Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of Missouri History Museum
St. Malachy's, at 2900 Clark St., being demolished.
Today, it is hard to believe that 20,000 people lived in the area west of downtown known as the Mill Creek Valley. But until the early 1960s, when the neighborhood was demolished for urban renewal, it was the center for much of the African-American cultural life of St. Louis. And at the center of that cultural life for those thousands of people were well over 40 churches, all of them demolished in the course of only a couple of years. While many of those congregations moved on to other locations in the central corridor or North St. Louis, others simply ceased to exist. They tell the story of African-American religious life in this city, and how so often civic leaders’ grand plans uproot and disrupt the lives of the most vulnerable members of society. Here are some of these churches’ stories.
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Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Union Memorial Methodist Church at Pine and Leffingwell, photographed in 1901, when it was Temple Israel.
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Photo by Chris Naffziger
Union Memorial Methodist Church in its second location, on Belt Avenue
Union Memorial United Methodist Church was located at the corner of Pine Street and Leffingwell; its address was 208 North Leffingwell, despite a front door facing Pine Street. Like many African-American institutions, the church had purchased a pre-existing building, the old Temple Israel, which had moved west, vacating the aging residential blocks west of Jefferson that were built after the Civil War. Founded in 1846, Union Memorial is one of the oldest African-American congregations in St. Louis. But while it could not save its building in Mill Creek—despite a newspaper article at the time reporting attempts to preserve the structure—Union Memorial went on to build a stunning new Modernist church in the West End. Still a landmark, it’s just south of Page Boulevard on Belt Avenue.
Photo by Henry Mizuki
Looking east on Chestnut, with the former St. Paul's A.M.E. Church on the right.
St. Paul A.M.E. Church also had an address on North Leffingwell (No. 15) though it faced Lawton Avenue, which was the name for Chestnut Street when it entered the Mill Creek neighborhood. St. Paul A.M.E. was the first church building in St. Louis that an African-American congregation built for themselves. It was one of the last structures demolished, and there are surreal photographs surviving of the church standing alone in a wasteland, surrounded by weed-choked vacant lots. The building originally stood next to one of the tallest buildings torn down in Mill Creek. A newspaper from 1964 details an attempt by the congregation to buy the building back from the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority. The attempt failed, the church was demolished, and the congregation moved to Hamilton Avenue in the West End.
Photo by Irv Schankman; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The interior of Memorial Baptist Church, photographed in 1960
At 2726 Pine Street, Memorial Baptist Church was another church with a rich history in Mill Creek. Its pastor was the Rev. Jasper Caston, who was also the Sixth Ward alderman—at a time when African-American representation on the Board of Aldermen was still rare. Tragically, he died in 1950, in a car accident near Hannibal. He was only 51 years old.
Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The end of St. Malachy's, 1959.
There was also a Roman Catholic parish, St. Malachy’s, in Mill Creek. St. Malachy’s ceased to exist when it was demolished in 1859, but it was already nearly a century old. Founded in 1860 as an Irish parish, it became an African-American parish as the demographics of the neighborhood changed. In 1941, the Jesuit order took over operation of the church. Archdiocesan records reveals a fascinating and deeply moving correspondence between a Jesuit priest, Father Zimmerman, and other Catholic officials as they watched the City of St. Louis demolish his parishioners’ homes. Someone even took the time to write up the history of the Jesuit period of pastoral care in Latin.
Sadly, the Jesuits’ efforts for their African-American parishioners were unsuccessful. While the archbishop at the time, Joseph Ritter, is famous for desegregating the Archdiocese’s schools and hospitals, even he did not have the power to stop the LCRA as it used eminent domain to buy up the houses where St. Malachy’s parishioners lived. Father Zimmerman wrote about his concerns about the demolition of his parishioners’ modest homes; crunching the numbers for the proposed development, he realized there was simply not enough new low-income housing being built. Where were his parishioners going to go? The letter to the archdiocese seizing the church from the LCRA has been preserved, and it lays out in cold, bureaucreatic terms exactly when the Archdiocese was to turn over the property and when all the sacred objects needed to be removed, so St. Malachy’s could be torn down.
Scanning through old newspaper articles and letters, I could clearly see a lack of planning or coherent central authority in the redevelopment of Mill Creek. In one article, a historic African-American church is to be replaced by a housing project. A couple of years later, the church is being replaced by an industrial park. Nearly 70 years later, we know what became of the sites of many of those demolished churches: They are vacant lots.
In other words, many of those churches could still be standing, providing a sense of community and continuity. And yet throughout St. Louis, civic leaders still assure us that all this city needs is just one more cleared piece of land for a renaissance to take place.
