IMAGINE a dictionary entry:
Delmar Divide (noun)
1. The line in St. Louis, Missouri, between areas populated mainly by whites on the south and areas populated mainly by blacks on the north. Named after Delmar Boulevard, a major thoroughfare in St. Louis often understood to mark this boundary. First use unknown, but in common use since the mid to late 20th century.
2. A term sometimes used as shorthand in the city and metro area of St. Louis to refer to racist aspects of the region’s history, as well as continuing inequalities in areas such as education, healthcare and job opportunities.
Note: Some observers believe this term will be archaic by the second half of the 21st century.
Hold up. That last part. Is it starting to come true?
Perhaps. In St. Louis, the Central Corridor — the strip including Forest Park, the Central West End, Grand Center and the streets heading east to Downtown — has long enjoyed primacy as the economic and cultural lifeline of the city. In the past few decades, gentrifying areas to the south – the Grove, Shaw, the Tower Grove neighborhoods, Benton Park and others – have hitched themselves ever closer to the Central Corridor’s prosperity, while at the same time becoming bastions of the city’s progressive left.
Neighborhoods immediately north of Delmar such as the West End, Academy/Sherman Park, Lewis Place and Vandeventer, where the vast majority of residents are African American, have mostly been left out.
But far removed from the noisy bickering over topics like “spy planes” and tax breaks for downtown sports venues that tends to dominate local headlines (and Twitter feeds), a quiet evolution is taking place on some of the blocks north of Delmar.
Accelerating development, newly empowered groups of residents, and targeted assistance from major regional institutions are combining to produce a budding momentum running through a west-to-east axis of neighborhoods. It’s still early. Yet already, these areas may be emerging collectively as a corridor of their own.
Call it the “North Central Corridor.”
If such a thing does exist, it looks like this: a skinny, fragile strip of the city bounded most certainly on the south by Delmar, and more loosely on the north by either Page or Martin Luther King boulevards (and Cass Avenue east of Grand). Inside are streets with names like Enright, Cates, Cabanne, Maple, Finney and Cook. (McPherson has also published a gallery of images from the area.)
“There’s a synergy and this is not by accident,” said Pamela McLucas, vice president of Park Place Housing and Economic Development, a nonprofit community development corporation formed two years ago to give residents of Fountain Park and Lewis Place a clear voice in how their neighborhoods are changing.
“I’ve been saying for the last 10 years: North St. Louis is going to be the last of the last, but they’re not going to have a choice but to develop it,” said McLucas, who lives in the same home on Lewis Place her parents bought in 1985, shortly after she finished high school. (She inherited the house when her mother died a few years ago and moved back in with her three children.)
A slow drive (or better yet, a vigorous bike ride) on the back streets of the neighborhoods reveals dozens of projects either underway or about to launch. Some noteworthy examples:
– In the West End, just across Delmar from the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood, rehabs of historic apartment buildings and single-family houses are popping up on block after block, joining newer homes built in the past two decades.
– In Fountain Park, directly north of the Central West End, the first of several housing rehabs planned by developer Kevin Bryant will hit the market later this month.
– Near the campus of Ranken Technical College in the Vandeventer neighborhood, plans are taking shape to raise up to $30 million for the first building of the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center St. Louis (AMICSTL), a project backed by business leaders and development officials that could eventually span 100 acres. (McPherson has also published a companion story on AMICSTL.)
– Linking all these neighborhoods is a planned 3.5-mile greenway from Great Rivers Greenway that will follow the path of the old Hodiamont streetcar line from Skinker to Vandeventer. And further east, on North Jefferson Avenue, nonprofit Doorways (which provides housing and services for people affected by HIV/AIDS) has broken ground on a three-acre campus near the massive construction site where the new western headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is rising.
What does all this activity mean? Is it just a chain of happy coincidences? Or is something bigger at play?
City development officials are confident it’s the latter.
“It’s not just one thing; it’s a multitude of things that are happening right now,” said Otis Williams, executive director of St. Louis Development Corp., the city’s development arm. “It’s the fact that we are paying more attention to these neighborhoods; it’s the desire of these neighborhoods that want to see something happen; it is the developers who are willing to take a little more risk; it is the institutions like Washington University and (business-civic group) Greater St. Louis, Inc.”
