Urban Renewal
"...Harland Bartholmew and his staff released a report on St. Louis After World War II...Batholmew's conclusions about the city's prospects were direct, grim, and to the point: without massive reconstruction of the built evironment through powers of eminent domain, the city was destined to crumble."
-Joseph Heathcott
-Joseph Heathcott
"In the aftermath of World War II, St. Louis joined other cities in responding to the now clearly established flight of middle-class population to the suburbs by undertaking a major redevelopment program."
-Katharine Bristol
In 1949, Mayor Joseph Darst took office. Backed by the Post-Dispatch and downtown business interests, he vigorously campaigned for urban renewal and public housing.
"From January to March 1950, the editors published a series of articles titled 'Progress or Decay: St. Louis Must Choose' ...Post-dispatch editors advocated a comprehensive program to clear and rebuild entire districts of the supposedly decadent, delipadated old city. Only through a commitment to a massive campaign of reconstruction, they concluded, could St. Louis avoid a spiral of decline."
-Joseph Heathcott
-Joseph Heathcott
Using eminent domain and funds from the Housing Act of 1949, slums were cleared and reconstruction began.
"A generation of St. Louisians was raised on the noise of bulldozers, the choke of plaster dust, and the scent of diesel fumes, as federal funds underwrote the relentless scrape of nearly one thousand acres of urban land." -Joseph Heathcott, Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal
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Source: "A Bicentennial Tribute: St. Louis 1764-1964"
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"Site clearance and evictions of hundreds of tenant slum dwellers took place without relocation assistance. Accelerating federal highway and urban renewal programs execerbated the situation by destroying thousands of units of low-rent slum housing and forcing poor people, most of them black, to relocate."
-Roger Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societical Symptom?"
-Roger Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societical Symptom?"