No matter how many years I spend in Manhattan, in my heart Saint Louis, Missouri remains my true home. The metro’s got a lot of intractable problems, but also tons of amazing amenities that don’t get half as much attention as the crime rates. I’d go so far as to suggest that St. Louis might be the most egregiously underrated place in the entire country.
Crime is the most pressing crisis, with the kind of fearsome murder stats one typically associates with failed states, but St. Louisans have gotten used to having to explain to outsiders how the statistics are highly misleading. Unlike most major metropolitan areas, St. Louis has an unusual degree of administrative separation between the city proper and far larger St. Louis County, not to mention East St. Louis and other municipalities across the river in Illinois. The nightmarish statistics only reflect Saint Louis City itself, which represents but a fraction of the metropolitan area and holds a disproportionate share of the region’s most distressed neighborhoods. Looking at things more holistically, crime rates in Greater St. Louis are still too high but well in the range of plenty of other big cities. Bucolic suburban St. Louis was a wonderful place to grow up and is still very much a great place to raise a family.
Misleading as the official statistics may be, they’re technically accurate and what the national media reliably runs screaming headlines about. It’s not fair, but it is what it is: St. Louis’ national profile and reputation have taken a brutal beatdown in recent years, and we desperately need to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, many of our wounds have been self-inflicted: the region has yet to recover from the August 2014 riots now euphemistically termed “The Uprising” that broke out in the north county municipality of Ferguson following inflammatory misinformation about the killing of black teenager Michael Brown by a white cop.
Up in New York, I remember receiving the initial reports from Ferguson with colleagues at Columbia Law School’s Office of Public Affairs and discussing how the incident just might represent our era’s own “Emmett Till moment,” solemn and almost sacred symbolic proof of everything faculty crusaders like intersectionality inventor Kimberlé Crenshaw et al had been preaching. Even as more of the story gradually dribbled out and it became clear that the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” narrative of a racist cop senselessly murdering a “gentle giant” was not accurate (as determined by a grand jury and later by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice), the legend proved too tempting a political cudgel for unscrupulous politicians to pass up.
For ten years now the shadow of Ferguson has hung heavy over St. Louis, leading to disastrous missteps like electing the stupendously incompetent Kim Gardner as a “reform prosecutor” who soon became notorious and then a national laughingstock before eventually being pressured out of office. Perhaps the worst decision was electing the bombastic demagogue Cori Bush to Congress to become one of the less distinguished members of “The Squad.”
I’d felt from the start that going with the gratuitously polarizing Bush campaign would be unwise, thinking it smarter to stick with the incumbent William Lacy Clay’s seniority with so much more heft to bring home the bacon. But that wasn’t quite electrifying enough for the true believing activist base, and we ended up replacing an uninspiring but dependable machine pol with a fiery narcissist who clearly viewed her political prospects as depending on maximally exacerbating racial rancor and relentlessly scratching at the Ferguson scab.
So I had a bad feeling about Cori Bush from the beginning, but hoped that she would grow in office or at least that putting a charismatic black woman front and center as the national face of St. Louis would help change the narrative and turn the page from Ferguson. But, alas, Bush’s divisive schtick continuously reinforced the metro’s image as a dangerous, racist, marginal hellhole.
In the meantime, another progressive fresh face had come to prominence in the wake of Ferguson: Wesley Bell, who was elected a “reform prosecutor” in St. Louis County after the longtime incumbent hadn’t pursued murder charges in the Michael Brown case. A lot of people braced themselves, expecting the utter uselessness of his counterpart Kim Gardner in the city, but Bell turned out to be a pleasant surprise: a measured, competent, basically responsible official whose core political instinct was bringing people together rather than tearing them apart. I haven’t agreed with him on some things—he’s a very conventional progressive—but simply by not being an active embarrassment he was obviously the better choice when it was announced he was challenging Cori Bush to represent Missouri’s 1st congressional district.
And so ensued a bare-knuckle primary brawl, among the nastiest I’ve ever witnessed, with Bell running a largely positive and policy-centered campaign while the Bush camp desperately smeared him as a liar, a traitor, a crypto-Republican Zionist, and even a rapist. Bell was indeed boosted by a flood of support from pro-Israel PACs perturbed by Bush’s bomb-throwing rhetoric about Gaza, but she was already vulnerable because she’d outraged organized labor in voting against Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill promising to bring a river of pork barrel spending to the region.
Whenever I tweeted anything in support of Bell or pointing out Bush’s abundant shortcomings, I’d get swarmed by Cori supporters reciting ugly talking points and accusing me of being a cynical Republican targeting a brilliant progressive superstar for being too strong a black woman. But if I were a cynical Republican, I would have wanted Cori Bush to remain in office as a toxic caricature of what Democrats believe. She’s been a showboating performer who gets nothing done and has zero potential to help move Missouri back toward being a purple state, while Bell has the capacity to make inroads with far broader constituencies. He’s dangerous to Republicans in a way that she could never be.
I must admit to having an agenda: love for St. Louis. My agenda is wanting St. Louisans to prosper and more national recognition of how special a place St. Louis is and can be. That’s why I’m over the moon about Wesley Bell’s resounding victory this week: at last, an opportunity to start anew, finally transcend the tragedy of Ferguson, and get back to the hard work of actually turning things around. I am more hopeful today for the future of my beloved hometown than I’ve been in at least a decade.
Next: Columbia Agonistes
I live in St. Louis. Been here 40+ years, moved here for a job after college. Grew up in the Chicago suburbs.
Can't disagree with a single word you wrote. You told it like it is. I will say, however, or perhaps emphasize further, that the de facto downtown IS Clayton, and has been for decades. It is not a new thing.
Every new sports stadium that gets built is sold partially on the notion that it will "revitalize downtown". Which at least contains the admission that downtown is lacking, that it needs revitalization. But doesn't contain the admission that, no, a sports stadium is not going to revitalize downtown.
I absolutely grieve all the beautiful buildings downtown and in the immediate surrounding areas that are abandoned and crumbling. It is so so so dang sad. The city used to be so alive and vibrant, but before I got here.
Good for St. Louis. This thesis argues that in the Civil War era, St. Louis started falling behind Chicago due to the latter's ability to attract more Northern capital during the era of sectional conflict: https://www.nwmissouri.edu/library/theses/2015/AnstineTroy.pdf