Reason‘s Scott Shackford reports,
A small St. Louis suburb has agreed to stop trying bankroll its government with a vicious regime of petty fines so excessive that the town has cited more than a third of its population.
The town is Pagedale. When I look at it on the map, I see it is where I lived from about age 3 to about age 10. I had remembered my home town as Olivette, but now I see that Olivette is a nearby community, sort of in between Pagedale and Clayton. A few random memories:
1. St. Louis County has many tiny jurisdictions, and they have always had to rely on fines for revenue. My first and only speeding ticket came from one of those places, where the speed trap was the main money-maker.
2. When I lived there, Pagedale was not racially integrated. But its social class range was wide, mostly lower middle class but including some professionals and even a few wealthy businessmen. One of the businessmen owned a small electronics factory where I worked a couple of summers in college. Another owned a drive-in movie theater that showed porn, which got him arrested more than once. He and his wife also had a vacation home and a boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, and I got to go water skiing with them once. I guarantee you that today no one living in Pagedale has a vacation home and boat. A couple of years ago I saw house advertised for well under $50K. It was on the same street where the theater owners used to live, and it was the same type of house as theirs.
3. When the Fair Housing Law was passed, real estate agents told residents to sell ASAP, before the Negroes (the 1960s term) started to move in and property values went down. This prophecy (aka “blockbusting”) became self-fulfilling. Probably at least 80 percent of homeowners did sell, and Pagedale quickly became a black neighborhood. We had been renters, not homeowners, and we happened to be away on my father’s sabbatical while the blockbusting took place. When we returned, my mom’s best friend insisted that we move to the jurisdiction with the best reputation for schools, which was the suburb of Clayton. So Pagedale faded out of my life, although I still go back there every time I visit St. Louis.
One of the strangest of modern realities of the US, is how most Americans so willingly leave behind their hometown and then they get very sentimental about years later.
1) It is probably best to assume de-segregation was going to happen to matter what even without the government housing authority. And it is best to remember the bad aspects of segregation as well. I lived in a working class town in Maryland similar to your experience, I think back how a successful African-American family in 1979 had to pay my fifth grade friend $.50 a week to walk with their first grade child to school. (Back then we told the African-American was naughty and would not go school on his own. Later I heard the truth from my parents)
2) Even in SoCal Orange County (moved in 1980), I find how much has both changed but remained relatively the same. From my parents house, there is a huge Korean mini-mall.
de Tocqueville: “In America a man builds a house for his old age and then sells it before the roof is on.”
The general point of mobility would make a good topic for a discussion. Sentimentality and nostalgia is a human condition. The American moving to-and-fro seems to be an old tradition. Some, but not all it, seems to be moving to capitalize on real estate value appreciation…
Yea, there is some crazy stuff that happens as in Compton and Oakland they have older people driving around like the old 1980 or early 1990 gang days. And really we don’t want the return to those days. (Yes, I know Oakland is becoming gentrification but in the case of Compton what really demographically changed was the ‘Latino gentrification’ of the city. SoCal largest Hispanic mall is off the 105 freeway.)
Part of it is just the psychological shifts that happen in the life cycle. Something similar happens with attitudes towards one’s parents.
And part of it is selective memory. But part of it is also real and legitimate. People really do remember some things that were better and preferable about those places.
And also, professional opportunities are not equally distributed by geography and urban scale. Far from it. Many folks would move back to their home towns (or college towns) if it meant the same job with the same income, which could go much farther and afford a nicer lifestyle. But that’s not where the jobs are, because that’s not where they could be.
Decadence and decay do happen; it’s not always an artifact of “get off my lawn” nostalgia.
I did notice that Pagedale is only 3-4 miles from the West Lake landfill, which also happens to be a huge nuclear waste superfund site. The landfill is permanently on fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill
A few years ago, traveling out of St. Louis to the August Busch Conservation Area, we stumbled upon this, several square miles that were closed to the public for years because the federal government made bomb materials (including radioactive ones) there. Eventually, all the bad stuff got bulldozed into a big pile on top of several impermeable layers and capped with about 8 different layers to keep out rain, plants, and varmints and to keep in residual radiation. You can climb the pile, which is cool. And there’s also a nice museum. A serendipitous highlight of that vacation.
One thing I was surprised to learn: people were thrown off their land and the area was closed as a war measure, but it was done before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Arsenal of Democracy indeed.
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/05/a-pile-of-nuclear-waste-now-tourist.html
I’m sorry, but I just want to ask if “porn at a drive-in” is a typo. I mean, weren’t convertibles common at that time?
The Rock Road Drive-In in Pagedale did indeed show porn movies if that is your question.
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/8632
Wow. I’ve never truly realized what the MAGA crowd are nostalgic for until I read that.
I was a toddler in Olivette in the mid 70s, and I recall being the only white kid in my kindergarten class. I also seem to recall being shot at (as a four-year-old). Apparently the area went downhill pretty bad.
Everything changes.
In Fresno it is the meth crowd, the neighborhood to the west a few blocks from me in Fresno. The third generation is starting, the lost kids whose mothers are dying or gone from drugs, the dads gone. These young adults are mostly living in garages and patio, running around trying to find ameth or opioid fix.
The effect was multi-racial, except blacks avoided the catastrophe, somehow.
My parents grew up in St Louis and we moved back when I was 13. I have some nostalgic love for St Louis (go Cards) but I’m not sure if there is a worse governing structure in the United States that the nearly 100 municipalities that make up St. Louis County coupled with the separation from the city.
Part of Olivette was zoned for Ladue schools, I imagine that part held up well. I love some of the great old architecture in Clayton like Broadmoor and Carrswold.