Illustration by Joshua Gay
Wondering about the next hip place in the St. Louis area? I can assure you with some confidence that it will be Chesterfield. Why? Because I live in Chesterfield.
It’s not that I have such a high opinion of myself that I imagine that I bring hipness to neighborhoods by my mere presence. I am merely speaking from my experience. Since I first began to live on my own in St. Louis, in the late ’80s, I have always been in the right place—at almost the right time.
I don’t confer hipness on neighborhoods; rather, I see them through what turns out to be the tail end of their blighted days. Just after I move on, shazam! The old neighborhood gets hip. People with fashionable clothes and coifs move in. Property values go up. Crime goes down. The neighborhood ends up in St. Louis Magazine.
Take the University City Loop, for starters. That’s where I became an official St. Louis resident, once I fled the dormitory system at Washington University. (On a recent visit to the South 40, once dorm hell, I was amazed to see that even my very first institutionalized housing has become unrecognizably hip.) In the late ’80s, as old heads will recall, the Loop was touch-and-go. Cicero’s was still a grungy basement bar, rather than an “entertainment plex”; there was a head shop that would sell you a bong; Joe Edwards was known as the owner of Blueberry Hill and not a “Loop developer”; and Fitz’s was not yet a fizz in anybody’s gourmet-soda glass. The place could be a little scary. One step north of Delmar (and I mean precisely one step)—it was definitely scary.
I lived one long block north of Delmar, on Eastgate. I didn’t have a crack-cocaine habit; in fact, I have never touched the stuff, though I was offered a verbal pitch for that narcotic product every single day that I lived on Eastgate. It wasn’t for the ambience that I lived there, needless to say; it was for the cheap rent, which I split with a hulking former U.S. Navy Seal, who would have helped me to feel safe and secure if only he had slept in the apartment once in a while. Daryl only needed an address as a cover story; he basically lived with his girlfriend, whose filthy-rich father would not have accepted Daryl’s living, unwed, with his baby girl.
Daryl eventually married into the money, and I headed for another blighted urban area, South Grand, just as Joe Edwards waved his magic wand up and down Delmar, rehabbing and gentrifying eyesores, creating a rising tide that raised all rents. I remember going back to the old neighborhood and blinking at all the educated, affluent-looking people, drinking local root beer where skinny little thugs had tried to sell me crack.
I would watch them, and then I would go home to South Grand. Of course, I lived on the wrong side of South Grand: the east side, Michigan just off Arsenal. I drive by the old place sometimes, and it’s still not exactly posh, but when I was there, it was a straight-up war zone. That was when you could still list all of the Vietnamese restaurants in St. Louis on one hand, and if you knew of any such place other than Pho Grand (still in its tiny, dingy location), you were cool. I knew about Pho Saigon, just past the corner of Grand and Gravois; I was cool.
Now, everybody on South Grand is cool. I mean this sincerely. I go sit and buy drinks from my friend Eric Hall at CBGB and stare in disbelief at the endless string of people who walk in and out of the bar with creative hairdos, Technicolor tattoos, sexually ambiguous boy/girlfriends and record collections that could beat the crap out of mine.
At age 39, I’m not quite an old fart (or so I tell myself)—I still play in a rock band and know scary people on a first-name basis—so I am able, barely, to resist the temptation to pull aside one of these metrosexual scenesters and say, “Look, kid, when I lived on South Grand, there was nobody but me and Wayne St. Wayne, a dozen Vietnamese people who ate at each other’s restaurants and that supercool video store that Thomas Crone wrote about every week in the Riverfront Times—back when that paper was still owned and published by a living, breathing human being.”
But I don’t bother. I just order another beer and remember the good old days when preteens scurried down my street carrying firearms bigger than their heads. The good old days when Bloods were Bloods, Crips were Crips, chop shops were chop shops, the Internet was still an insider secret and you could buy a big brick house on Hartford or Connecticut for 40 bucks and the promise to bring it up to code before the next
civic election.
I left South Grand and went to New York, and while I was gone, South Grand got hip.
Now I’m back, and I’m in Chesterfield (a long and separate story). No one would accuse Chesterfield of being blighted unless he was looking for tax credits, but I do spend a lot of my time downtown. My favorite bar is the Schlafly Tap Room, at 21st and Locust; two of my artistic colleagues live exactly five blocks east on Locust, in the Leather Trades Building, and my band uses one of their lofts to rehearse in once a week.
That seems to be enough contact with me, the accidental harbinger—the Forrest Gump of urban renewal—to start the cycle all over again. One night early this year, my bandmates and I looked out the window in awe at Locust Street as traffic moved past us in both directions. Dang, we realized collectively, one-way streets are going both ways now. They are getting serious about this downtown thing, once and for all.
It’s still scary on the streets downtown at night. When my female friends walk the few blocks from their building to the 7-Eleven at 17th and Pine, they watch out. This is familiar to me. It’s the Loop in the late ’80s, South Grand in the early ’90s. It’s a place in St. Louis that I get attached to, just before I leave and it gets suddenly, mysteriously better.
Sure enough, my friends see the writing on the ragged wall. The Leather Trades Building is going to be sold, emptied, refurbished and reopened with higher rents and more affluent people. Downtown is going to get the Loop treatment—once I leave and find a new place to rehearse, that is. I’m thinking about my basement in Chesterfield. Neighbors tell me that Geezer Butler, bassist for Black Sabbath, once lived in the house to our left, and the road manager for the Grateful Dead “lived in” (i.e. made the payment on) the house to our right.
See what I’m saying? That’s pretty hip. It’s starting to happen already. Chesterfield, baby, is gonna be hip, gonna be happening. You heard it here first!
All I have to do is leave.
Chris King co-founded the arts organization Hoobellatoo and edits the St. Louis American newspaper.