Optimists and pessimists
McLucas said communities of color like hers are much better-positioned now than when she was a child. She credits programs like the Neighborhood Leadership Academy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and groups like the Community Builders Network, which connects neighborhood leaders and helps them build the capacities of their organizations.
“Now, we have skills that we didn’t necessarily have back then,” McLucas said. “We are part of boards and committees. We are in leadership roles and have decision-making capacities. More of us are sitting at the table now. There is strength in numbers.”
To be clear, progress in the North Central Corridor is slow; often one house at a time. The projects are small compared to the developments taking place in the Central Corridor.
On many blocks north of Delmar, long stretches of vacant houses and empty lots dominate. Dilapidation is common. Banks still hesitate to lend substantial amounts of money north of the line, sometimes within spitting distance of million-dollar houses in the Central West End, say frustrated neighborhood advocates. And the twin issues of crime and schools continue to drive residents out of the city, particularly black families with children.
Not everyone will buy the idea that a new corridor is emerging at all. After all, false dawns are an unfortunate staple of the history of North St. Louis.
The most recent involved developer Paul McKee’s massive Northside Regeneration project. Over a decade ago, McKee promised (and is still promising) to bring thousands of new houses and gleaming offices to an area northwest of downtown. So far only a gas station, a modest grocery store and a few houses have been completed. (The NGA West is in Northside’s footprint, but some city officials say that project is unique and would have happened anyway, regardless of McKee’s involvement.)
By contrast, the neighborhoods of the North Central Corridor enjoy advantages conferred by simple geography. Their street grids, for example, provide direct links to the Central Corridor (and its major employers) that would be the envy of any South Side neighborhood.
Moreover, areas like the Academy neighborhood, tucked behind the emerging Delmar Maker District, have housing stock that is largely intact. And the blocks of Union Boulevard just north of Delmar, boasting structures including Clark School (now loft apartments) and the Cabanne Branch of the St. Louis Public Library (paid for by Andrew Carnegie), contain one of the city’s finest groupings of secular architecture outside downtown.
Finally, momentum in these neighborhoods is coming from dozens of development firms and residents’ associations, as opposed to relying on one developer as Northside Regeneration has.
“I do think that if the strength of the Central Corridor wasn’t there, you wouldn’t see that movement north so readily, particularly what’s happening across Delmar and moving towards Page,” Williams said. “It’s time for that movement to occur.”
From Skinker to Union Boulevard
Start near the western edge of the city – North Skinker Boulevard – and look east down Delmar. Over the past two decades major projects on the north side of Delmar including the Pageant concert venue and Moonrise Hotel, the 11-story Everly student apartment building, and the Washington University North Campus have extended the vibrancy of the Loop further into the city.
Venture north on Hamilton Avenue from Delmar, and it’s clear this activity is slowly spreading north and east, into the heart of the West End neighborhood.
At the corner of Hamilton and Cabanne, developers Jeff Mugg and David Mastin of Delmar Properties are about to complete their latest renovation: 36 units in a 1920s building called Cabanne Apartments. Scheduled to open in May, the apartments are the biggest component of a $9.2 million project that includes significant improvements to three other Delmar Properties buildings nearby.
One block south, the firm is assisting another developer who plans to rehab a six-unit building on Cates Avenue.
Mugg estimates his company has worked on retail and residential projects totaling more than $34 million over the past couple of decades, including on Delmar and the streets to the north. Aside from multifamily, the firm has renovated about a dozen single-family houses in the West End.
The Delmar Divide, Mugg said, “is still a perceived barrier. But perception and reality are two different things. The neighborhood has changed, and is changing.”
Almost a decade ago the company completed its Gotham project. It includes apartments and ground-floor commercial space fronting Delmar, but the jewel is a rehabbed 1920s building with 84 units over seven floors facing Enright Avenue, the first street north of Delmar. It’s one of the largest buildings in the neighborhood.
