Scattered Ruins on an Urban Prairie

STL Streets paid a visit to the abandoned Spivey Building in downtown East St. Louis this summer. My old job used to take me there and to other places in East St. Louis quite a bit. East St. Louis is a strange land - not so much a ghost town as it is scattered ruins on an urban prairie.

No more than 50 years ago, East St. Louis was a bustling burg. Its downtown storefronts were occupied, its theaters full, and its houses occupied. The decline of the heavy manufacturing industry and the institution of the interstate highway system catalyzed East St. Louis's precipitous decline. (The interstate highway system may actually have had the most physically debilitating effect, walling-off the city both from itself and from the rest of the metropolitan area, while passing it by.)

James Kunstler writes a lot about how our current economic arrangement, and resulting urban and suburban landscape, are predicated on assumptions of cheap and available gasoline. Exurban housing developments and strip malls really make little sense unless a fleet of automobiles can take these developments' inhabitants to, from, and within them. Kunstler predicts in the near future a cataclysmic event where a quick and sustained rise in oil prices brings about a "Long Emergency" for our society. Basically, the cars will stop running, and the automobile-based infrastructure will be useless in meeting society's needs.

I have difficulty seeing a cataclysmic event, but I do wonder whether, say 50 years from now, much of the housing developments in exurban "fastest-growing counties" such as St. Charles County will resemble the urban prairies of East St. Louis (maybe even more like prairies - vinyl-sided housing probably lasts less than half as long as brick buildings).

When the assumptions predicated on certain types of land development cease to match the realities, abandonment happens in a hurry.

I would be remiss to write of East St. Louis without mentioning the many great musicians who developed their art in the city's nightclubs. It's amazing how much American history is lost forever in the ruins of East St. Louis - music being only part of what has been lost. Here's Ike and Tina Turner: