Photo courtesy of John Cruz
Charlesetta Taylor's house on its way to St. Louis Avenue.
Charlesetta Taylor’s house has safely arrived at its new location on St. Louis Avenue.
Due to the expertise and hard work of the men and women of Expert Home Movers, there appears to be little to no damage to her house after having traveled almost a mile across the St. Louis Place neighborhood on Sunday. The architecture of Taylor’s home fits in perfectly with its new neighbors on St. Louis Avenue, and I’m sure only the keenest eyes in the future will notice that the house sits on concrete foundations and not stone. Perhaps publicity of the house’s move to its new location will encourage more people to go up to St. Louis Place and discover the beauty of the neighborhood’s architecture, particularly along its eponymous main artery.
While Ms. Taylor’s story has a happy ending, for the vast majority of homeowners, the ending continues to be far from happy.
See also: A day in the life of a doomed St. Louis neighborhood
In an off-hand sentence in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, the author repeats the claim that all residents were given the offer of moving their house at City expense. Sheila Rendon, whose house she owned with her husband Gustavo, was taken by eminent domain, begs to differ. In a St. Louis Public Radio article, Otis Williams, the director of the St. Louis Development Corporation—which is charged with clearing the site for the National Geospatial Mapping Agency—makes such a claim. Are we really to believe that out of the several dozen home owners, Ms. Taylor was the only one to take the City up on its offer?
Having attended the eminent domain hearing for the Rendons’ house, I reviewed my recording of the meeting and no offer to move their house came up in the hearing. And with all due respect to Mr. Williams’s architectural tastes, the Rendons’ half-flounder house was very much a worthy candidate for moving to a new location on historical importance. In fact, their house is very indicative of the working class urban fabric of the St. Louis Place neighborhood; most houses were modest, not large mansions like those seen on St. Louis Avenue.
Knowing all of this, I was disturbed to see that the general public is still under the impression that the eminent domain of St. Louis Place went smoothly and all residents are happy with their current situation. As I said above, that is far from true. Adrienne Davis’s adult daycare is currently out of business, and she is now struggling to get back her licenses which require a new address.
Photo courtesy of John Cruz
Other residents are discovering their new St. Louis County real estate taxes are substantially higher than their former residences in St. Louis Place. The Rendons’ new house is located in a thriving part of St. Louis Place, but the building needs major repairs to receive an occupancy permit. The last time I saw Gustavo, he was coated in white dust, having been hard at work, repairing their new house given to them by the Land Reutilization Authority. It needs its roof replaced, as well as a portion of its exterior wall. It goes without saying that of course the interior needs major repairs due to its exposure to the elements.
And perhaps most frustrating was the cavalier dismissal of Ms. Taylor, the Rendons, Ms. Davis and others that they did not live in a “real neighborhood.” Such a comment harkens back to the infamous dismissal of working class neighborhoods by Robert Moses, who attempted to rebuild New York into a “Modernist Paradise,” demolishing lower-income housing and slashing interstates across its vibrant urban landscape. Thankfully, his interstates planned for Manhattan were stopped, but the damage to much of the island’s historic neighborhoods still happened.
To untrained, bourgeois eyes such as Moses’s and others, a working-class neighborhood with peeling paint and a few loose bricks must be destroyed. In particular, Italian-American neighborhoods were extremely distressing to Moses. Never bothering to step inside their houses and witness their immaculate cleanliness and savory aromas of food cooking on the stove, he instead judged the slightly rough exteriors as proof of “degeneracy” and “blight.”
See also: The human stories behind the abstract phrase "eminent domain"
I can assure those who deem the St. Louis Place “not a real neighborhood” have never actually visited the area in question or spoken to its former residents. On the dozen or so visits I made last year, among the weed-choked lots owned by Paul McKee, the community had real warmth, love, and concern for one another. Neighbors would walk back to their house to get their cool modernist sugar bowl for my coffee, and the smell of the Rendons’ barbecue fired up and loaded with hamburgers and hot dogs are some of my fondest memories of last summer. In contrast, I live in a “hot” neighborhood on the Southside where a neighbor’s telephone book sat on his front porch for four months because he literally never comes out his front door. If that is considered a desirable community, I don’t know what to say.
So why do I keep harping on this subject? Because I want an acknowledgement by St. Louis leaders, not in their lawyers’ legalese, that admits real people were hurt in the City’s pursuit of the NGA. Why is that so hard to do?