“There are several 30-unit buildings sitting around this neighborhood that still need to be done,” Mugg said. “There seems to be some momentum. There are others that are starting to pay attention to what’s going on. Enough has been done now that projects make a little more sense financially. We’re excited about having other people join us to make a difference.”
Residents and others active in the area are working to make that happen by developing a comprehensive community plan. Funding for the effort, called the West End Plan, comes from InvestSTL, a regional initiative focused on building strong neighborhoods. Cornerstone Corp. is leading the plan’s development; organizers hope the city will eventually adopt it as the official plan for the West End and Visitation Park.
(Clark-Fox Family Foundation)
Half a mile east, across the St. Vincent Greenway that bisects the West End, is the biggest construction site on Delmar: the Delmar DivINe. The brainchild of Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark, the $100 million-plus project will convert the former St. Luke’s Hospital complex into offices and shared resources for nonprofits, with a focus on health, education and human service organizations.
The DivINe — which Clark emphasizes is on the north side of the street — will also have a facility on the ground floor that neighborhood and community groups can use to stage events. The project also includes 150 apartments targeted at moderate-income residents.
Clark, who has been involved in the neighborhood for many years and helped open the KIPP Victory Academy charter school on Maple Avenue several blocks north, said she discovered the vacant hospital building one day in 2015 when she happened to drive by. “They were literally nailing the ‘For Sale’ sign on the building,” she recalled.
Tenants for the offices, where some space is still available, will begin moving in this fall. The apartments are scheduled to open next spring. Clark estimates she’ll eventually be adding 1,000 people to the 7,700 already living and working in the 63112 ZIP code.
“Our goal is not to gentrify the area. Our goal is to bring young people – teachers, nurses, social workers, people that make $35,000 to $55,000 – together like they are at Cortex,” Clark said. “I hope that 10 percent of those people — at least 10 percent — want to buy a house in the neighborhood…or take a house and redo it, or build a house on an empty lot.”
One recent sign of progress a few blocks north of the Delmar DivINe: Dumpsters have appeared outside the “Castle,” an abandoned 1920s apartment building on Cabanne just west of Union Boulevard that is in serious disrepair. CityScene STL reported in January that a Clayton-based developer plans to renovate the building.
Origin stories
St. Luke’s is just one name from this area of the city that present-day St. Louisans will recognize. (The hospital’s main campus is now in Chesterfield.) In fact, the neighborhoods bordering this stretch of Delmar are stuffed with the origin stories of institutions that long ago moved to the suburbs.
The Visitation Park neighborhood takes its name from Visitation Academy, housed here before it moved west to Town & Country. (The park where the school building once stood is now named for St. Louis civil rights activist Ivory Perry.)
Just to the east, the Soho Lofts apartment building was originally built in 1905 as a feeder school for Washington University called Smith Academy; the academy was a forerunner of today’s MICDS in Ladue. Near Soldan High School on Union is the building that used to house the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, once the center of the Jewish community in St. Louis. The organization moved to West County in the 1960s and is now the Jewish Community Center, or simply the J.
The Delmar DivINe is part of the Delmar Collaborative, an informal group that Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corp. (WUMCRC) recently helped establish.
“We convened this table to introduce the community and economic development folks to everyone working up and down the corridor, with the hope they would find some common cause,” Brian Phillips, assistant vice chancellor and executive director of WUMCRC, told McPherson.
WUMCRC and its partner, Park Central Development, are best known for their earlier work to stabilize the Central West End and Grove neighborhoods adjacent to WashU’s medical campus. Recently they’ve focused more attention on the neighborhoods in the North Central Corridor, expanding assistance for groups in areas including Academy, Fountain Park and Lewis Place.
Clark said one factor in the Delmar corridor’s accelerating momentum is the fact that different groups of developers, lenders and philanthropists have split the boulevard into bite-sized chunks. Each group is working on a different section between Skinker and Grand Center.
A good example is the Maker District now emerging on Delmar between Union and Kingshighway. Jim McKelvey, founder of payments company Square and a partner with Doug Auer at Third Degree Glass Factory, has played a key role in getting the district up and running. Nonprofit art center Craft Alliance moved from the Delmar Loop in University City to the Maker District last year.
