Photograph by Sarah Carmody
The Southampton neighborhood is quintessentially South City, sandwiched between St. Louis Hills and the Bevo neighborhood. I’ve lived in every part of Southampton—in an upstairs flat in one of the four-family buildings on Eichelberger; in a one-and-a-half-story 1930s craft house with stone masonry, fake fireplace and leaded stained-glass windows on Delor; and now on the north side, in a house that is older than most of the neighborhood around it.
This is my seventh year in Southampton, and as of this year I’ve officially been a city dweller longer than I was a country girl. When I was a kid, we didn’t have such amenities as sidewalks and streetlights. Instead of waiting for the infamous “South City doorbell” horn to blare, we listened for approaching guests’ distinctive engine pitches and the sounds of the gravel that crunched under their tires. Even before my first hour-long bus ride to school, I knew that living in the country was incredibly lame. Whereas some kids dreamed of being in a Mariah Carey video, I fantasized about walking to the grocery store every day for fresh bread and fruit, measuring distance in blocks instead of acres and having a mailbox attached to my house.
Southampton is a low-key neighborhood. It doesn’t have the obvious draws of the bustling boutiques and art houses in the Central West End or the trendy lofts and nightclubs of downtown. But the past few years have brought some changes. Thanks to extraordinarily affordable housing prices five years ago, the sidewalk in front of my house has a lot of entertaining new traffic. A single gal jogs past, the Croatian dad next door drags in bags from the grocery store, the two guys down the street walk their three dogs or the two gals up the street walk their three dogs, and the electively unmarried hetero couple push their toddler in his stroller.
After the diversification, probably the coolest change to the neighborhood is the revitalization of Macklind Avenue. Four years ago, shops were closing. At Krekeler’s, the neighborhood’s only independent grocery store, you walked into a murky, dusty, depressing interior. The photography studio on the next block had faded, its yellowing pictures propped up in the dirty windows. The façade of the dry cleaners was peeling, and no one ever seemed to go in or come out.
That dry cleaners is now Murdoch Perk, a café serving breakfast, lunch, coffee and decadent desserts. A member of the wait staff walks by in a “SoHa, St. Louis” T-shirt. The bare brick walls are hung with works from local artists, and the tables are filled with young parents, retirees and college kids taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi access.
The old photography studio is becoming an antique store, and the old resale shop has been turned into Home Eco, a store filled with recycled and environmentally friendly clothing and cleaning products.
The Krekeler family, who shut the doors of their grocery store for more than a year, reopened at the same location Thanksgiving weekend. Its new name, Macklind Avenue Deli, is painted mural-style on the front of the building. Inside, the completely renovated store is airy and well-lit, the deli sells fine meats and cheeses and the shelves hold an extensive beer selection.
Across Chippewa, monks hold a meditation night at the World Café, and people eat Cuban and Mexican food on the tiny patio of La Tropicana bodega. On quiet spring nights when all the windows are open, you hear things: A tropical bird makes unearthly noises a few houses down; a schoolkid practices his trombone; a young married couple argues about which of them didn’t let the dog out in time. People call “Hello, neighbor!” from their porches to avoid mispronouncing each other’s equally foreign names.
In the country, small-town gossip travels with frightening speed, but in the city, privacy fences—real or imagined—seem to separate us from our neighbors. Yet the Southampton e-mail list is abuzz with the latest news of whose car got egged last summer, who’s complaining to the alderman about noise-ordinance violations and who hasn’t cleaned the newspapers off their front steps in two weeks. For a neighborhood no longer in transition, these are the big problems.
I came to Southampton an eager student of city life, and here are the results of my study: Global warming has blunted our winters, and the summers are ever the same thick, hot, wet towel wrapped around the head, but Southampton still manages to get a little cooler every single year.
