This was an extremely painful video to watch. To think that a population could do this to their own city is absolutely mind boggling. I really wonder what historians will think about this era in 1000 years.
@@jamalgibson8139 The car & gas industries have trillions of $ to spend on advertising/brainwashing the public and for paying off politicians. And when no other transit options are put in place, of course people will be scared and angry, and fight bitterly for every parking space. The alternatives need to be in place first. By that I mean, residents of a city should be no more than 5 minutes walk from public transit that runs regularly 24/7, and separated bike lanes on every main road.
Don't the local politicians care? Do they work hard enough to mitigate the effects of the lost industries by looking for alternatives and retraining people?
Want to take a guess why? Guess who moved in? All of my ancestors live in north stl. My grandmother was even Miss Missouri 1940. Now look at it. Worst ghetto in North America. It’s not a coincidence why this same process happens in every single major city. Yet we can never state the obvious.
You can blame the years and decades of voting Democrat as well as the city of St.Louis seceding from St.Louis County in 1877 for making the city of St.Louis what it is today.
@@CJColvin I don’t think the republicans would’ve done any better in designing an urban place. It’s their fault they can’t win elections in cities. IMO it’s time for a new political party focused on urbanism.
I think overtime we see that all this is at the fault of liberals and conservatives alike, for differing reasons depending on the specific time period and place. In general, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” brush too broad of a stroke over the specific set of ideas and circumstances that led to this. Even now, you’re seeing new urbanism crop up amongst those on the left and right. The left tends to focus more on transit, and the right on architecture, but there’s a lot of overlap. The more bipartisan this is, the better.
@@alexanderrotmenszI really love this comment! It articulates what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Thanks for your videos, and for your thoughts on finding common ground to work towards a better future.
Europeans: This building is 100 years old. We must do anything in our power to preserve it, whatever the cost. Americans: This building is 20 years old. We must demolish it to make way for some new project.
@miles5600 Well, it's true that we Europeans don't automatically preserve any old building, but I think it's safe to say that we at least check if a building is worth preserving. I think after WW2, we largely lost the appetite for the kind of city-wide destruction that was depicted in this video.
Tragic! How could such massive destruction of a once glorious, historic city have occurred? Sadly, Americans repeated this sad tale across the country. Although the Europeans replicated some of the worst practices of American urban expansion, I am glad to live in breathtakingly beautiful Middelburg (The Netherlands).
@@alexanderrotmensz Although America still has it in some places, like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, as well as certain parts of Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Chicago.
As you say, I am afraid even in the latter examples it is pockets rather than entire cities. New York could at one point probably just post-Second World War especially with destruction wrought to London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Berlin, Warsaw etc. Have legitimately said it was the architectural equal of its European cousins. However even that great city destroyed so much of its gilded age architecture, and that was not really due to the car or surbanisation with the way New York evolved more like a European city. I will never understand the car centric urban renewal programmes in America. Unfortunstely the UK followed suit to a slightly lesser degree with the excuse of World War 2 destruction. With somewhere like Coventry which was a beautiful medieval city with a large car manufacturing base on its outskirts which was then subject to bombing due to switching to war production. So after the war the factories were rebuilt along with the roundabouts and fly overs. With nothing really left of the beautiful medieval architecture that rivalled somewhere lke York. So these places no wants to visit, so rather than thousands of tourists both domedtic and overseas they just decline.
U bent bekent met het plan van Jokinnen in Amsterdam, neem ik aan? Of het eerste wederopbouwplan van Rotterdam van W.G. Witteveen, die van Rotterdam net zo'n mooie stad had kunnen maken als Middelburg (waar ik ben geweest en absoluut onder de indruk was)?
@@HighFlyingOwlOfMinerva Nee. Hartelijk dank voor de informatie. Hoewel Nederlander, ben ik in Californië getogen. Toen ik met pensioen ging, verhuisde ik vanuit Engeland naar Nederland.
We look at Roman ruins and wonder how such a great ancient civilization could end. We've witnessed it in our own country. Early 1900s America is a long-lost ancient civilization that was systematically destroyed after WW2. America was rapidly urbanizing back then and becoming progressive by increasing access to education and fighting corporate monopolies. Had we kept to that trajectory, we'd be like Norway or Denmark by now. A stable social democracy with beautiful cities, high wages, and very little poverty. St Louis used to be a 15 minute walkable city with rapid electric transport. Something we strive for today but come nowhere close. We had it 100 years ago. Ever since WW2, America has had a wartime economy. The economy was quickly reshaped during WW2 to fight the Nazis and the Japanese but the government never relinquished control of the economy. Instead corporations put themselves in power and wrote laws to benefit their own interest with corporate subsidies at the expense of everybody else. Cities meant free markets which meant competition and the corporations didn't want competition, so they bulldozed the cities and built their own private shopping malls instead.
@@alexanderrotmensz Glad to hear you say that because I felt I was going on a tangential rant. I appreciate your series SO much. This is sure to capture a huge audience.
