All-but-Dead City : E. St. Louis: Hope Amid Hopelessness

The once-mighty Obear-Nester Glass Co., where proud workers used to turn out bottles by the millions, has become just another dead factory in this all-but-dead city--quiet and smoke-dirty, with the sad and seedy look of unused structures everywhere.

As a final indignity, the soaring roof of what used to be called “the glass house” now shelters a vagrant flock of pigeons and a 12-foot-high trash heap, on which eight young men labor for a few dollars an hour to extract waste paper fit for recycling.

“East St. Louis,” says Abb Rhodes, a friendly, wiry man of 63 who runs the recycling business, “is just not like it used to be.”

It sure isn’t.

It Had Verve

When I lived here during the 1950s and ‘60s, East St. Louis was a blue-collar showplace, the premier city in southern Illinois. It had verve. It swaggered. It boasted of its railroads, its steel mills, its stockyards--and its glass factory.

“If you can’t make it in East St. Louis,” people used to say, “you can’t make it anywhere.”

We used to complain about the ubiquitous freight trains; they seemed to block every other intersection. But we knew they signified money.

Scotia’s Fine Foods served great soul food--I still remember the fried shrimp and fish. Drive-in movies were the rage. There were even a couple of hotels--the Broadview and a Holiday Inn.

In 1959, Look magazine named East St. Louis one of its 11 “All-America” cities for its good government and general progressiveness. A big fancy sign on St. Clair Avenue trumpeted its success.

All-American Failure

Now, it is an all-American failure, its heavy industry a shambles, its shops boarded up or protected by iron bars, its population depleted. East St. Louis makes most depressed factory towns look like Beverly Hills. It is a metaphor for cities in decay, a laboratory for an urban environment so sick that sociologists and city planners swarm over it constantly.

It was never rich, but now it is beyond impoverished. Among the three poorest cities in all the nation, it had a per-capita income of $4,997 in 1983, far below Los Angeles ($10,654) and even Newark ($5,897). Two-thirds of its residents are on some form of public assistance.

“The bottom fell out of that place,” says a Census Bureau official in Washington.

But hope didn’t. Those who are still here insist that one day soon people with money will move in to take advantage of the housing stock and the proximity to the Mississippi River. Like survivors in an exotic urban game, they seem proud to have stuck it out and just a little disdainful of those, like me, who left.

“We’re planting seeds in this area,” says Ed Buchanan, now a fledgling building contractor with whom I used to drink beer, eat barbecue and sell insurance. “We know there’s going to be a harvest. Every person who has money is investing in East St. Louis.”

Others stay for a more elemental reason: It’s home, and you don’t desert it. “I’m not going anywhere else because you can’t run away,” says Mamie Jennings, an old friend of my family who says she is “not old enough for Medicare and not young enough for men to care.” She insists that “East St. Louis can come back whenever the people want to see it come back.”

Even when it was prospering, East St. Louis was a dirty town, grimed by the coal burned in houses and factories. But like many old industrial cities, it wore its soot like a badge of productivity. We’re working, the city shouted. We’re making things, and we’re making money.

And it always had crime: petty gangs that battled in the streets and professional gangs that controlled the slot machines from smoky back rooms. We used to say, only half kidding, that East St. Louis was where people came when they got run out of Chicago, 300 miles north. East St. Louis was bad when bad was cool.

The grime is still here, and the crime. But the swagger is gone, at least for the time being. So is liveliness. In its place is an eerie quiet. If you stop your car in the middle of the day on State Street, minutes may pass before another car goes by. Few East St. Louisans brag anymore. Not even about jazz great Miles Davis having grown up here.

Most Whites Are Gone

Gone too are many of the people. In 1960 East St. Louis was home to 81,000 people, including 45,000 whites. Now the total population is around 50,000, and only 1,500 are white.

Some here blame that fact for the city’s problems. Some who remain here argue that state, county and federal officials ignore cities dominated by people of color. “Many of us hate to believe that we are in a community of black folks and can’t make a living,” says Ben Phillips Sr., 59, owner of Ebony Insurance Agency.

Clearly, many folks here are not making a living. Overall unemployment runs about twice the national average, and a lot of those classified as employed have only part-time work, or at best hold low-paying service jobs.

Johnnie Allen, 56, who smokes Winstons and rides a Kawasaki motorcycle, is a virtual compendium of lost jobs. Now unemployed, he said he’s been laid off at Swift, Obear-Nester and two other plants here.

“When I came here from Shuqualak, Miss., in 1948, you could leave one job and get another,” he says. “But now you better try to hold on to the one you got.”

Buzz of Activity

Gone is the hubbub at the packing houses that lined Route 3 on the outskirts of town. That welcome buzz of activity greeted countless blacks from Mississippi--like Allen, and like my parents and me. We moved here from Meridian, Miss., in 1955 when I was 14.

Trading in hogs and cattle was at a roar then; now it’s a whimper, and much of the once-imposing National Stockyards complex is in ruins. I couldn’t even find the Swift fertilizer factory where I loaded 100-pound sacks in the summer of ’62.

Everything--if it’s still here at all--has become something else. Union Clothing Co., which used to sell the city’s best shirts and hats, turned into a bargain shoe store, then folded. Bundy Oldsmobile, where I bought my first car in 1961--an irresistible ’56 Ford, blue and white paint job, V-8 engine--now has a sign declaring it the Christian Community Center.

East St. Louis is a town without the simplest amenities. Not one hotel remains. There is no movie house, no new car dealer. When you don’t want to eat at Wendy’s or McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken, you have to leave town--go to Belleville or St. Louis.

