in the morning
and start running out and checking out
everything, you know. I think it'll probably
stay the same. I mean, it's not like white
people are going to move back. I wouldn't think, you
know, but then again, you can buy a house
here for, like, $15,000, one that two or three years ago, would've been 90. - If I can't pay my bills, I'm gonna be moving
back with momma. I've talked to two people that have moved back
here just recently. - I might come back, you know, but right now I can't do it. - It was the worst emotional
experience in my life except for the death
of family members. I can tell you it
was that rough, because after we moved, there were many
breakfasts that I sat at the table and cried and said, "I just wanna go back home." - I'd still like to
level everything here and take it back. But that's not gonna happen, so yeah, I guess
we have made peace. - You can't make peace with it. It ticks you off. that people don't wanna
take care of, you know, something that was good. - You do become prejudiced
when, as growing up, you've seen the changes,
and you don't mean to be, but they're also prejudiced
too again us, as well. - Nobody wants to be robbed. Nobody wants their
house broken into. It's not like you say,
"Oh, I'm moving out here "so they can break in." No. - There are always criminals, and there are always
bad apples or whatever, and we have our
share, but that is not what Spanish Lake is. That does not define us. - There's only a small
percentage of Spanish Lake that once someone came in and
actually viewed it firsthand, they would consider it bad. The majority of Spanish
Lake is still beautiful. - Like, I think you
could actually have a lot of middle-class,
prosperous people
in the neighborhood and if they have black skin,
it's still going to be bad in a lot of people's eyes. - The blame, if you will,
is placed on the people rather than an acknowledgement that this is the
whole system together that's locking these
people into a place. - What causes that very
well I'm not educated enough that it was
government doing it or real-estate
agencies or what it was or the economy maybe. I don't know what
to blame it on, but, yeah, I can definitely
say that I witnessed it, yes. - Yeah, I think if we had had
maybe a mayor or something, some kind of a leadership thing. I don't know. Somebody was against us. I'm not quite sure who. - I think it's a
governmental push. You're just bringing in a
different class of people, and I think that's
what it's really about. - It's a human fear of poverty. It's greater than
the fear of race. The fear of poverty
is the greatest thing that motivates people
who are all really poor, everybody's really
pretty much so, in comparison to the super
rich, we're all poor, right? We try to do whatever we can do to make certain that the poorest you get away from and that
they're all in the same area, and then super-super
wealthy people who don't give a
crap about poor, they just wanna be more wealthy. - If people didn't move, this area would still be
what it was many years ago but change is going to happen. - Everything changes, but the
one thing that stays the same are our children, our kids. - I remember the old men
back when we were kids talking about, oh, when
the black people moved in, you know, the neighborhood
would go to shit. And property values would lower. - And they embedded
that in their children, and so their children, you know, through no fault of their own, think like their parents think. - Was it because of
people moving out? Or people moved out
because of the changes? - [Man] Yeah, that's...
- Oh, that's like the chicken -[Man] It is. - Did the
chicken come first or the egg? Or how does that go? (laughing) Yeah,
that's the question. - We should be, you know, have
more sense of togetherness because we really just don't
know what the government is going to do with us. You know what I mean? They're cutting back
Medicare and Social Security and all these things
that we think are in, you know, the parameters
that are in place to take care of us,
but these things might not be available, so you better
get a sense of community. - We've seem to just be
moving our population from point A to
point B to point C. We just spread further out. We have to build
new infrastructure
in those new areas, and the schools and the roads
and all the institutions that people paid for
so dearly in both money and in blood are just abandoned. It's like a policy
of abandonment. - It's my subdivision,
but it's not my community. There may be some
neighborhood cohesiveness but not community. Not the bond of
Spanish Lake Community. We're gonna have to work to find those
commonalities, I think. But the thing that we all have
in common, that we all love, is the beauty of this place. We can all relate to
Spanish Lake Park and Fort Belle Fountaine and the conservation area. We can all relate to that, and those are
tremendous assets here. - [Woman] Spanish
Lake is still awesome. It was beautiful.
- [Man] Yeah. - [Woman] Especially the park. It's just grown so unbelievable
for, you know, like, 30 years since I used to, when
I was little, to come here. - Spanish Lake, to me, is
when we were driving our cars across this lake right
here in the winter time. - Spanish Lake Park, the park. I go walking there sometimes, and sometimes when I
just need to think. - A lot of good
memories standing right in this area around here. And it was great. It was good times,
and I miss 'em. I miss 'em a lot. - This is a home-like
scenery for me, with me growing
up in the country. - Spanish Lake means
everything to me. It was the place I grew up. - It was home, and driving now through it, it's just all different. I just doesn't seem like home. - Spanish Lake and
all of North County, I have a very deep
emotional attachment to it. - It's where I was
born and raised and had the most comfort level
here when I was growing up. - Just a nice place
to raise your kids. - Spanish Lake is home. I've seen the good
times and bad times. Seen a lot of changes. It means home for the moment. - I don't know. I kinda forgot a lot
about it once I moved out. - It was fun. - I have good experiences. - Gosh, it means everything, friends, family, beginnings. -It's where I grew
up (chuckles). Tried to grow up. (both chuckling) - Spanish Lake is
a beautiful place, and it's a place that
I really feel at home. - [Man] This is 1238 Maple
in Spanish Lake, Missouri. My parents bought this
house for $19,500 in 1980. We lived here until
I was 10 years old. The memories I have here are
some of the happiest I know. This is when my parents
were still married, and I didn't have a
care in the world. We moved from Spanish Lake in
1997 when my parents divorced. After college, I
moved to Los Angeles. In 2007, I took a trip
back to 1238 Maple. I was nostalgic, and I wanted to get back
in touch with my childhood. When I arrived, I was shocked. Not only was my old home vacant, but the three surrounding
homes were as well. The house was run down, and the yard had
not been maintained. I wasn't expecting the
house to be the same, but I wasn't expecting this. Afterwards, I went to my
old school and church. It was even worse than
seeing my old house. My school was gone. My friends were gone. My neighborhood was no more. Four years later, I
saw a Facebook group known as The Lakers, and they were having their
first reunion in Spanish Lake. I quickly found a
small film crew, and I flew back to
my old home town. In the middle of our film shoot, my producer, Matt, placed
an ad on Craigslist looking for more
people to interview. We received only
one email reply. Her name was Paris Drake. I asked him, "What
street does she live on?" He said Maple. When I heard this, I
knew where she lived. I'm in Spanish Lake, and
I'm about to go to the house that I grew up my
first ten years in. I haven't been here in September of '89 I think
was the last time, so we're about to meet Paris
Drake, the woman who lives here. She contacted me. I did not contact her so makes it kind of interesting. Here's the old kitchen. - Yes. - Wow, this is totally
different. - This
is the kitchen. - Did you do all
these renovations, or were they done before? - [Paris] No, they were
done when I got here. - Wow. - Now, was this, this
closet here, was it here? - Yeah, it was pantry. - [Paris] It was here? Oh, okay, I thought
that was a new addition. - Nope, that was pantry.
- Not that it's... You know. - [Man] And then we had, like,
a little corner with the, you had the laundry and
we used to have a bar, an actual, like, built-in
bar, and that was here. It would separate... - Well, that comes and goes.
- There from there. Yeah, they took all that out.
- They're coming. - [Paris] And kind of
serves its purpose. - Wow. This is my old bedroom. - [Paris] Really? - [Man] Yeah. (laughing) - Well, it's an office now. It's not a bedroom. - It looks great.
- Thank you. - It seems so much
smaller than I remember. - Because you were smaller
so everything is up. - It's true. (delicate piano music) ("This Is My Life"
by The Hookman) ♪ (lyrics) Rode into
town on a dark Sunday ♪ The dusty road
hollered my name ♪ The people put you down
when you're doin' good ♪ But your work goes on okay ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ This is my life ♪ And I live it
the way I want to ♪ This is my life ♪ And I don't have to
prove anything to you ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ Got a '65 Ford ♪ Goin' to Hell and back ♪ Got a second wife
that drove me to Hell ♪ Spent eight years
working in a sweat factory ♪ And I ain't got
nothing to show ♪ This is my life ♪ And I live the way I want to ♪ This is my life ♪ And I don't have to
prove anything to you ♪ Oh, yeah (guitar solo) ♪ This is my life ♪ And I live it
the way I want to ♪ This is my life ♪ And I don't have to
prove anything to you ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ Got a '65 Ford ♪ Drove to Hell and back ♪ Got a second wife
that drove me to Hell ♪ Spent eight years
working in a sweat factory ♪ And I ain't got
nothing to show ♪ This my life ♪ And I live it
the way I want to ♪ This is my life ♪ And I don't have to
prove anything to you ♪ Oh yeah ♪ Whooooah ♪
