Photographs by Matt Marcinkowski
You can’t go to Little Athens anymore, or Mill Creek Valley, or Gaslight Square. Get off the highway at Wild Horse Creek Road and you’ll see a lot of houses, but no creeks and no horses. Kinloch has dwindled to fewer than 500 residents, and Graybridge Lane, which was a bohemian neighborhood back in the ’50s and ’60s, is now buzzing with golf carts.
There’s this funny thing about St. Louis—we have certain stories we tell ourselves over and over again, like the ones about the 1904 World’s Fair! and the 1982 World Series! Other stories we bury. Like how in 1972, the Veiled Prophet had his mask forcibly removed by activists who slid down guy wires, and the Post-Dispatch wouldn’t print his name (though everyone saw it was Tom K. Smith, Monsanto’s executive vice president). You see this pattern in the built environment, too: Certain sanctified areas are kept as static and timeless as possible, while others are cleared out wholesale. Though, of course, it’s not that simple...
We sat down with seven people, men and women, black and white, ranging in age from their early fifties to their late eighties. They all witnessed St. Louis’ major 20th-century shifts, including the desegregation of housing, the destruction of neighborhoods for highway expansion or urban renewal, and the transformation of horse pastures into shopping malls and cul-de-sacs. Though they miss those lost places—be they jazz clubs or cornfields—they also comment on how grateful they are for St. Louis’ evolution into a more diverse and tolerant city.
Graybridge Lane
Peter Shank, 71, is a painter who lives in the house he grew up in—the house his father, architect Isadore Shank, designed—in Ladue.
My parents moved away from St. Louis in the Depression. And then they decided, like so many people do in this city, to come back to raise a family. So they started looking for a piece of property to build a house. My father looked at some lots in Upper Ladue and Fordyce. And he started getting rejections, because almost all of the subdivisions had restrictions against Jews.
So he bought this piece of property with his business partner, who had the house right next door; it was just a large piece of property, and they made it into a subdivision. Of the original seven houses, two of the others were first cousins of my father’s, and then two were close friends. A lot of them were involved with the arts, which was very unusual for Ladue, which even then was an enclave of the wealthiest people. They were sort of the bohemians. Essentially all of the fathers and mothers were our fathers and mothers. We talk about it now, and we really think of it as an ideal childhood, sheltered from so many of the horrible things in this world, living in this little community.
Most of the kids that I grew up with and went to school with had a lot more money than we did. We’d have driving groups, and my brother Paul was brought home once by whoever was driving that day, and my mom said, “Who brought you home today, was that Teddy’s mother?” And Paul said, “No, it was Teddy’s father.” And my mom looked out the window, and it was the black chauffeur. That was the other side of Ladue.
When my parents got to be in their late eighties, early nineties, and I was running over from south St. Louis every day, I bought a house just around the corner here in the western end of University City, and that was a very smart thing to do. In four years it doubled in value, and when my mother died—she died second [after my father]—I was able to buy my brothers’ share of this house, and I moved in here with my partner.
I was so restless the first couple of months. I knew I was going to feel weird for a while, but it turned out to be the greatest thing. Maybe it was just the right time of your life to do that. I love the fact that those memories are always there; they’re attached to this house and this neighborhood and they can’t go away.
Now Jews can buy property in Ladue. But that’s never really been a concern of mine. More interesting to me was moving back into Ladue 10 years ago: I’m a gay man, moving back into this house with my partner, and Ladue [at one time] had a law that two unrelated people could not live in the same residence, which meant that technically, no gay couple could live in Ladue... There are lots of gay couples now living in Ladue.
It’s funny now, when you talk about this neighborhood, Graybridge, originally founded by a group of bohemian artists and Jewish people who were sort of on the periphery of Ladue—now there are a bunch of members of St. Louis Country Club that live here, because it’s right across the street; they all have their little golf carts, and they go up and down the road to the country club every day. — As told to R.M.
Little Athens
Virginia and Georgia Doumouras are sisters. They have lived in the same house—a few blocks from St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, the center of their lives—for 78 years.
Virginia: We moved here April 15, 1932. I was 12.
Georgia: And I was 10.
V: We shared a back bedroom—still do. Papin Street; Clayton, Chouteau, Gibson, and Arco avenues—the whole neighborhood had Greek families. In the ’40s and ’50s, they called it “Little Athens.” See? [She pushes forward a yellow legal pad.] I listed all the people who lived here: 34 on Chouteau, 14 on Gibson… I remembered them.