Clark explains the lessons she’s applying from her business career like this: “I didn’t open up 400 Build-A-Bear stores at once. I opened up one at a time.”
Eastward to Fountain Park
Just east of Kingshighway Kevin Bryant, president of Kingsway Development, is set to make a splash on Delmar with an $84 million plan that includes a 200-unit apartment building called The Bridge and a rehabbed building with 25,000 square feet of shared office space called Elevation.
Those would join existing projects like the Lofts@Euclid, an 87-unit historic rehab that opened in 2016 at the southwest corner of Delmar & Euclid. The building houses a Fields Foods grocery on the ground floor.
At Elevation, Bryant has lined up three retail franchises for the shopfronts on Delmar: the UPS Store, Jamba Juice and the Original Hot Dog Factory. Next door he has plans for a performing arts theater called The Circuit. Directly west is LaunchCode, a nonprofit founded by McKelvey that provides free training for students in areas such as software development and places them in apprenticeships. LaunchCode is renovating and expanding its own education center.
Kingsway’s big plans for Delmar have grabbed most of the attention. But for residents of the Fountain Park and Lewis Place neighborhoods, the most important changes in the area could end up being the smaller-scale residential projects that Bryant and his partners are pursuing on the streets just north of Delmar.
On the north side of Fountain Park itself – an oval-shaped green whose namesake water feature and mature trees make it one of city’s most beguiling public spaces – Bryant is about to wrap up Kingsway’s first home renovation. He plans to put the house on the market in April, with a price of around $225,000.
Other rehabs will follow soon, as Bryant tries to draw the prosperity of the Central West End northward, across Delmar.
“What it’s forced me to do is a minimum of four houses at a time out of the gate, so that those appraisal values can pull from each other,” Bryant said, explaining how he hopes to jump-start Fountain Park’s struggling housing market. He is beginning with properties surrounding the park and then plans to move around the corner, to the 700 block of Aubert Street. He says low-income tax credits should help keep asking prices realistic for the neighborhood.
Bryant has been designated by the city as the master developer of a rectangle bounded by Delmar on the south, Page on the north, Kingshighway on the west and Taylor on the east. This lets him control who gets tax abatement in the area. His plan is essentially a decade-long vision to try and bring a variety of development to the area.
“I organized a plan that revolved not so much around me redeveloping every parcel, but organizing and attracting more experienced developers. I’m more of a traffic cop,” Bryant explained. “I create opportunities for a small guy that might just want to rehab one house, and I have organized larger projects.”
One encouraging sign: An investor wants to redevelop a 12-unit apartment building around the corner from the park. Not far away, the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis recently completed the first phase of a $20 million renovation that will consolidate the league’s operations in the former Sears department store building on North Kingshighway.
Bryant added that it’s important to constantly win the trust of neighborhood residents. They want stabilization, which means reducing crime. They also want new development that won’t push them out, he said.
“Ultimately, it boils down to gentrification without displacement,” Bryant said. “Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem, because we don’t have a lot of areas where we’re going to do whole blocks at a time. We have a lot of infill, which is different. There’s no need to displace anyone.”
Bryant spearheaded the founding of Park Place Housing and Economic Development, the organization Pamela McLucas helps lead, in 2019. Park Place works to ensure residents in Fountain Park and Lewis Place can help guide redevelopment and keep a mix of incomes in the area.
Working with partners like Park Central Development, the organization monitors private investors in the area and implements crime reduction efforts via a neighborhood ownership model. Park Place also teamed recently with the St. Louis chapter of national volunteer organization Rebuilding Together to help four residents with home repairs. The repairs cost $25,000 for each house.
McLucas, the Park Place vice president, said she’s seeing keen interest from homebuyers on Lewis Place where she lives, and on other nearby streets.
“It’s as though there is an awakening – not just investors, but people who are looking to be owner-occupiers, who appreciate and see the potential for the housing stock,” said McLucas, who is a licensed real estate agent. “This is the same housing stock that’s in Tower Grove and Holly Hills, or any other place that’s south of I-44.”
