Old Kroger, Ohio Avenue Just South of Cherokee Street

This is the former home of Kroger's, robbed at gunpoint in 1959 by none other than James Earl Ray.

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.

St. Louis: Playground to the Entire Region

Why does it seem like everyone who wants to engage in illegal activity feel the need to come down to the City of St. Louis to cause trouble? I've started to notice--and it's a trend that certainly has been going on for a long time--that many of the high profile crimes in the city recently have been committed by non-St. Louis City residents.

Take the drag race on the Near North Riverfront a few weeks ago where a teenage girl was hit by two other teenagers racing by her. Neither of the drivers, using open, public streets that any innocent person could have wandered into in the middle of their race, were from St. Louis City. One suspect was from Glen Carbon, the other from South St. Louis County. After scanning Google Maps, I located several places where these young ruffians could have engaged in their 'sport' without having to drive to the big, dark, scary city:

Bluff Road looks like the perfect place for young Trenton Pinckard to have raced his car without having to put the citizens of another municipality in danger.

Likewise, William Mack Sapp could have easily "kicked butt" in a drag race along arrow-straight Union Road; the curve over the I-55 interstate bridge could make racing there have a new twist.

As I arrived for work at the Art Museum, I stepped over beer bottles left by revelers on Art Hill who had come to sled on its famous slope. Since when did the City have to absorb all of the region's troublemakers? Couldn't they cause trouble in their own communities?

Elevated Lanes of I-70, Laclede's Landing

I have no idea why a whole herd of people were being arrested under the interstate last Sunday.

Murder

A girl is dead, and this is all the Post has to say about it?

Murder and Geography

Interesting...while murders have increased in the City of St. Louis overall, there has been a dramatic decrease in the southern half of the city. See the interactive map here.

Anti-Crime Shrubbery

I found this interesting article about the use of specific shrubs that work well as barriers to burglars trying to get in through windows or onto your property. An ingenious and aesthetically pleasing way to stop intruders.