Most of the Greek people worked in restaurants. My father owned The Press downtown. Uncle Gus owned an ice-cream parlor and candy store at Kingshighway and Chouteau. We got a lot of people from the tennis courts.
G: We used to call them “our tennis courts.”
V: We went to Greek school three days a week after grammar school. Mrs. Andreades had been a teacher in Greece, a very dramatic lady. If you asked her how she was… [hand to her heart, she mimes a moaning sigh]. Georgia and I had little blue plaid satchels full of books. Once, I was misbehaving, and she came over and went like this [she whacks herself on the head] with my satchel!
G: Our textbooks were The Iliad and The Odyssey.
V: On Saturdays, the Greek ladies would go to the park with knives and a sack and dig up dandelions to eat. The black ladies would also go, but they would get the collards.
During World War II, Georgia and I joined the American Women’s Voluntary Services. We were trained to do fingerprinting! We sold war bonds and did marching drills, but we couldn’t march in the parades, because we couldn’t afford uniforms.
G: Greeks are very patriotic. And religious—the church was the center. I remember the priest would ask, “Did you mind your mother?” Only one time, Virginia got up and said, “No.”
V: No, no, you got it wrong. He said, “Have you been a good girl?” and I said, “No.” Because you don’t lie to
the priest.
G: The ice man would come up the alleys, and you would put a card in the window: “50,” “70,” however many pounds of ice you wanted. We’d blow fans over the ice, and we’d sleep out in the backyard. And we’d go to the [Muny] opera, and we’d walk home through the park—can you imagine?
V: The ladies of the neighborhood would congregate every afternoon in someone’s home and have Greek coffee and cookies. Some of the ladies loved the wrestling matches on TV. They thought it was real, and they would cuss the villain in Greek!
G: Our mother was a great cook. Dolmades, spanakopita, pastitsio. Our mother was known for her spinach pita. Our aunt was known for her galaktoboureko.
V: On name days—the feast day of the saint you were named for—there would be lamb, feta cheese, olives, baked bread, ouzo, Greek dancing in the yards. Some ladies wouldn’t drink the ouzo, and my mother would bring it back to the kitchen, and we would sneak it.
G: In the ’80s and ’90s, our neighborhood went through a pretty bad period, with drugs and crime.
V: I would look in the paper, maybe see what was for sale, and we’d take the dog for a ride and maybe get
ice cream.
G: We thought, isn’t it foolish of us to go into debt for an inflationary house? And now the neighborhood’s made a comeback, thanks to Wash. U.
V: [Chuckling.] One night, years before, they stopped my father to rob him. They told him to put his arms around the telephone pole, and they took his watch, and then they said, “Oh! Give it back to him! That’s Al!” — As told to J.C.
Click here for an extended version of this oral history.
Mill Creek Valley
Born in 1934, John Curtis grew up in Mill Creek Valley, the historically black neighborhood that had produced Josephine Baker 28 years earlier. By 1959, the entire neighborhood had been wiped out, its shops, theaters, and nightclubs replaced with bland businesses.
I lived in Mill Creek Valley all my young life. My grandfather, A.W. Curtis, had a big church, The Church of God in Christ, and a grocery store, Curtis Confectionery, at 2714 Clark. It was for black people—90 percent of the black people went to black stores. My father had a coal truck, and he made $200 to $300 a day, because black people didn’t have a choice, they had to buy from him.
I was an only child, and I was spoiled, but they kept my feet on the ground. We lived in a redbrick, two-family flat on Spruce Street—it’s the highway now. [Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge] Ronnie White’s father, Orville White, used to stay upstairs from me.
Our neighborhood went from Grand Boulevard all the way down to Tucker Boulevard, and from Olive Street over to where the railroad tracks are at. They had fortunetellers, but I didn’t believe in that. And they had what they called a red-light district. Now what did I know about them whores and prostitutes, runnin’ around in diapers seeing them red lights?
We played baseball, had a broomstick or something, and one of the kids pitched tin cans. Or we played cowboy with a mop stick. One of the kids was the Lone Ranger, and another couldn’t say “Tonto”—he said “Tonky”—so that’s what we called him. A lot of people had nicknames. Mine was “See See,” ’cause I’d say “See?” all the time.
See how clean these streets are? [He points.] That’s how Mill Creek was. Cleaner. There was a glass-bottle recycling plant over on Clark Street, and they paid for bottles, so you think there were bottles on the street?
But everybody talked about tearing down the slum. And most of those businesses they called development and progress, most of those businesses are gone.
