We boxed up our November history issue yesterday, and since you can't talk about the history of St. Louis without addressing the ol' urban renewal thing,I thought I'd post this gem from archive.org. "The Dynamic American City," was produced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1956, and the script could've been penned by Mister Robert Moses himself, with its disgust with 19th-century buildings and brash talk of Modern architecture and autocentric urban planning. The thesis is this: we can prevent people from moving to the suburbs by clearing out old neighborhoods wholesale and putting up Modernist buildings, especially ones where people can park, work and live in one place. St. Louis makes a short cameo appearance, with much praise from the narrator about how much of the urban fabric we've cleared out—judging from where Busch Stadium stands in relation to the camera, the demolished neighborhood is likely Hop Alley, St. Louis' Chinatown. (Though please, historians and preservationists, let me know if I'm wrong here.) There's also some great footage of Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower, the architect's only skyscraper.
The Dynamic City
This 1956 U.S. Chamber of Commerce film praises demolition in St. Louis, as the 19th-century city falls to the wrecking ball in the name of Modernism and the car.
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