Check out London, Paris,Stockholm etc. You will see they have become hell holes for the same reasons. Loss of cultural values through uncontrolled immigration of peoples from cultures incompatible with the west.
Your analysis is miles off. The American Midwest has fallen into decline for exactly the OPPOSITE reasons you cite. It is NOT because of greedy AMERICAN corporations writing laws to benefit their own interest that accounts for the decline. It was those very businesses in the first place which stimulated growth; as much demographic and cultural as much as economic. The decline is because of two main factors: Firstly, Globalists have set to work gutting the Middle Class: destroying free market small 'c' capitalism. The enemy of America is NOT the AMERICAN businessman... it is the Multinational Mega Corporations... plagues headed up by monster CEO's who owe allegiance to nothing except money. Meanwhile, and secondly, as the Middle Class is eroded, too many people use their democratic power to put in governments that take the hard earned wealth of middle class Americans and ''redistribute'' it to an ever increasing parasitical 'welfare' class. This is what is destroying America. This kind of cultural decline what Donald Trump is trying to stop. And THAT's why the multinationals and globalists who are in bed with the Welfare Barons of the Democrat Party are trying so hard to destroy him.
Suburbanization, White Flight, Deindustrialization, & Car Dependent Infrastructure destroyed many of our current mid-size cities. The tale of St Louis is echoed through many cities along the Rust Belt and beyond. From Rochester NY to Detroit MI, American cities use to be cosmopolitan & architectural jewels that rivaled an even surpassed some European counterparts. They went from gorgeous monuments to humanity to overblown parking lots. The cookie-cutter suburban project was & is a mistake, lets preserve & reclaim this way of life.
I agree except for Detroit as it wasn’t just a mid size city but a massive one with almost 2 million people at it’s peak and was the 5th largest city in the country for the 1950 census. It was regarded as the Paris of the Midwest.
@@Daniel-pc2ov No crime is only an effect of the Suburbanization, White Flight, Deindustrialization, & Car Dependent Infrastructure which destroyed large amounts of homes, business and etc in those cities which made the people effected by all of that turn desperate and turn to crime.
I doubt it. Follow the money. Lack of money did in St. L and Detroit and Buffalo, etc. Google Maps the county of "Fairfax County, VA" a suburb of Washington DC where taxpayer money flows (the DC area has 15% of all federal workers, and the federal government consumes 20% of the economy, as well as taking about 33% of the money). You will see that Fairfax county looks like an architectural wasteland, ugly buildings abound, but every household here averages $150k a year and there are no poor people that I know of. Follow the money.
nah they dont really show any of the nice neighborhoods in this, there are many; but like the other half of the city does look like this with several exceptions in certain areas.
Yeah that isn't at all what I would call a scenic drive. I live in the area, plenty of other roads with better views of the city, river, arch, and natural beauty of the region.
@@tobylucido1512 the nice neighborhoods are in St Louis County but not in the city proper. this is showcasing the city itself to which its quite accurate
As a St. Louisian I love the arch and its park but at the same time I hate the arch and the park it sits on, why?, because nearly 30 entire city blocks were bulldozed and destroyed to make way for it. 30 city blocks of historical buildings, parks, houses, people and stores were all bulldozed to make way for a park and a giant metal arch. I mean like Peoples entirely Lively goods were destroyed and never put back together for it. All in all I love it because it carries a lot of good sentimental value, but I also hate it for what had to be destroyed in order for it to exist.
How many times has the Elite used some rational to destroy large swaths of urban America? 🤔🤨 The Elite surely didn't bulldoze those 30 city blocks out of reluctance (just like Pruitt-Igoe).
Seriously? Can you name one historical building that existed where the arch is now? They didn't demolish any buildings for the arch because the area was literally a giant vacant lot for 30 years before the arch was built. The arch was the winning design in an architectural competition to decide what would occupy the empty space. The neighborhood that existed where the arch is now was a low population density, mixed used area with mostly run down, decrepit buildings. If you miss it so much go visit the north side riverfront neighborhood. It's the same thing. Seriously, what motivates people like you to talk about 'love' and 'hate' over shanty apartments and old warehouses demolished almost 100 years ago? Do you know how many truly historic buildings there are rotting away in N. STL right now that no one could care less about? If you want something to be angry about, Bridgeton was demolished for a $1 billion airport expansion in the early 00's. Air traffic fell afterwards, so tens of thousands of people were forced out of their homes for nothing. The people responsible for that are still influential and alive so be angry about that.
They did the same thing in Richmond heights (basically STL to those not from here) to build the Menards, hah.. Eminent Domained entire neighborhoods. Destroyed historic black school and church. Uprooted hundreds of families.... To build a hardware store.. Across the street from another hardware store, and a block away from yet another. Makes the arch seem really important!
By the time that the old riverfront was razed, very little of the historic buildings remained in the neighborhood, and it was mostly rundown buildings.
The majority of the next generation of Americans won’t have any ancestors who lived in this country during its prime. There will be no collective ancestral memory of the way things were.
No one knows how anymore. And even if they did, the squabling over imposed White ideals of beauty vs. black would create insurmountable obstacles to doing anything.
I have hope that all these cities that suffered from de-industrialization (st. louis, pittsburgh, baltimore) will all have a renaissance in the coming decades. The prices for well-known cities (NY, Chicago, LA, Seattle) are going up to insane prices, hopefully that drives people to move.
I've got bad news: it won't happen. We are as if a person with hands and feet bound was pushed over. Falling towards the ground knowing full well that the circumstances which got us here can't be improved in time. All thats left is to hit the pavement and hope it doesn't hurt too much; only then can we begin to untie ourselves.
I moved to St Louis City to buy my first house and I love it here. This video shows the decay of the denser, downtown core. Fortunately there is a lot of old world, walkable, historic neighborhoods that are still doing well. I appreciate the hope for a comeback. I want to see the city grow again too.
St Louis is the epitome of how public transport and walkability being replaced by the dimwitted love for the highway (which, as a resident of St Louis, are awful) and parking lots can destroy one of the greatest creations West of the Mississippi. We could have been the greatest.
It's everywhere. I grew up in Orange County, CA, and when I was a kid, the tracks for the LA street cars were still there, although I think the trolleys actually stopped about the same time I was born. St. Louis had streetcars back in the day, but they were long gone when we moved here. I just looked it up, street cars and trams started disappearing in the fifties there, and shutdown altogether in 1963, while they lasted another 3 years in St. Louis.
The only dangerous area are north and east Stlouis. Everything else is decently safe. The population decline is attributed to everyone living in suburbs around the Stlouis area and not in the city itself. There is actually a population of around 2 million in the Stlouis area.
Even in the ruined sections of the north side, you can still see what the buildings were at one point. They still retain that beauty, and their potential for renewal is evident. In fact, parts of the north side are getting fixed up. The old houses were so well built that even with their age and long abandonment, their bones can be restored. It's a testament to the craftsmanship that used to be normal in the country as well as its commitment to basic attractiveness. St. Louis is still full of so much beauty that is often not shown. The media prefers to only talk about the negatives, writing the place off as a lost cause as if many people didn't still call it home and love it in spite of its problems. We were capable of great cities once, and we are still capable of it. People all over are still working at it, trying to revive cities all over America. Even in St. Louis, and indeed billions are pouring into various parts of town. Maybe things will eventually turn around. Only time will tell. Thanks for showing off some of the beauty of St. Louis. It's a very underappreciated city and far more beautiful than many in the US if you know where to look.
It certainly is sad how much beautiful architecture St. Louis lost, and with only a handful of notable exceptions the modern architecture in St. Louis is mediocre. But the loss of all those old buildings and density downtown are not the cause of St. Louis's fall; they are a symptom of it. Like many cities, St. Louis experienced a terrific amount of suburbanization and white flight in the aftermath of WWII.. This hit St. Louis harder than most for many reasons, but foremost among them is the City of St. Louis's not being part of St. Louis County. So when residents fled the city for the burbs, all the property tax revenue generated by these new suburbanites went exclusively to the county; the city got no share of it at all and had to duplicate all county government services for residents within its borders.
@@jonathanstensberg Annexation and the city/county split are not the same thing. While other older cities did not annex land like Columbus, OH and Indianapolis have done, most of them are part of a larger county. Kansas City is in Jackson County, Detroit is in Wayne County, and Cleveland is in Cuyahoga County. St. Louis, on the other hand, is not in St. Louis County. It’s not in any county at all. This is hardly the source of all of St. Louis’s myriad economic woes but it does aggravate them. Recognizing this, many St. Louis citizens would like to reunify with St. Louis County. St. Louis County, however, will have none of that.
That is sad as these were started by the British colonist along with New Haven also mentioned in this thread and carried on in the same architectural vein after independence.
@@bscottb8You are correct 💯. I stopped there for fuel on the way to school in Vernont. I couldn't believe how the downtown area looked. I had no idea the people from Yale had such tremendous amount of input in that decision. Please explain Thanks!
I will say that the scenes from the car are slightly misleading. The majority of buildings you see from the car are actually of East Saint Louis, a completely different city across the Mississippi River.
The "bulldoze into Oblivion" aspect pretty much sums up Atlanta because there's practically no historical buildings left and if there are any there more or less abandoned, hidden or just overlooked. Though sherman did wreck it back in the civil war but i digress.
Urban renewal and redlining are highly involved, devastating countless urban cores. A video in the series dedicated to Kansas City would be highly impactful, as this video was
This leaves me with such a melancholy feeling. I was born in St. Louis and have always loved being in the city when I return to visit. The older architecture carries with it a sense of excitement and civic pride that is just not present anymore. The crime is terrible now, but even worse is the lack of momentum from the leadership of the city to really try and do anything about it.
The problem is the leadership of St Louis thinks we just need "more money for the programs" to fix the crime, meanwhile the people in charge of these programs are stealing money. St Louis needs a complete reform in the police and needs to crack down heavily on the criminals there. But we can't because STL government likes to severely limit the police.
I live in St. Louis, and my grandpa is old enough to have lived in the city when it was still beautiful. It was safe, clean, prosperous, and had so much culture. From all of his stories of how the city used to be compared to what it is now, it's clear that it used to be great.
You should really do more research vs using google images. Pruitt Igoe is actually the new home of the NGA. A school was also built on that property in the mid 90s. St. Louis City retains a lot of original architecture. St. Louis City fell victim to white flight in the 50’s, along with an egregious city plan that mapped what out we see today.
Another American city destroyed by greed and misguided "planning". When I see our nation's strip malls, parking lots and freeways, I think, "Is this the best we can do? Is this all that "progress" can deliver"? We built great, walkable cities in the past. We can still do it. Thank you for your research and commentary. -Jim
Good old STL, I live in Soulard, still get a little experience of what the city was like back in the day but it’s definitely a far cry of what the city used to be.
You should try a full length one about STL! This is very well researched and concise, but as other people mentioned you just scratched the surface of the city's history. Just from watching this video I know it would be a banger. Subscribed!
Wow. I've seen a _lot_ of bad in my own city but holy shit, this is even worse than some of the places I've been to in the Netherlands like Lelystad, Almere or Rotterdam. How you can remove such platinum designs so cold and calculated for... a vast array of _nothing_ is beyond me. Truly horrifying.
There are a lot of false narratives on UA-cam designed to garner clicks and subscribers. You only scratched the surface on a very complex issue. Many of these narratives are self-defeating for the restoration needed to make SL a better place.
heartbreaking, I still will be confused as to why we had such magnificent architecture and world fairs but have the ugly and uninspiring architecture and projects we have now
It's cuz the people who came later cared more about standardization and functionality over creativity and beauty. Now no one cares enough to put beauty into architecture, now its just copy, paste and repeat for everything: Buildings, vehicles, appliances, etc its all basicaly copy pasted. Theres nothing unique being made anymore, nothing that stands out enough to inspire or enlighten, nothing that stirs the creative mind or soul. I've only seen tidbits of the little historic architecture we have left and even then its still slowly disappearing. The National register of historic places is a good example of this: on paper it protects structures but those structures can still be destroyed even if there on the register. There's countless examples of buildings, vehicles and other stuff on the register that have been destroyed since being listed. If you dont believe me feel free to look it up.
@@RailPreserver2K I don't think it's all standardization and functionality. The St. Louis Art Museum is a beautiful traditional building form the time of the World's Fair. They recently added a "modern" wing to it, and instead of using similar architecture they tacked on something that could be a giant mobile home (if you squint). Sometimes bad/ugly is just a reflection of the ethos of the people in charge. Our culture today is largely sick, and it's reflected in architecture. For non-art museum type stuff, though, I think cost plays a big part. Municipalities should revive the idea of architectural standards.
Pruitt-Igoe ISN'T like soviet housing. Because soviet 'microregions' near always were built based on the needs of their residents, including social infrastructure, transportation, work places, medicine, environment and leisure. Unlike meny social housing projects in West Europe and America.
Was going to say there are some really nice areas of St Louis and downtown isn’t too bad either. My friend lives in Lafeyete. The architecture around there is beautiful
My grandfather is 82 years old. He grew up in downtown St. Louis in the 1940’s and 50’s and has witnessed the city’s decline firsthand. It’s crazy to think that the few remaining beautiful neighborhoods like the one he grew up in were once plentiful, with hundreds of thousands of people residing within. I knew St. Louis was a shadow of its former self, but I had no idea just how drastic its decline was until watching this video. This makes me want to ask my grandfather a lot more questions about his childhood and what St. Louis was like back then
I lived in downtown STL in 1985-90. Years later I learned how highway construction destroyed thriving Black communities, such as what was bulldozed for I-44. And so many of the lost buildings fell to developers, who only cared about profits.
@@drh3b There were never plans to go past where it is now in Brentwood. 170 is meant to be a short cut north for the commuters coming out (and in.) of the city (St. Louis) on HWY 40 northward instead of going all the way on 40 to 270. Also, giving access to the Clayton business area instead of having to use two-way streets to get to work for thousands of Clayton employees. 170 has been around for many decades. When I was a teenager in the mid 1970s my grandfather lived in U city off Delmar about a block from 170. I recall my dad telling me that one day 170 will go north all the way to 270. We lived in Florissant about a mile from 270 and where 170 would be. We had to drive Hanley Rd. north to Florissant back then. Unfortunately, grandfather died before 170 was completed to 270. You want to go from north county to south county or vice-a-versa? That's why 270 was built. Most (if not all.) major cities have a HWY that circles or semi-circles in the county around the urban city. Your "idea" doesn't hold weight about wealthy white people stopping the HWY. Why? You forgot about 170 going through some of the wealthiest area in St. Louis county. It's called Ladue and Clayton.
