MLK Clean Up

From State Senator Jeff Smith:

Closer to home, I'm organizing our second annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Cleanup of MLK Jr. Blvd in the city, on Monday, Jan. 19 - the state holiday honoring the civil rights leader. This is a great opportunity to honor the life and memory of Dr. King, and last year, (in spite of the weather), we had a great time doing it. I invite any of you, along with your friends, friends, neighbors and any organizations to which you belong, to meet at the corner of MLK Jr. Boulevard and Union at 12 p.m. on Monday. Gloves, trash bags, donuts, and hot chocolate will be provided!

If you can make it, just call my district aide Johnny Little at (314) 601-4252, or reply to this email (jeff.smith.reply@gmail.com).

MLK in St. Louis

Perhaps my experience of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in St. Louis was epitomized by watching a lone wrecker. The man was palletizing bricks and stoking a bright orange barrel fire fed by millwork and door casements of the building he was wrecking. The cold did not deter his determination to get in a day's work. The building he was wrecking? A commercial building on Martin Luther King Drive.

The scene was a reminder of some harsh realities of this city. Northside laborers, even with skills, are far more likely to find work tearing down their own neighborhoods than rebuilding them. Our city is one of many American cities who renamed a downtrodden thoroughfare for one of the greatest Americans to live, and then did nothing to staunch the decay that dishonors the name on the street. Our city's leaders, black and white, found time on the holiday to pander and squabble while many citizens were busy earning money for food and shelter.

Further west on the street, past Kingshighway, I encountered the relatively vibrant street culture of the Wellston Loop. People were out walking, traveling from store to store. A barbeque restaurant was crowded, with patron's cars spread out over an adjacent vacant lot. New sidewalks were in the middle of construction, and several buildings were amid major renovation projects. That's reality on MLK, too.

A few more notes on the demolition permits on MLK

I was disappointed that we lost not one, but five buildings on MLK at the Preservation Board on Monday.

4222 Martin Luther King had to go. I watched it burn--it was terrible and thorough, and complete with a huge collapse. That building was not a building anymore afterwards.

4149-53 MLK had to go, too. They were pretty much just front facades. They were in the kind of state that only heavy subsidy or some wealthy angel of rehab could have turned around, and I didn't see either touching down on that block any time soon, sadly.

4220 and 4224 could have been saved. I really, really think so, call me crazy. (I call your attention to the fact that I just said I'm okay with the other three demolitions--I'm not THAT crazy!) After questioning whether to vote on the buildings individually, the board voted on all five buildings at once. The vote to grant the demo permit was unanimous (with Richardson, Callow, Robinson, Killeen, and Kennedy in attendance).

The first time I went along the length of MLK after moving back to St. Louis several years ago, I was struck by what a beautiful street it was, and how surprisingly intact and varied its collection of storefront buildings was. Going down a street like that, you can just tell from the landscape that it was and is an important place. As I've watched disappearances on the street since that day, one little storefront here, another little storefront there, I just keep thinking This street will be gone before I turn thirty. I mentioned this in my testimony to the Board on Monday. Asked how old I was, I answered: "Twenty-three."

"You've got time," came the answer.

"It won't take that long," I replied.

Making the loss of the buildings of the 4400 block especially sad was the testimony of Alderman Moore, who had brought the buildings up for demolition in the first place. He said he saw people run out of 4222 shortly before it started visibly burning. He said that he just knew they had to be brick rustlers. Brick rustlers have been setting fires in his area and letting the flames and the fire department be the demo crew--the wood is eliminated, and you get loose bricks and conditions where people are less likely to be suspicious if you're palletizing. Sure enough, Alderman Moore said, he went to the building at 8am the next day, and at 9am the brick rustlers showed up and started picking out the good bricks, throwing broken brickbats back into the remains of the ruined building. The Alderman called the police, and he said they showed up briefly but then left without doing anything, letting the brick rustlers go. What I want to know is: If the cops won't even help AN ALDERMAN arrest brick rustlers (9am the morning after a fire! When no demo permit could have possibly been issued yet!), how the hell do the rest of us in the community even stand a chance at stopping brick rustling?

Hope on Martin Luther King Drive

I spent some of my morning talking with a building owner in the Wellston Loop area. He has big plans for his big building, the former J.C. Penney store at 5930 Martin Luther King Drive. (This is the International style gem designed by William P. McMahon and built in 1948.) He envisions the building as catalyst for rejuvenating the area, and seems optimistic despite acknowledging forty years of neglect of the area and of Martin Luther King Drive in general.

