Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
God first spoke to Margaret Goldsmith about Old North roughly seven years ago, she says. Her primary residence at the time was Indianapolis. (Her ex-husband had served as mayor there.) She wasn’t even from St. Louis. Born into a family with a newspaper fortune, Goldsmith had grown up in Washington, D.C. Still, she had a connection to Old North, that small neighborhood less than a mile north of downtown that’s best known for Crown Candy Kitchen. Through some friends, she had met Daniel Blash, a Pentecostal pastor who preached at Fresh Anointing Church, at 14th Street and Sullivan. She came to town, heard his sermons, got to know some folks. Then one day, she says, the Lord began telling her to move to Old North. “I don’t argue with Him,” says Goldsmith, a Christian since her twenties.
So on subsequent visits, she’d explore. Peering out her windshield at the collapsing vacants, the weedy lots, and spruced-up brick houses, she’d inevitably get lost. (Old North boasts not only three areas on the National Register of Historic Districts but also two street grids that fuse at an angle.) She kept ending up at Warren and Blair. On the southeast corner stood a boarded-up building—which, she later learned, was built by German immigrants on the eve of the Civil War and is the city’s oldest remaining Lutheran church. She saw a “For Sale” sign. God told her to buy the property, she says. So, in 2015, she did.
Now she has a construction crew giving it a gut rehab. Her plan is to make the church a community center. She has ideas for it—tutoring for kids, activities for seniors, Christmas parties, art shows exclusively for Old North artists (of which there are many among the roughly 1,890 residents)—but she’s open to suggestions. A neighbor recently asked if there would be secular programming. Goldsmith, who doesn’t identify with any single denomination, replied: Absolutely.
“I’m much more interested in hearing from people what they want,” she says. “I’m not from here, but I know enough to know you don’t come in and tell people what they need.”
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Goldsmith is merely the latest outsider to feel drawn to this box cutter–shaped neighborhood with the topsy-turvy trajectory. Old North was once an independent ethnic-German village before it was swallowed by the city in 1841 and became home to Irish, Poles, and later, African Americans. (It’s now about 72 percent Black and 24 percent white.) It hollowed out in the second half of the 20th century, as so many urban-core neighborhoods did, such that in the early 2000s, developer Paul McKee was able to escape notice while buying a bevy of parcels through shell companies and letting them rot, concealing for a time his grand scheme to remake North St. Louis. After McKee’s plan became public, it failed to get traction. (He still owns many of the properties.)
In 2010, however, things looked promising for Old North. Its once-bustling main drag, Crown Square Mall on 14th Street, got a $35 million facelift. Home sales spiked. Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, which has served as both a neighborhood association and a community development corporation, had full-time staff to answer questions and push forward.
Then, once again, external forces slowed things down. The financial crisis took its toll. In 2013, the Restoration Group lost its regular federal funding and, as a result, its professional staff. “The volunteers have done a fantastic job of keeping the organization running,” says Doug Rasmussen, a 17-year resident and urban-planning consultant, “but in my view, to take it to the next level, it requires a person whose job is to live and breathe community development as a 60-hour-a-week job. It’s hard work.”
Into this context stepped Goldsmith. As a gift to the community, she funded a needs assessment—that is, a thorough investigation into Old North’s assets and the aspirations of its residents and property owners. A 13-member steering committee was convened, and Rasmussen’s firm was hired to guide the process, which entailed 20 virtual meetings and survey input from 104 stakeholders. The topline results: Folks were fond of the historic architecture, the tight-knit feel, and the location, but they saw decrepit buildings and crime as liabilities. The respondents wanted to tackle those issues, offer more options for kids, and ramp up investment.
Rev. Paulette Sankofa, who runs a nonprofit for seniors a couple blocks east of Crown Candy, says her main concern is putting pressure on “slumlords” to maintain their properties. (About half of Old North’s 990 housing units are rentals.) She says she feels ambivalent about needs assessments in general. To her, their inherent limitation is that people can’t ask for what they’ve never imagined—for instance, she dreams of creating a museum of textile and fabric art of the African diaspora, which could attract tourists. “This community has a capacity for so much,” she says.
Holston Black III agrees. An engineer by training who worked at Boeing/McDonnell Douglas for 28 years, Black bought his house on Hebert in 2014 and now chairs the restoration group’s development committee. He ticks off his reasons for optimism. One is that private investment continues to trickle in. LMAC Holdings is converting the former Webster School into senior homes, and, as of last year, there were eight or nine houses being restored. (Black says he recently gave a tour to some investors from Atlanta who marveled at the old trees and low prices.)
Then he mentions the $1.7 billion facility being built for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It will be a 10- to 15-minute walk from Old North, though Black is unsure how much impact a high-security federal complex will have. Financing for nearby homes still isn’t easy to obtain, he observes. “People on our side of the neighborhood have had trouble getting mortgages over $200,000, and these are people who work at Wash. U.”
Another reason for optimism is philanthropic projects. The Kranzberg Arts Foundation, for example, has partnered with the ONSLRG to rehab a couple properties. And then there’s Goldsmith, who Black says has been refreshingly willing to show up and speak with residents. Black aims to help her. “One thing we all agree on,” Black says, “is that we do want to have more neighbors.” Goldsmith hopes to be one soon. For now, she stays in a condo in the Central West End but is actively looking for a house in Old North.
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
On a hot summer afternoon, she gives me a tour through her church building’s musty, cavernous second story. Leading me over to an open window, she points out overgrown lots across the alley. They’ve been city-owned for years. Row houses had recently stood on them, but they were destroyed by fire. She says she wants some assurance from the city that it will at least protect its own properties, which abound in Old North, before she invests more. “There are three pieces of property in Old North I’d go after in a heartbeat, but I won’t because of what’s next to them,” she says.
She reflects quietly, adding: “When I bought this church, I didn’t think about all the challenges. I’ve renovated a lot of things in my life but nothing like this.”
