Whose violence?

I was in St. Louis September 14-15, 2017, to speak at the Pulitizer Arts Foundation.  While there, Sophie Lipman, the public programs and engagement manager, took to me to see neighborhoods and meet local activists.  Everyone I met on Thursday, the 14th, shared their anxiety about the Stockley Decision, which was expected on Friday, the 15th.  This was the case of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, who had killed Anthony Lamar Smith after a high speed chase.  Stockley was recorded as saying he was going to kill Mr. Smith; Stockley was also accused of planting a gun on him.  Activists in St. Louis were deeply involved in the protests in Ferguson, after the death of Michael Brown.  Their agitation was evident, their pain at the situation deep.

Their emotions, I thought, were resonances of the harsh reality of segregation in the city.  They explained the "Delmar Divide," a boulevard that divides the city into white and affluent and black and devastated.  The landscape is so shockingly different that I gasped when at the difference when we crossed from the black neighborhood into the white neighborhood.  One of the activists I met was new to the city.  She shared that when she first started to travel around the northside, she would weep at the catastrophe.

When the inevitable "not guilty" verdict was delivered, the protests sprang up, decrying, once again, that a policeman could not be punished for obvious murder.  As the anger erupted, and some violence flared, Mayor Lyda Krewson was quoted as saying, "We understand the desire to disrupt but we will not understand the desire for destruction or for harming people.  We will protect all our residents."

One doesn't have to spend more than five minutes north of Delmar Boulevard to feel the hollowness of this statement, and the decrying of violence on the part of protesters.  The systematic violence of racism and class oppression is the great violence in St. Louis, as elsewhere in the United States.

We might make a new chant, to follow, "Whose streets? OUR streets": "Whose violence? THEIR violence."

Beautiful + What?

I had the pleasure of visiting St. Louis November 14th.  I wanted to visit the site of the Mill Creek Valley Urban Renewal Project, as well as the site of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project.  I was staying at the Hilton at the Ballpark -- a delightful hotel -- and these sites were close by.  I also got to see the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which includes the Gateway Arch.  All of these places turn out to flank a downtown mall, which starts at the Old Courthouse, and ends by Union Station.  What splendor!  The arch is a stunning site and the museum well worth a visit.  The Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott trial took place, is one of the most important places in American history.  Union Station, designed by Theodore C. Link, is a magnificent building, and a major project in adaptive reuse.  And the mall is also an attraction.  Yet, sadly, the magnificence is not well-used.  You would think that such a charming spot would be full of people but everywhere I went, the streets were empty.  There were a scattering of tourists in the park, but that was it.  Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist, made the observation that parks need people.  In general, she was quite skeptical about open space, seeing it as a potential rupture in the tight coherence of occupation that makes a city hum.  She was decidedly opposed to the orthodox view, as propounded by the great park designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, that city people are longing for great open spaces.   Evidence on the Jacobs' side: the most active place I was visited with the tiny stretch of historic waterfront, which is full of restaurants, shops and people strolling about.  St. Louis has much of beauty but to make the city vibrant again, its leaders might rethink all that open space that replaced what once was its energetic urban core.