“It’s not a normal thing,” says Johnetta Haley, director of the East St. Louis campus of Southern Illinois University. “That may cause young people to use their leisure time in a way that is not the most healthy.”

Curfew for Youths

She means gangs. There are so many of them here that the city last year enacted a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew--10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. During those hours, it is punishable by fine for youths under age 17 to “loiter, idle, wander, stroll or play upon” practically any place outside the home without a parent.

Vandals routinely attack once-sturdy houses, now deteriorated but not demolished. They take whatever can be sold and leave gutted hulls behind. In July, city officials called in the state police to patrol the streets after motorists were set upon while traveling a spaghetti network of highways that local residents suspect were created to bypass the city.

Despite it all, people survive. Crime is high, but most escape it. And they resent the city’s image as a seething caldron of violence.

“I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never had any trouble,” says Edwina Settles, 25, who works at a community foundation chaired by former U.N. Ambassador Donald McHenry, who grew up in East St. Louis and lived here for a time. “I have good friends here. They’re not in jail, and they’ve never killed anyone.”

It is a pride made more remarkable by its existence in the face of stark economic reality: Industry here is at the bottom of the spiral. Over at Sterling Steel Casting Co., Bobbie Hill, a foreman, said the plant employed 200 workers 3 1/2 years ago but was gobbled up by a St. Louis firm and now employs only 20.

Shrivel to the Nub

The mill and many other industries here are like the town. They don’t quite die; they shrivel down to the nub and lie there, waiting.

Rebirth is coming, the town leaders say. They are passing out bumper stickers reading “EAST ST. LOUIS is on the RISE.” It’s the same promise East St. Louisans have heard for years. But this time, the boosters insist, it’s for real.

Norman Ross, 39, is one of these. He concedes he may have the world’s toughest job: As director of the local chamber of commerce, he is paid to sell East St. Louis.

He insists he’s succeeding. When people and firms inquire about East St. Louis, Ross tells them: “We’re tied into St. Louis.”

He envisions a repetition of 1890, when several low-lying streets in the flood-plagued city were literally raised out of the mud with 14 to 20 feet of rock and dirt in a project financed by a $725,000 bond issue.

$525 Million Raised

Now, according to city officials, $525 million has been raised in bond sales to pay for a massive river-front development, including a $220-million marina, a $125-million apartment complex and a $125-million facility for converting trash to energy.

Skeptical East St. Louisans wonder if the project ever will be completed and whether the money will all be accounted for. But Mayor Carl Officer’s chief of staff, cool and confident Kelvin Ellis, 35, insists that the project will make East St. Louis “a prime example of urban economic policy that works. We need some of the yuppie types from St. Louis.”

It’s no accident that Ross and Ellis invoke the name of the city across the Mississippi River, whose 630-foot Gateway Arch is visible from practically every corner of East St. Louis and stands as a shimmering reminder of the glitter this city never had.

East St. Louis has always had a love-hate relationship with St. Louis. We loved their relative sophistication but hated their disdain for our town, which they always called “the East Side.”

That feeling hasn’t changed. At a recent meeting of downtown merchants, the dean of them all, 84-year-old Martin Seidel, gleefully told the story of the St. Louis wholesaler who refused to deliver costume jewelry to Seidel’s apparel store because of fear of crime on the East Side. “Then some guys got in the wholesaler’s place, beat ‘em up, tore it up,” Seidel said, laughing. “So we said, ‘We’re afraid to come over there.’ ”

Family Funeral Business

The Missouri city influences politics across the river. Officer, heir to the family funeral business here, is accused of mayoring in East St. Louis but living in St. Louis. He denies that, saying he spends a lot of time over there because he has a funeral home on that side too.

There is one thing we had that St. Louis did not--all-night bars. West Siders used to flock to East St. Louis to party because the bars never closed.

That’s still the case. In fact, the biggest industries here these days are bars, liquor stores and chop suey joints. Recreation is drinking, then eating greasy fried rice and pork.

Shopping is less fun. Many of the stores along Collinsville Avenue have moved out. Many of those remaining, especially the liquor stores and convenience marts, are more like fortresses than stores: Proprietors have erected bullet-proof glass to protect themselves; touching what you want to buy is impossible.

“That’s the way it has to be,” says Herbert Blackmon, co-owner of a liquor store. “It makes you feel a little safer,” he says, knocking on the glass. Those who have stayed have learned other survival techniques too. A lot more people seem to carry pistols than when I lived here, and a lot fewer seem to walk alone at night.

‘Lost Tax Bases’

Still, “ain’t no point in moving,” says George Jones, 70, one of the few whites left. Leaning over his porch banister, he says: “You move someplace else and you get the same thing you got here. A lot of places have lost their tax bases.”

That’s what William Mason, 52, loves to hear. Mayor from 1975 to 1979, Mason now runs a consulting firm dealing with urban and education issues. “We’ve stayed here,” he says, just before getting into a red Datsun 280ZX, “because we don’t think running is the answer.”

For many of the young people, though, staying is not the answer. At the Southern Illinois University campus here, four teen-agers working in a summer jobs program all say they will not be back after college. Gladys Birge, 17, a senior at my old high school, Lincoln, puts it simply: “I want to get into the business world and get away from these gangs.”

But those who stay here do not give up. Against all odds, they keep finding hooks to hang their hopes on. These days, the hook is the much-dreamed-of river-front development. Stephanie Anthony, 26, the city’s public and governmental affairs manager, is quick to point out that the railroad lines down on the river are already being dug up and moved. In the next two years, she says, the new buildings will be rising.

Back at the Obear-Nester paper dump, Abb Rhodes hopes she’s right. “It’ll be wonderful,” he says, “if it ever gets off the ground.”