One of my favourite Christmas movies is meet me in St.Louis. I always thought as a kid it would be so cool to go there. Now, not so much. It’s so sad that this is the reality for so many cities. Thank you for this great video. It’s so nicely put together❤
Still visit. There’s still amazing architecture all over the city. Big city amenities with a small town feel. Forest park is truly a gem and the food here is great too.
Exhibit A - prime example of how the Republican Reagan Revolution in 1981- in antitrust law enforcement where they thought it should be fine if their big corporate buddies got to all merge with each other. In 1980 St Louis was home to 23 Fortune 500 companies. Now it is home to just 7. The rest were bought up by other companies. Think of once proudly independent Anheuser-Busch for a good example. Think of all the ancillary businesses associated with a big corporate headquarters - law firms, catering, advertising, all kinds of office services, upscale restaurants and shopping because of a concentration of wealth., etc., etc.and what happens to a city when it loses those companies and their headquarters - and then look around at empty downtowns like St Louis, but also places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee. What happened to them wasn't necessarily as organic as it was political. It didn't happen by accident. Jobs do matter. Take them away and cities decline and we can specifically point to Republican antitrust policy for causing this over the last 40 years.
A wonderful, sad video. It's really almost beyond belief. As a young guy I worked for a few years doing architectural history surveys. We did this sort of damage to ourselves everywhere.
It’s so tragic what happened to this once great city. I would love to see the town return to prosperity someday. It’s crazy to imagine that just urban renewal and car culture could ruin a place this significantly, the sheer about of demolition is just crazy. I would love to see a deeper dive into how it happened and what could help save the place.
really enjoyed this although it saddened me. St Louis for all its problems has some of the most beautiful architecture and parks anywhere. the video Brick by Brick tells the story. this video you've done was short to the point and covered a lot. also excellent music.
In my architecture program in the 1980s, I took an urban planning course with one of the Pruitt-Igoe designers. I was critical of him and almost got thrown out of the program for questioning the validity of “urban renewal.”
The stories of other grand and important cities in the Midwest such as Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati , Milwaukee, Dayton, Akron, KC, have similarities to this one.
*Misleading video (!)* Many of these photos of dilapidated buildings 0:18 . . . are NOT from St. Louis. They are from another city across the river in Illinois . . .
As a St. Louisan, I appreciate the quality of the video. However, this is just the surface level telling of the story. It goes much deeper with institutional racism, red-lining, white flight, urban sprawl, etc.
Some of it was violence. See the book slaughter of cities ethnic cleansing. It talks of how the white people who built these places had their lives robbed of everything g they built after the great migrations of the 1960s. I had no clue Harlem was built by Europeans.
I knew my city would make the list! Though, I'm sad the UA-cam algorithm didn't try to show me this video immediately after upload, I'm always looking for this content. You didn't lead the others with the crime reports... is it not so bad elsewhere?
I've driven around the city plenty in my lifetime and St Louis has a surprising amount of great architecture and impressive buildings. Of course like most cities the impressive work and the skilled sculpture is all old. Everything new is usually either simple boxes or giant preschool-looking creations. And we all dress and look a lot skankier than people in the 1900s that's for sure. Society everywhere seems to be generally deteriorating over the decades but it appears to be a nationwide thing.
What I always find interesting is that when people make model buildings even today, they often look beautiful and impressive just like they did in the old days. Just look at the monuments and classic old houses companies like Department 56 churn out yearly, like "Christmas in the City". These are the ones people buy by the truckloads to decorate their homes. But the actual structures we build to live in today- and especially workplaces and civic centers- are for the most part simple and ugly. And our behavior with public statues is even more bizarre. We kick down and remove the old attractive renditions of ourselves from times past... and instead put up new ones to replace them are distorted and kinda grotesque humanlike figures instead. Why is this? Its very strange!
@@Leroy-tj9jg Well, they once had a beautiful Famous Barr department store building downtown, all sculpted with brass ornamentation and with ornate wrought iron escalators. I believe its closed and possibly torn down now. You will be having no more of that, said the city apparently..... lol
@@e.gadd.1 I think you touched on something that has not been brought up in this thread, and that is moral decay. It just happened to coincide with societal decay all across the USA.
@@Leroy-tj9jg There are a lot of older buildings and former mansions in St. Louis that even in decay you can tell used to look great. St. Louis used to be rich, and had several downtowns each with their own impressive buildings.
I'm from the STL metro area, and it hurts to think about what we've lost. The waterfront was bulldozed in the 1930s (which is where the Arch now stands), Interstates 64, 70, 55, and 44 diced up the heart of the city in the postwar era, our urban industrial zones are old derelict structures collapsing into themselves, and historic neighborhoods like Wellston and North St. Louis are warzones now. However, even though so much is destroyed, we still have some greatness left. The old Union Station building you showed is an architectural marvel, the Lafayette Square neighborhood (among others) is still gorgeous, and Forest Park (where the 1904 World's Fair was) has our beloved zoo. Also, the driving footage you showed at the intro isn't in St. Louis proper, but East St. Louis, which is in Illinois. It was once called the most beautiful city in the United States in the early 1900s, but now it is reverting back to nature. I know people who grew up there, and it started to go downhill when the industry started to leave in the 1950s-1960s, which caused a demographic shift. It really became unpleasant and violent in the 1970s, and that's when most people decided to flee.
I’m from St. Louis,and when I went to the history museum and saw what the city used to look like my mouth dropped to the floor,it used to be such a beautiful city,it’s a shame what happened to it.
this video fills me with despair. i love cities, they're alive with their own personality and this one has been beat within an inch of its life. it deserves so much better.
As a Brit whose best friend lives in St Louis I have to say you picked areas where there is specific degradation. However all cities have this. I have to say I see St Louis as a second home I love the city. It’s not too big or small and has some amazing architecture. I love Lafeyete area and Forest Park and botanical gardens
There is plenty of neat stuff left, but you wouldn't have to work hard to make a long video tour of deteriorating areas. I would give you some recommended driving, but there's a lot of crime in some of those areas.
This video is sad, but St. Louis and the greater metropolitan area have life still. We have a wonderful art museum (free admission), the science center (free admission), a world famous zoo (free admission), beautiful parks, historic neighborhoods. I grew up in Southside St Louis and live just outside the city now. There are some neighborhoods that have gone derelict and you showcased them very well here. There are about 3 million people who live in the greater St. Louis area and many of them work and recreate in the city proper and even call it home even though they live in the surrounding counties but most of our crime statistics don’t take that into account. St. Louis is still a great place to live but I will agree that the city really needs a boost. Thank you for highlighting it in this video.
Urban Renewal was terrible, but the downfall of Saint Louis can be traced back to 1876 when the City voted to leave St. Louis County and become independent. When the white flight and suburbanization in general happened 75 years later, the tax base was doomed.
Remarkable. Not American so it is very interesting to observe old America I knew little to nothing about. How it has been negatively transformed within cities that really had their heydays. The history, character and cultural heritage lost and with it so much gone for the people to appreciate, enjoy and take pride in. Seemingly for development of roads, community housing and another concrete jungle. Very, very sad. Enjoying your channel and will explore further. Thank You.
Good video, but you can't blame all of St. Louis's troubles on urban renewal, and you can't blame all of Pruitt Igoe's troubles on poor architectural design
St. Louis still has a lot of amazing architecture and is beautiful still, but we have lost a tremendous amount due to white flight, redlining, neglect, and movement to the suburbs. We still have more beautiful buildings than almost anywhere outside of Chicago or NYC. It is not as dire as this video makes it seem. I live in the urban core and love it.
Unfortunately STL has torn down more historic and significant architecture than most US cities have ever had, BUT there is still a wonderful amount of great architecture and city parks that remain. Suburbia and the decline of the city has been really rough here, but come see how much is left and really wonderful. I love my late 1800s house and largely intact neighborhood
"All these nice buildings make me sick! They're just too damn pretty! They all have to go. We need a good place for families to live; with a lot of strip malls, box stores, and unwalkable neighborhoods. Now that's a city!"
While St Louis likes to bemoan the city/county split, its impact is dramatically overstated. The idea is that St Louis was unable to annex land during post-war suburbanization. However, very few old cities annexed significant areas of land during this time. This is because older cities were already boxed in my older suburban municipalities that did not want to be annexed. The only cities that managed large annexations were you get cities, largely in the south and west, that did not have pre-existing suburbs preventing expansion. In other words, without the city/county split, St Louis would not have been able to annex much land, and would still be in a similar situation today.
FYI...St. Louis City and St. Louis County are different entities. The County is home to many of the municipalities you mentioned and are not affiliated with the city of St. Louis in any way.
I live there, it would be cool if they had kept it the same. Luckily though now people are much more attached to the old architecture here, and we're much less likely to take them down. :)
The people that are there now will never add any value to this city. We can blame it on highways and such- but it is the work of each generation to improve upon the other.
It was also the historic towns. Ottumwa Iowa experienced urban renewal. They destroyed a beautiful and circular walled unique park, a functional downtown, and the character of the city.
St. Louis has its issues, but it is still worth a visit. It is easily the largest collection of historic architecture for a region it's size. Also, keep in mind it's still a region of 3 million and many major institutions, corporations, universities, etc. The sky is not falling.
I'm from the east coast, but spent a month total of the last year in STL, Ferguson, Florissant, etc. So full of highways and stroads and hostile to pedestrians or bikers. Hardly any green space. The city of STL is pretty dead, and you can't really tell where the downtown even is, cause it's just a bunch of parking.
One month doesn't do it justice. We have PLENTY of Parks, (did you not see Forest Park, the second biggest urban Park in the USA?) green spaces and now we have lots of biking paths (St. Louis Green Way)...seriously how do you write such nonsense after "a month"..
You can't tell where the downtown is? Dude, there is a 600 ft Arch greeting you? Also, St. Louis doesn't really have wide roads compared to most newer cities, even in the suburbs. Sounds like you're exaggerating.
I’m a big American fan from East Europe but I can see how the trend is working against you nowadays. America became different and tired over time. I like when you guys had 80. boxy cars and everything looked so unique… Nowadays on another hand… we have the same looking cars everywhere, skyscrapers are higher elsewhere and many other things. It breaks my heart to see my childhood dream drifting away slowly.
I visited St. Louis in 2011. A very nice city, not with the glam of New York City, New Orleans or San Francisco, but it has its charm. So sad to see the way it was deprived of its former beauty. I hope it will have the chance to rise again.
As a Brit I walk around our cities - of which even the worst affected by car infrastructure and modernist design principles are still very historic and walkable compared to every US city outside of a couple - and I think how for all the suffering and toil of generations of slaves and workers there is at least evidence of the wealth that they created through their labour. One of the great tragedies of the great lost American cities is how so much toil and energy has been destroyed. There's so little left in so many places to show what a great civilizational force the USA was at its height of growth. It's so utterly sad.
I grew up in North County, itself a creation of movement away from the first suburbs that were the original movement away from the City. And so North County is now a past success expereincing crime and dysfunction , where residents retired to ... St. Charles County/O'Fallon/Wentzville. Because land is apparently infinite, and the cure to fix all problems is to simply abandon them to "the poors."
My grandfather was born in 1900. In ca. 1928, he visited St Louis on government business and wrote to his fiancee that the city was an ugly dump and the scariest, most dangerous place he had ever seen. That's coming from a man living in Washington, DC, who had been in every major city of the northeast and south, and who had seen Paris and other European cities during the First World War. So I don't know where all this nostalgia comes from for these run-down cities. They became run down because nobody wanted to live in them the way they were. That they are even worse now is a function of systematic mismanagement, and not proof that things should have been left as they were. And curated black-and-white photographs and nostalgic music cannot gloss over how horrible the living conditions in the "good old days" were for most city dwellers.
@@alexanderrotmensz I'm not American but I hope the US can fix the cities and abolish (the soulless) suburbs for better ones or for revitalized old cities. It would make the country a lot better in my opinion
Not only larger cities but smaller cities like Saginaw MI, Canton OH, Niagara Falls NY, Chester PA, Camden NJ, and Bridgeport CT are all once proud and prosperous blue collar gritty cities that are mostly urban decay and abandonment pickled with industrial brownfields.
My Great Uncle had climbed a church that was being torn down because a parking lot was put there where the church had once been. He had written about it in a journal I came across after he passed. Climbed the church to save the cross The cross they said they would not save. So I went with the will of God in my spirit and took the cross. So delicate and beautiful the cross laden in my arms I weep for this city the once beautiful St. Louis.
This was an extremely painful video to watch. To think that a population could do this to their own city is absolutely mind boggling. I really wonder what historians will think about this era in 1000 years.
Fall of Rome vibes for sure
It wasn't the population, it was the automotive industry.
@@tomb9818 Eh, considering how often NIMBYs cry about anything that takes away parking or street space, I'll say we did it to ourselves.
@@jamalgibson8139 The car & gas industries have trillions of $ to spend on advertising/brainwashing the public and for paying off politicians. And when no other transit options are put in place, of course people will be scared and angry, and fight bitterly for every parking space. The alternatives need to be in place first. By that I mean, residents of a city should be no more than 5 minutes walk from public transit that runs regularly 24/7, and separated bike lanes on every main road.
Historians will write of the United States as an object lesson, for sure, for avoiding the mistakes the USA committed.
Ironically, both St Louis and Detroit were once the 4th largest cities in the country. Now both have lost 2/3 of their population.
Don't the local politicians care? Do they work hard enough to mitigate the effects of the lost industries by looking for alternatives and retraining people?
Atleast Detroit is trying, their population finally grew this most recent census.
@@stephenvarty191 they keep electing democrat mayors and councils so no they dont care
I think New Orleans also once held that title too. then it went down the toilet. its infrastructure replaced by roads
Want to take a guess why? Guess who moved in? All of my ancestors live in north stl. My grandmother was even Miss Missouri 1940. Now look at it. Worst ghetto in North America. It’s not a coincidence why this same process happens in every single major city. Yet we can never state the obvious.
Great video, St. Louis is really beautiful, but it’s so sad what they did to it.
You can blame the years and decades of voting Democrat as well as the city of St.Louis seceding from St.Louis County in 1877 for making the city of St.Louis what it is today.
@@CJColvin I don’t think the republicans would’ve done any better in designing an urban place. It’s their fault they can’t win elections in cities. IMO it’s time for a new political party focused on urbanism.
