The Horseshoe, Completely Gone

I had the opportunity to get a ride up to the infamous Horseshoe, a section of one way street that loops around a desolate corner of Wells-Goodfellow.

I asked one of my students, a St. Louis police officer, about the area, and he informed me that he actually grew up on the Horseshoe, and its terrible, violent reputation was well deserved.

Sadly, what a developer had thought would be a perfect neighborhood where children could play in the streets without fear of vehicular traffic became a recipe for another kind of traffic. Since the street was one way, the police had to enter at the top of the Horseshoe, providing plenty of time for drug dealers on the lower half of the loop to be warned of their approach by their confederates.

The official explanation for the Horseshoe's demolition was that it was in a flood plain and the land was needed for MSD's use as a retention pond.

Maybe so, but I can't help but think it worked out well that Wells-Goodfellow was finally rid of this street.

It's so sad to see what was clearly a beautiful quiet oasis in the city to come to this. Every house is gone now.
Watch a sensationalized show about the area.

Wells-Goodfellow #3: The House of Horrors

As I’m sure many of you had, I read the reports last week of the atrocious torture and killing of six dogs in an abandoned apartment building in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis. While I consider the building in question, at 5321 Wells Avenue, to be in Wells-Goodfellow, nonetheless it is in one of the most deeply troubled areas of the city.

While not the smartest action to take, I felt a personal need to go see this neighborhood, and perhaps get some sort of grasp of how this happens. I set out for the street, and reached it from South City in about fifteen minutes. I was expecting a bombed out neighborhood, with only a few houses scattered here and there surrounded by dense undergrowth, as I had seen in other part of Wells-Goodfellow. Much to my surprise (though certainly predicted by Google Maps), the streets around the apartments in question are still densely populated, with few empty lots and only a few abandoned houses. How did the sound of six dogs being tortured to death go unnoticed? It seems to be an impossibility.

I turned down Arlington Avenue from MLK Dr. and saw dozens of people out in the street, and I got the distinct feeling I was being watched. When I reached the corner of Arlington and Wells, I realized that it was not a good idea to proceed down the street. Out in front of a corner store were a group of young men, all dressed identically in red polo shirts, loitering. They saw me and started yelling unintelligibly. If you look back at the pictures Stray Rescue posted, you can see the gang graffiti features a reference to the Bloods street gang. Did those young men perhaps know who had committed the unspeakable acts in the apartments a block away down Wells Avenue?

I wasn’t waiting around to find out, and proceeded another block down Arlington, turned down the next street parallel to Wells Avenue and then turned out onto Union Avenue and headed back downtown. I snapped some furtive photographs from my car, which give you an impression of what the area looks like.

My investigation raises some questions in my mind. Clearly people on Wells Avenue knew exactly what was going on in that house of horrors, where six dogs were mutilated and tortured over the course of several weeks, based on the state of decomposition of several of the dogs. The drug dealing had been going on there for a while as well. Were they too terrified or too apathetic to contact the police? Considering how blatantly those gang members were showing themselves out in broad daylight with little fear of harassment by the police, I suspect the former. In fact, I have never seen such obvious gang presence in the city of St. Louis, anywhere.

Also, why the heck does the woman who owns this building even own it? She's not doing anything with it, and just letting it sit and rot and become a haven for crime. The city will never, ever recover until it gets serious about absentee slumlords, allowing their "investment properties" to be maintained like this. She should answer for her negligence as well, since she is legally responsible for what happens on her property. "I'm trying my best," a common refrain of slumlords when confronted by news cameras, is not good enough.

It also begs the question, how did this obviously once nice neighborhood fall so far? If you look at Google Maps, you can see the huge yards and stately homes that propagate in this area. Judging from the housing stock, I would suspect it was middle to upper middle class, correlating with what I have read about Wells-Goodfellow in books about the city. The apartment building where the crimes occurred is actually a beautiful building, and probably once commanded high rents. Its huge backyard once probably hosted innumerable barbeques and pick-up baseball games, but one hundred years later, it hosts nothing but horrors.

Update: A man has been charged in the crimes, according to media reports.

Last Remaining Gasometer

Once one of four gasometers built in the St. Louis area, it is now the last one, clinging to life in splendid isolation on Natural Bridge Avenue.

Wells-Goodfellow #2

I visited the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood several years ago, focusing on St. Louis Avenue. I returned and while I tried to retrace my steps, I saw many new things.

I know that for many people, the neighborhood represents everything that is wrong with St. Louis, and dismissively refer to it as the "ghetto," but I want to be more idealistic.

Yes, it's disturbing to see just how badly this portion of the city has fallen, and much of the area looks semi-rural due to abandonment, which is what the neighborhood was for much of its history.

What remains is just as beautiful of any area of the city west of Kingshighway, but just a little rough around the edges.

I hope to get back soon and explore this varied and interesting area more.

Borderlands, Skinker Parkway and Kienlen Avenue

Most St. Louisans have driven Skinker between Highway 40 and Delmar, but it continues on for several more miles and changes its name to Kienlen Avenue, skirting the border of the city and county.

What is surprising is the large number of relatively recent, if certainly bombed-out apartment complexes lining the street.

The area, long rural throughout St. Louis's history, has a distinctive suburban quality to it. It doesn't seem like a great place to live without a car, but it seems many of the residents rely on public transit.

There is still a lot of activity, as this seafood restaurant in a former Church's Chicken(?) attests. It might not always be pretty, but it is certainly still alive.

A Couple of Buildings Along Martin Luther King Dr.

Arlington School

Renovations have commenced and are well under way at the Arlington School on King Dr. Located in the middle of a large group of new houses, it should look great when it is done.The red brick facade, combined with the red terracotta decorative elements makes for a beautiful building.

Wohl Community Center

What a strange and unique building the Wohl Community Center is. Built in a part of the city that had already developed decades before, the center brought Mid-Century architecture to the corner of Kingshighway and Martin Luther King Boulevards at Sherman Park.It was locked the day we went, but the glass walls allow the visitor to look into most of the building.It is still in good shape, so its future hopefully is safe.The combination of the rustic rock wall with the streamlined walls of the building create an interesting contrast.

Modernist Enclave in North St. Louis

Thanks to Toby Weiss and Matt Mourning, I was alerted to a fascinating street in North St. Louis, where the early Twentieth Century architecture switches to Modernist architecture of the mid-century.Perfectly preserved, and still maintained, these houses face other houses across the street built fifty years before.Expect a more detailed and more informative post from B.E.L.T. in the near future.There appears that nothing was ever on this spot, despite being in the heart of the city. Nearby Handy Park was apparently a quarry, and perhaps they used this block for storage.Update: Toby Weiss has posted a much more detailed post on this fascinating block here.

West End North into Wells-Goodfellow

St. Louis Avenue

Norwood Square, Wells-Goodfellow

Norwood Square has already been thoroughly and eloquently documented here, but I offer up my own pictures as a chronicle of the rise and fall of Norwood Square.
According to a neighborhood boy, this is where the "rich" people live.
It is sad to think that the settling of the ground, so visible in the bends and cracks on the houses, will eventually claim many of the wonderful homes on this unique subdivision.