[He nods toward the Wells Fargo Advisors tower at N. Jefferson Avenue and Olive Street.] People’s Finance was a black bank, looked just as nice as that. And see that Jefferson Bank? The London Theater was over that way. They didn’t have a toilet—can you say that in your magazine?—so we called it the Funky London.
Now on Jefferson, about half a block down, was the Star Theater. That was an upright, clean theater. They had a toilet. And most of the people who wanted to be dignified would go there. It cost about 15 cents. But they had cowboys at the Funky London, seven days a week. I’d look both ways to see if anybody I knew was lookin’, then rush in. It cost a nickel.
This Irish restaurant, Maggie O’Brien’s, was The Strand Theater. And Blue Moon Restaurant was at
22 ½ S. Beaumont. It was a tavern, so I never went in there. I couldn’t afford the Deluxe Restaurant, either—that was comparable to the finest restaurant today. Even the black movie stars were segregated back then, and when they came to St. Louis, that’s the only restaurant they ate at. Joe Louis, Cab Calloway, Count Basie...
You ever eat Taylor’s Sausage? Schnucks on Lindell Boulevard is the only store that sells them. It’s the only black-owned business from Mill Creek that’s still operating.
Mill Creek Valley was blighted in early ’50s. Most people went north, where I stay. — As told to J.C.
Gumbo Bottom
Jane Sehnert, 58, is the proprietress of Annie Gunn’s restaurant in Chesterfield, as well as The Smokehouse Market next door, where she grew up above the store.
This area was called Gumbo originally, known as Gumbo Bottom. Chesterfield was just around the corner. It was just a little cluster of homes. We were surrounded by cornfields, and you could walk across what is the highway now to get to the Missouri River, just all farmland. It was totally safe; you could get on your bike and ride anywhere, go visit a friend that was a couple miles away, and you would never worry about it.
Annie Gunn’s didn’t exist then; the Potroast Inn was there. Don Grauel and his brother Ralph ran it. It had 3.2 beer and a pool table in the back. I don’t even think it was air-conditioned; it was a country bar filled with local characters. They served hamburgers and pickled pigs’ feet. As a child, I wasn’t allowed to go in there very much. My dad would go over there and play pool.
A really big day when I was little was to go downtown and go to what is now Dillard’s, what used to be Stix, Baer & Fuller, and you’d go to the tearoom and you’d have a strawberry parfait—that was just the biggest day ever. And then when you’d make a purchase you’d have the little Stix, Baer & Fuller credit card, and the saleslady would say to my mother, “Chesterfield—now where is Chesterfield?” I always remember that. No one knew where it was.
It was pre–I-270, and people really didn’t go past Lindbergh Boulevard; that was the dividing line. I went to St. Joe’s Academy on Lindbergh and I remember the girls in my class, their parents wouldn’t even let them go to Chesterfield, it was way too far. When they came to visit me, it would be a really big deal. And now most of them live out here.
Now I make the trip to the city all the time, three times a week; we’re very close to everything. I think now if you really want a rural feeling, you have to live in Hermann or Labadie. It’s hard to tell where the boundaries of Chesterfield begin and end. It reaches out now for miles. There’s a lot more concrete, there’s a lot more buildings, there’s a lot more businesses, there’s a lot more people that have moved here from all parts of the world—you certainly don’t know all your neighbors now.
The whole world has changed. It’s a global economy now. I didn’t know anyone from Bosnia when I was growing up; I didn’t know anyone from France. Now we have little pockets of people all over St. Louis, and I love that. I love the diversity. And I love the way I grew up, that it was so rural and cozy and friendly and warm. — As told to R.M.
Gaslight Square
Trebor Tichenor was named after his father, Robert (his parents just reversed the letters). His band, the St. Louis Ragtimers, played in Gaslight Square, and they are still together 50 years later. Unlike other kids his age, Tichenor didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll. He was obsessed with St. Louis’ own indigenous music—ragtime.
My grandmother was very sympathetic to my interest in music. We found this place called the Gravois Music Center, near Bevo Mill… It was a record store that sold ethnic records, square-dance records, German records, all kinds of stuff. I used to go in there and start looking through the 78s. I bought anything that had the word “rag” on it. When I was 16, my grandmother found the first book on ragtime, which was published in 1950, They All Played Ragtime. I just got more and more obsessed with the music and the collecting. That’s all sheet music [he gestures to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase]. I have thousands, but all those folders were what was left of the old Hunleth Music Company downtown, and I bought all they had. Then, in the basement, I’ve got 10,000 piano rolls. I built my knowledge tune by tune, collecting this rag I’d never heard of, and then I went after the sheet music, and just built this great collection.
