There’s a deeply haunting image floating around the internet of a street scene in Saint Louis’s “Deep South” neighborhood in 1998. It is of a woman with a stroller being pushed by her teenage son who looks terrified. It was taken by Robin Knowles and shows an impoverished area in which African Americans still live.

“This is a place where people actually live…to be honest,” said Robin Knowles in a report posted by the Saint Louis Post Dispatch on June 18, 2007. “It is true that there are parts of the city where crime is certainly still an issue, but it is not so oppressive that people cannot live their lives normally.”

The neighborhood in which the street scene is located has been described as the “vast slum of south St. Louis.” According to Knowles, residents have two options: move to an area of north St. Louis called the “Jungle” (whose name is in reference to the breeding grounds of mosquitoes and malaria parasites found in the wild) or get “resettlement” from the government. The federal government, according to a report released in 2007 by the Saint Louis Public Health Department, has built 500 hundred or more public housing units since 1967.

There are, of course, neighborhoods like this throughout the United States. One could argue that the “nation’s soul” was ripped apart by urban unrest throughout the 1960s and 70s. In Saint Louis, the same was true. After a young white teenager was murdered on December 28, 1968, an angry mob burned down and destroyed more than 600 buildings in the majority black community of the Tuscaloosa district. It was the greatest black riot in America history. Thirty years later, in August 1991, arsonists burned down 72 buildings in the predominantly black part of Saint Louis.

What makes Saint Louis’s “Powder Room” story so tragic is that it wasn’t a spontaneous act. It was carefully orchestrated. The drug lord paid someone from the area to go into the drug dealer’s apartment, bring back the cash, and then transport it to a boat where it would be transported across the river to Chicago. The person who went to do this was Louis Pickett, according to a report by NBC News and other media outlets.

So what has happened to the saint?

Most of the original buildings are gone. There are still a few scattered here and there. The River City South, one of the largest public housing projects in the United States, was forced to close.

The demolition of the slums destroyed an entire neighborhood.

Every corner of the city has become a prime “drug territory.”

Due to the drug activity, crime and poverty, the area is a highly dangerous area to be in.

A CNN report was written about the conditions in the slums in 2004.

It showed the streets of the slums:

It showed the “bulbous, unkempt” homes, and said of one that has been abandoned, “Each window is broken out. Blood spatter stains the walls. The air is thick with the smell of mold.”

The article described the conditions inside:

Shattered furniture. Piles of dirty clothes. Shredded pictures and clothes thrown in the corners. Old mattresses. Metal dressers that look like they’re on their last legs. Shelves filled with expired medicine bottles. Walls covered in holes and tarps from being blown out by the wind. A refrigerator with a bullet hole in it.

Worst of all, a resident of the slums told the reporter how the area had grown dangerous for families to move in. “In the last couple of years, I have seen a lot of young guys going around with guns in their hands. Every day, they try to steal stuff,” said one resident.

According to another report, the Saint Louis area has the highest rate of slums and the highest rate of crime in the nation.

Additionally, according to a report by CNN, between 2000 and 2009, there has been an increase in the number of gang members in the area.

Residents of Saint Louis and other cities are being relocated from slums and in poor areas to areas like the north end of the city. Where there was crime and violence, there are now highly paid businesses, recreational areas and peaceful neighborhoods.

Where there was crime and violence, there are now highly paid businesses, recreational areas and peaceful neighborhoods.

One reporter wrote, “The commercial district is just one of many that have come into town since the slums were cleared out,” and said of one business “Located at the junction of Route 61 and Lindell Boulevard, the business has received millions of dollars worth of repairs in the last two years. One of the businesses that was re-built in the area is Signature Beverage Mart, which sells Pepsi products.”

Another reporter said, “For the first time in half a century, tens of thousands of residents are again living in a socially mixed community of middle-income neighborhoods.”

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reported in September 2008 that, “For years, the south side was left to wither after decades of decay.

Written by Robin Knowles 03/09/1992 © 2022 The Saint Louis Waterback Times Company