The neglect is formidable. On the drive out to his building from downtown, I passed the sites of a dozen buildings that were demolished within my lifetime and whose details I clearly recall. I passed even more buildings that sit empty, or in use, or in some derelict state between. I passed two buildings with significant recent collapses. I passed one row of flats and a corner commercial building under demolition despite being in good condition. I was overcome with melancholy as I considered that many of these buildings won't survive my lifetime, or even the next decade, and the fifty-odd blocks of a street that supposedly honors to good work of Dr. King will be virtually unrecognizable to me by middle age, and already is unrecognizable to people old enough to recall its heyday.

Even at the time that Franklin and Easton avenues were renamed for Dr. King in 1972, the conditions of the buildings on the street were not great. At the time, some critics felt that the legacy of Dr. King was diminished by placing his name on a street with a sad future. The sad future is now, and the street name certainly seems cynical.

Hopefully, the J.C. Penney building and others on the street will survive, and find good owners, and provide momentum for development along here. Aldermen O.L. Shelon (4th Ward) and Jeffrey Boyd (22nd Ward, including the Wellston Loop), whose wards include most of the street in the city, are pushing for redevelopment that is architecturally sensitive. They can only do what is politically possible, though, before it is up to the market to generate the capital needed to revive sections of the street. May that time come before all is lost on the great street with a great name.

State Bank of Wellston to Be Demolished for Walgreens?

Word on the street -- the street being Martin Luther King Drive -- is that the State Bank of Wellston will soon be demolished for a new Walgreens store. Hopefully the rumors are wrong, but they seem sadly probable.

Charrette on MLK Drive this Saturday

This announcement fell into my inbox:

Help plan for the future of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive in the Ville Neighborhood! Alderman O.L. Shelton, the City of St. Louis and AIA St. Louis are working together to bring together design professionals, developers and neighbors for a charrette to be held at Marshall School, 4342 Aldine, 63113 on Saturday Apr. 22.

Green input and perspectives are welcome! If you'd like to participate, contact Michelle Swatek with AIA St. Louis at mswatek@aia-stlouis.org or (314) 621-3489.

Don't Go on MLK?

Overheard at a downtown lunch counter today:

"You know, a whole part of Atlanta is bad. You know, I think it's the south side. Yeah, stay out of there," said the first person.

"It was like that here for awhile. The only good part was West County. It still is, kind of, except for those areas they are fixing up," replied the second.

"We have some bad parts here. Chris Rock has a saying, it's like, something like 'Martin Luther King was a man of nonviolence. But if you go to a street named for him you will find people doing violent things. If you're on a street and see that it's Martin Luther King, get out of there.'"

"Yeah. Isn't that the truth. Martin Luther King is a bad street."

I think that I found the target audience for the You Paid for It segment on the streetscape improvements on MLK. (The improvements -- coming amid unfortunate demolition -- are expanding west into the Wellston Loop, so that at least part of the street will look worthy of its name.)

Coming Down This Week

Urban Review St. Louis reports that the Doering Mansion is almost gone. Demolition began last week.

Also nearly gone this week is the art deco Regal Theater on Martin Luther King Boulevard. I have been following the saga there and hope to post more information and photographs on our website soon. In the meantime, the other endangered art deco movie house in town, the Avalon Theater, still stands and could be restored.

And still: On our way back from the Wellston Loop last night, we passed at least three in-progress demolition sites on Martin Luther King Boulevard. The north side is still bleeding!

Old Easton Avenue

One of the two remaining three-story 19th-century commercial buildings on the south side of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive just west of Jefferson disappeared last week.

We have no photograph of the building. May someone else have a better memory of the building than ours.

Rob Powers did get a photograph of another great commercial building across the street that came down in 2001. The "Heller Co." sign and its greatly-altered building still remain in use. This block was one of many thriving commercial blocks on the former Easton Avenue; by the 1930s almost every block of Easton from downtown through the Wellston Loop was chock-full of buildings housing apartments, stores and offices. The street must have been fabulously urban.

Today, traces of the past density remain, especially between Grand Avenue and the city limits. But the vitality is less evident, and certainly less concentrated. Enough buildings remain to make the thoroughfare a likely candidate for future revitalization.

After the Smoke Clears

I returned to the fire on MLK today and also did some research.

The building that burned was a two-story commercial building at the rear of 4416-22 Martin Luther King. I write "rear" because the building that burned down was not attached to the storefront building that faces Martin Luther King -- good news for the building, I suppose.

The rear building was reduced to a pile of rubble and only a few sections of the outer brick walls stand, none higher than eight feet.

Saint Gabriel Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church owns the buildings.