I finally found an incredibly good piano tuner, who’s made my old Steinway sound like it did in 1956. My grandmother bought it for me. She knew I was serious about the music. So we went downtown to Aeolian, and she said, “Pick one out.” It was these little Baby Grand Model S’s, a small-sized Steinway, that they don’t make anymore. I picked one out, and she plunked down $3,000. That piano is on its second set of hammers. [Walking into the next room, he points out an upright piano.] This is the piano I used to play down at Gaslight Square. I bought this in 1960 or ’61. This is a 1919, made in Chicago by the Cable Company. I kept it going, all these years. I played it open like this, so that people could watch the hammers.
The great thing about the Square was, you could find just about any kind of music there. At one time, I counted five Dixieland bands working. [Laughs.] There was modern jazz, as we used to call it, at a place called The Black Horse. That was where Jeanne Trevor sang. You could find any kind of music. The Crystal Palace had all this avant-garde stuff. From 1961 to ’64, we were at a place called The Natchez Queen. This was a club, and the front, as you walked in, it looked like the front of a boat. Beautifully appointed, with raised wallpaper. It was a first-class production. Then we moved down the street to a place called Bustles and Bows. That later became the Rooster Tail.
When we got to the Square, it was going full blast. At night, you could not even think about driving a car down Olive Street. That was where everybody went. And some of us had the illusion it was going to last. — As told to S.R.
Click here for an extended version of this oral history.
Watch a video of Trebor Tichenor playing the "Mapleleaf Rag"
North County
Charles Henson sits in a booth at Ferguson’s Corner Coffee House, with the city’s mayor several tables away. Since moving to North County nearly 40 years ago, Henson’s watched the neighborhood slowly change. He’s done his part to smooth the transition by helping start a group known as People Reaching Out for Unity and Diversity (PROUD). A former corporate director of community relations, founder of an HR consulting firm, and Wash. U. grad, Henson is currently unemployed.
In 1972, when I was 13, I moved from north St. Louis, near Wellston, to live with my grandma. She lived in unincorporated North County, on Mable Avenue, which was the dividing line between the Ferguson and Kinloch school districts. I was entering high school, and my mother, who’d grown up in Kinloch and was a teacher, thought I’d have a better opportunity here—plus, our old neighborhood was beginning to change, and our home in the city had gotten broken into several times.
When I first started at Ferguson-Florissant, it was at an all-white school. I’d just left an all-black school from K through eighth grade, and had limited exposure in that environment. I played football, so I started to develop some relationships with white kids prior to the start of school. I remember in the locker room, one of my teammates loaned me a bar of soap, and when I finished taking a shower, I couldn’t remember who he was, because everyone looked alike. I just remembered where his locker was, so I walked by with the soap out, and luckily, he reached out and grabbed it.
For my parents, the ideology was that I was in a better environment. In some ways, they were right—and in other ways, it was not the best experience. What was missing was the nurturing piece that I got in the city of St. Louis. Unfortunately, there were people in high school—classmates’ parents—who didn’t want me there. I had friends who’d tell me, “We can be friends here at high school, but you can’t come to my house.”
When my parents moved to Ferguson in ’75, our neighbors were predominantly white, and they slowly disappeared over time. Communities that surrounded Ferguson were thriving, but before you knew it, there were a lot more empty doors. The shopping centers and drive-ins and those kind of things that existed were disappearing. By the early 1990s, a lot of the early signs of white flight and economic flight had happened, and people were starting to hear rumors that America was changing, with the word “diversity” being used more often…
It’s just been an amazing, 180-degree turn of events. There’s finally a generation—if we as adults don’t screw them up—that says, “You decide on your friends based on what you have in common and like or dislike, not based on the color of your skin.”
My daughter graduated in 2008 from Ferguson-Florissant, where I’m on the school board. I was at the podium and said, “I graduated from this school, and my daughter’s now graduating here, and my mom”—who was 85 at the time and sitting in the audience—“could not attend Ferguson-Florissant School District as a child living in the district. And here I am now, sitting on that very board of governors who promoted that ignorance a long time ago.” Thank God things have changed. — As told to J.M.
Click here for an extended version of this oral history.
Web Exclusives
- View a gallery of "Then and Now" St. Louis historical images
- Read extended versions of three oral histories (Gaslight Square, Little Athens, and North County)
- Watch a video of Trebor Tichenor playing the "Mapleleaf Rag"
By Jeannette Cooperman, Jarrett Medlin, Robert Meyerowitz, and Stefene Russell, Edited by Stefene Russell, Photographs by Matt Marcinkowski