McLucas calls longtime residents the “staying glue” in the area. That’s vital in an area where 94% of the residents are African American, 48% of houses are vacant, and less than 30% of residents own their homes, according to Park Central’s most recent annual report. McLucas would like to see more residents have the opportunity to become owners.
“They chose to stay when there was white flight, black flight, vacancy and everything,” she said. “I’d like to see rewards for the people who have stayed, and make sure they get equitable treatment during redevelopment, so there isn’t displacement, and they aren’t taxed out, and they aren’t beat up by building and code enforcement.”
Manufacturing a boom
The massive east gate of Lewis Place overlooks one of the major anchors of the North Central Corridor: Ranken Technical College.
In recent years Ranken has established branch campuses in Wentzville in St. Charles County and in Perryville, about 80 miles south of St. Louis. But ever since its board decided in the 1970s against moving out of the city, the college has been committed to its main campus along North Newstead Avenue, said Ranken CEO Stan Shoun.
“It’s been the anchor and it’s going to continue to be the anchor,” Shoun said, noting that the campus includes about 1 million square feet of facilities spread across 23 acres.
Ranken offers training and apprenticeships to prepare students for careers in sectors including the automotive, construction, IT, biotech and manufacturing industries. The college graduates around 900 students each year across all its campuses; about 80 percent of those are associate’s degrees, with the rest bachelor’s degrees.
Now, Ranken is a key player in a project which could transform this section of the North Central Corridor: the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center. A recently-formed nonprofit formed to develop the project, called AMICSTL, is in the early stages of raising up to $30 million to construct the first building adjacent to Ranken’s campus.
Shoun, who sits on AMICSTL’s board, said that over the long term the AMIC campus could grow to include multiple buildings on 100 acres. (McPherson’s separate story on AMICSTL is available here.)
Ranken has its own community development arm which has partnered with builders including Efficacy Consulting & Development, a firm run by former Missouri state legislator Yaphett El-Amin, on affordable housing developments such as Finney Place directly east of Ranken’s campus.
Shoun said Ranken students have built over 80 houses in the area, representing a $12 million investment.
“Our job since 1907 has been, and always will be, to build the next generation workforce,” Shoun said. “We build houses to give our students the skills necessary to work in the construction business. Oh and by the way, the unintended consequence is a house. That’s not a bad unintended consequence.”
“Guiding light”
Further east, there has been substantial progress in the Vandeventer and Covenant Blu-Grand Center neighborhoods during the past decade.
In 2018 the Deaconess Foundation opened its Center for Child Well-Being on North Vandeventer Avenue. Now Deaconess, along with the United Church of Christ Church Building and Loan Fund, is assisting community members as they finalize a comprehensive development plan covering both neighborhoods. It’s dubbed the North Central Plan.
In 2017 development firm McCormack Baron Salazar completed a retail and residential project, including 300 mixed income apartments, nearby on North Sarah Street.
Emily Bernstein, vice president of McCormack, said the company used an earlier iteration of the North Central plan as its “guiding light” when it developed North Sarah in three phases between 2010 and 2017. (Some of North Sarah’s residents came from the nearby Blumeyer public housing complex; the last of Blumeyer’s high-rises was razed in 2015.)
“There was an obvious opportunity to knit back together this community that had at one time been thriving, and had all of these historic ties,” Bernstein said. “It had these anchors nearby: the Central West End, Gaslight Square, St. Louis University. But there was a dearth of high-quality, affordable rental housing.”
In addition to a new city park named for educator and diplomat James Milton Turner, the development houses the North Sarah Food Hub, a commercial kitchen space originally intended for culinary education. (The Food Hub, which was preparing to open when COVID-19 hit, quickly refocused its kitchen to help prepare and distribute food for needy students in St. Louis Public Schools.)
Nearby, at the intersection of Page & Whittier, stands Transformation Christian Church. Pastor Pricellious Burruss, who co-founded the church with her husband in 1989, likes the new houses in the North Sarah development, and says she hopes the neighborhood will continue to improve.
“We’ve come a long way, but we can still be better,” said Burruss, who with her late husband lived for nine years in the rectory attached to the church, raising five children.
