It’s time again to remind everyone just how much the interstate highway system destroyed so much of St. Louis. And more importantly, it should be noted that often the neighborhoods left behind were devastated just as badly by the mere presence of the interstate racing past them. This author thought of this recently while exploring one of those orphan streets that so often forlornly lie facing a rusty chain link fence or a perhaps worse, a giant weedy embankment across the street.
While there are countless examples across the city where highway construction has torn apart communities, perhaps it is no more obvious, no more glaring than the Old North neighborhood. Laid out as a planned community at a time when most of the Grand Prairie was still countryside, the suburb of North St. Louis possessed its own Market Street and an independent street grid punctuated by three circular public spaces in the middle of town: one for a church, one for a park, and one for a school.
Then the interstate came, crashing through Old North just to the east of the three public spaces, thrusting the soot and noise of the automobile into the middle of the neighborhood. The author spoke to a longtime resident who remembers when the demolitions began, including her local parish. Attending a worship service the night before the church’s destruction would begin, the woman related how the general consensus in the air was unanimous: Old North would never be the same, and while only a portion of the actual neighborhood would be demolished, it would alter the community forever. She says many people decided the interstate construction was a message that it was time to move on to the suburbs. Even worse, if someone was unlucky enough to end up on the east side of I-70, they would find themselves bracketed by the noise of industry along North Broadway on one side, and the roar of the interstate on the other. While a few houses still remain, the empty and weed-choked lots that permeate the streets of the eastern half of Old North are a testament to the damage done.
The damage continued into the 1970s, this time with the completion of I-44 through South St. Louis. Its destruction was very democratic: parts of The Hill were lost, while august mansions in Compton Heights came crashing down for the right-of-way. Walking the streets of those communities, enjoying the close-knit community shaken but not destroyed on the Hill, or gazing upon the Beaux-Arts beauties of Compton Heights, the enjoyment is always tempered by this author with the sad knowledge that the same community and elegance existed sometimes right across the street where the interstate sits only 50 feet from what was spared.
Perhaps no better place illustrates this than three houses that sit all by themselves, just to the east of Reservoir Park. They are in perfect condition, lovingly maintained and restored, but all of the houses around them are gone. The street in front is really not even a street anymore, but more of an alley the highway builders grudgingly installed to allow people to drive in front of their houses. It should be noted, when building I-55 through Dutchtown, some houses were left with the interstate literally in their front yard, the street in front of them dispensed with during construction.
And finally, if one does not care about historic architecture, it should be noted that highway planners seemed almost obsessed with routing interstates through the city’s great parks: with the exception of Fairgrounds and Tower Grove Parks, all of the largest parks in the city have been invaded by the interstate. It has continued to the present day; only in the last couple of decades Creve Coeur Lake Park received its own interstate intruder in the form of the Page Avenue Extension. The interstate highway system may be a marvel of engineering, but this author wonders if anything so wondrous could be so disastrous to our cities.
