The Slow Death of a City Block in St. Louis

“At any given time, there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis.”

BuiltStLouis.net laments the deterioration of what was once a city bustling with life, full of people and activity, but is now full of desolate urban landscapes punctuated by plywood boards over windows and piles of jagged bricks from demolitions. The worst part is the northern half of the city, which shows the most evidence of decay. BuiltStLouis.net has documented the fall of the 1900 block of Montgomery Street with painstaking detail, complete with drawings of how the area originally looked back in 1875 and how it looks now.

From BuiltStLouis.net:

The 1900 block of Montgomery Street is a textbook case, an ordinary residential block in the St. Louis Place neighborhood. At upper left, you see how it looked in 1875, its formative years, as captured in Compton and Dry’s perspective atlas of the city. It is a burgeoning urban environment: dense, walkable, human-scaled, full of sturdy red brick buildings. The block was alive, the buildings continuous from one corner to the other.

Today, 130 years later, only the shaded ones remain.

The devastation is so widespread that it’s hard to grasp how much has been lost. You visit 1900 Montgomery today, and you see 6 buildings, with spacious grass lots between them. You accept it and move on, thinking no further of it. And when another one succumbs to fire or wind or gravity or the bulldozer, you shrug. “It’s just one building,” they always say. Yes, one building…. one after another, and another, and another, and another, and another… thousands of anothers.

BuiltStLouis.net calls this story of decay ‘a disintegration of the urban fabric’. What was once a ‘series of connected outdoor rooms’ in a densely populated urban space is now practically devoid of life. The city is no longer walkable – retailers have long since moved. St. Louis certainly isn’t alone in this situation – so many other urban centers across America have seen the same thing happen. Perhaps there’s hope, though – as people begin to move toward walkable urban communities again, perhaps areas like these will be revitalized.

Check out BuiltStLouis.net for more details and photos.

Link [BuiltStLouis.net]