Transformation helps anchor a couple of different spots in the North Central Corridor. The church complex includes the Family Life and Learning Center, as well as a retail store. In the West End, Transformation runs a school on Etzel Avenue that currently serves children two years old through second grade.
After the COVID pandemic started, Burruss converted the retail space from a religious bookstore into a free store that accepts donated items such as clothing; the store now distributes all its items, including snacks and nonperishable food, for free. (It also houses a jobs and resource center.) Funding for the store, which is staffed entirely by volunteers, comes from the church’s missions, as well as its congregation.
Burruss said she wants to open a health and financial literacy center near North Sarah; she also wants to organize more activities for families with children. Last year Transformation hosted a drive-in movie shown on an inflatable screen, which attendees could watch while staying socially distanced. The event, “Movies, Messages and Mime,” featured free food, performers, and gospel messages.
The neighborhood “is a food desert, but it’s an entertainment desert, too,” Burruss said.
More doors for Doorways
About a mile east of North Sarah – past Powell Symphony Hall and the tidy rows of the Renaissance Place mixed-income apartments that replaced the Blumeyer project, the nonprofit Doorways is building a new campus on north Jefferson Avenue, in the Jeff VanderLou neighborhood.
“We’re going to be out and in front,” said Doorways President and CEO Opal Jones. “We want to be on a major corridor. We want public transportation. We want neighborhood amenities. We want to be around other service providers if possible. We needed at least three acres to do all that.”
A few blocks north will be the new NGA West. And across Jefferson a small hospital is under construction. (The hospital is one of the few plans by Northside Regeneration that made it off the drawing board.)
The new Doorways campus will include a 50-unit emergency housing facility, at least 30 units of permanent housing, and the nonprofit’s head offices. Those offices will move from a facility on Maryland Avenue in the Central West End. (Doorways will continue to operate its 36-bed assisted living center at the CWE facility, as well as other housing facilities around the city.)
The Jefferson corridor is a key piece of Project Connect, a city initiative to coordinate development, community improvement and transportation projects in eight neighborhoods surrounding the new NGA West.
The new Doorways campus will have a retail space at its northern end, to which the organization hopes to lure a bank or other tenant that can serve both its clients and nearby residents, Jones said.
“The last thing I want to do is raise $30 million and build this campus, and not have it be an asset for the community,” she said. “We envision opening up our spaces so other nonprofits and community groups can use them to further their work, and partner with us.”
Who gets a loan?
One challenge that developers and residents face in many North Central Corridor neighborhoods is a familiar one: money. Financing packages rely heavily on government assistance programs such as block grants and HUD-insured loans, and many projects are only viable because of tax credits for historic preservation and low-income housing. (The entire corridor is within the St. Louis Promise Zone; most of the areas east of Kingshighway are within an Opportunity Zone as well.)
McCormack’s Bernstein, referring to the North Sarah project, said: “It’s hard at any time to put together financing for a large-scale redevelopment, and that’s why they don’t occur that frequently.”
For the Kingsway development on Delmar, Bryant needed city aldermen to approve tax increment financing. The $6.6 million TIF will help pay for public improvements along Delmar and is also helping to finance the apartment component of the project, he said.
As for the Delmar DivINe, which is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Maxine Clark has been working on the project for over five years. She ticked off the financing components she needed to pull together: a bank loan, a mortgage, a HUD loan for the apartments, New Markets tax credits, historic tax credits and private donations.
“It was a significant ask for a project north of Delmar to the donating public of St. Louis,” she said. “It wasn’t that people don’t give money: We have the park; we have all these incredible things that people have built. But most of them are south of Delmar, including the Grand Center area.”
As for individual homeowners, is there still redlining north of Delmar?
“Definitely,” Pamela McLucas said, although she added that it’s more covert than in the past. Now, she said, lenders will often blame a potential borrower’s debt to income ratio or source of income. And oftentimes a house on the North Side will be appraised at less than the amount of the mortgage.
“They just don’t close,” she said. “Or, your application will get past the loan officer, but it just doesn’t come out of underwriting.”
Another hurdle, according to McLucas: Higher insurance premiums that make it harder to close on financing.
“There’s the misconception that there’s no money in these communities, and that is far from the truth,” McLucas said.
WashU is helping with this, one loan at a time. Under its Live Near Your Work program, WUMCRC provides forgivable loans for workers at the university’s main campus and its medical center who buy houses in selected city areas. For the neighborhoods immediately north of Delmar, the loans are $8,500, said Phillips of WUMCRC. During fiscal year 2020, the program issued loans in Academy and Lewis Place for the first time.
Getting a grip on crime
Of course, crime also holds progress back in the North Central Corridor, as it does across the entire city.
In Fountain Park and Lewis Place, Bryant said violent crime and drug trafficking appear to have fallen over the past few years, although he noted that some pockets recently are “revving up a little bit.” He’s helped install security cameras on some streets, and has organized residents to call police when they see suspicious activity.
“With crime, you have to constantly be on the move,” Bryant said. The criminals, he said, “have to constantly see that this area is changing, and that there are consequences to selling drugs around this area; or that residents are looking now, so they can’t be so quick to break into houses.”
Pamela McLucas described crime this way: “It’s not good, but it’s not nearly as bad as it has been. In the ‘90s, there would be bodies popping up everywhere. It was nothing to find a body in the backyard.”
Now, says McLucas, neighbors call 911 straight away if they see or hear signs of trouble.
“People talk about how they don’t see police in their streets? We don’t have that problem. We always see cars patrolling. If I call the police, they’re there,” she said.
Unity and division
Progress is uneven, but Delmar Boulevard is slowly on its way towards becoming an attractive, less-broken façade for the neighborhoods north of it. Bryant, discussing the Delmar DivINe and the Maker District, radiates optimism about the street’s future. But he quickly adds that the side streets off Delmar are just as important.
“Everybody’s saying ‘with the success that’s going on down Delmar, the Delmar Divide will cease to exist and it’ll be the Page Divide.’ So as long as we can continue to push north, we can keep erasing those divides,” he said.
As for McLucas, her optimism is grounded in the sensibility of someone who was born in the North Central Corridor and has lived there off and on throughout her life. She has heard big promises before.
“Plans have been made for years and years and years. I’ve been hearing since I was a little girl that they’re gonna redo the city,” she said. “But that kind of stuff is happening now. The people that have been the staying glue haven’t left. You can’t make any money on the South Side anymore, so now everything north is what’s hot and popping.”
With her three children under her roof – two of them grown and the youngest still in high school – McLucas is now head of the household in the home her parents bought on Lewis Place back in 1985.
“It’s an exciting time; it’s still a challenging time. We’re learning how to raise funds; and learning how to write grant proposals; how to raise money; how to organize volunteers. There has been a level of education and interest from within this community,” McLucas said.
She added: “We’re no longer looking for that knight on a white horse to come save us. We know that we can save ourselves.”
It’s easy to see how McLucas’s enthusiasm for Lewis Place, for Fountain Park — for the entire city — could become infectious. Would that be enough to stabilize the North Central Corridor, put it on a firm upward trajectory, and turn it into the kind of place where new arrivals learn how to coexist with the “staying glue” of longtime residents?
Nobody knows.
A hopeful sign would be a scenario like this: One day in the near future, St. Louisans from just about anywhere in the metro area find themselves doing the same thing older generations did countless times before: standing on the edge of the Central Corridor, at a corner on the south side of Delmar, looking at the opposite side.
Then these future St. Louisans will do something most of their parents and grandparents might scarcely have dreamed of. They’ll look both ways, cross Delmar, and perhaps wonder briefly, as their foot reaches the curb, what all those old people had been so worried about in the first place.
Then they’ll keep going, because they have somewhere to be, two or three blocks up ahead. Straight north. –McP–
More stories from McPherson on the North Central Corridor:
- A Gallery Of Images
- North Side Set To Be Home of Advanced Manufacturing Center
- To Understand AMICSTL, Look to Sheffield, England
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Remarkable changes since I first arrived in St. Louis in 1995. Wonderful. So much potential and now it’s happening.
Great article, really like the moniker, North Central Corridor
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