I think overtime we see that all this is at the fault of liberals and conservatives alike, for differing reasons depending on the specific time period and place. In general, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” brush too broad of a stroke over the specific set of ideas and circumstances that led to this. Even now, you’re seeing new urbanism crop up amongst those on the left and right. The left tends to focus more on transit, and the right on architecture, but there’s a lot of overlap. The more bipartisan this is, the better.
@CJColvin it was all downhill after the indian mounds was flattened. 😢
@@alexanderrotmenszI really love this comment! It articulates what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Thanks for your videos, and for your thoughts on finding common ground to work towards a better future.
Europeans: This building is 100 years old. We must do anything in our power to preserve it, whatever the cost.
Americans: This building is 20 years old. We must demolish it to make way for some new project.
*For some parking lot.
That’s not how it works. Just because a building is old doesn’t mean we preserve it nor is that smart to do.
@miles5600 Well, it's true that we Europeans don't automatically preserve any old building, but I think it's safe to say that we at least check if a building is worth preserving. I think after WW2, we largely lost the appetite for the kind of city-wide destruction that was depicted in this video.
@BrokenCurtain You can also thank Lyndon B Johnson for making the black community are what they are today as well.
*a new freeway
Tragic! How could such massive destruction of a once glorious, historic city have occurred? Sadly, Americans repeated this sad tale across the country. Although the Europeans replicated some of the worst practices of American urban expansion, I am glad to live in breathtakingly beautiful Middelburg (The Netherlands).
Americans go on vacation to Europe for its beauty, unaware we had it too
@@alexanderrotmensz Although America still has it in some places, like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, as well as certain parts of Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Chicago.
As you say, I am afraid even in the latter examples it is pockets rather than entire cities. New York could at one point probably just post-Second World War especially with destruction wrought to London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Berlin, Warsaw etc. Have legitimately said it was the architectural equal of its European cousins. However even that great city destroyed so much of its gilded age architecture, and that was not really due to the car or surbanisation with the way New York evolved more like a European city. I will never understand the car centric urban renewal programmes in America. Unfortunstely the UK followed suit to a slightly lesser degree with the excuse of World War 2 destruction. With somewhere like Coventry which was a beautiful medieval city with a large car manufacturing base on its outskirts which was then subject to bombing due to switching to war production. So after the war the factories were rebuilt along with the roundabouts and fly overs. With nothing really left of the beautiful medieval architecture that rivalled somewhere lke York. So these places no wants to visit, so rather than thousands of tourists both domedtic and overseas they just decline.
U bent bekent met het plan van Jokinnen in Amsterdam, neem ik aan? Of het eerste wederopbouwplan van Rotterdam van W.G. Witteveen, die van Rotterdam net zo'n mooie stad had kunnen maken als Middelburg (waar ik ben geweest en absoluut onder de indruk was)?
@@HighFlyingOwlOfMinerva Nee. Hartelijk dank voor de informatie. Hoewel Nederlander, ben ik in Californië getogen. Toen ik met pensioen ging, verhuisde ik vanuit Engeland naar Nederland.
We look at Roman ruins and wonder how such a great ancient civilization could end. We've witnessed it in our own country. Early 1900s America is a long-lost ancient civilization that was systematically destroyed after WW2. America was rapidly urbanizing back then and becoming progressive by increasing access to education and fighting corporate monopolies. Had we kept to that trajectory, we'd be like Norway or Denmark by now. A stable social democracy with beautiful cities, high wages, and very little poverty.
St Louis used to be a 15 minute walkable city with rapid electric transport. Something we strive for today but come nowhere close. We had it 100 years ago. Ever since WW2, America has had a wartime economy. The economy was quickly reshaped during WW2 to fight the Nazis and the Japanese but the government never relinquished control of the economy. Instead corporations put themselves in power and wrote laws to benefit their own interest with corporate subsidies at the expense of everybody else. Cities meant free markets which meant competition and the corporations didn't want competition, so they bulldozed the cities and built their own private shopping malls instead.
Wow. You actually nailed it.
@@alexanderrotmensz Glad to hear you say that because I felt I was going on a tangential rant. I appreciate your series SO much. This is sure to capture a huge audience.
Check out London, Paris,Stockholm etc. You will see they have become hell holes for the same reasons. Loss of cultural values through uncontrolled immigration of peoples from cultures incompatible with the west.
100%
Your analysis is miles off. The American Midwest has fallen into decline for exactly the OPPOSITE reasons you cite. It is NOT because of greedy AMERICAN corporations writing laws to benefit their own interest that accounts for the decline. It was those very businesses in the first place which stimulated growth; as much demographic and cultural as much as economic.
The decline is because of two main factors: Firstly, Globalists have set to work gutting the Middle Class: destroying free market small 'c' capitalism. The enemy of America is NOT the AMERICAN businessman... it is the Multinational Mega Corporations... plagues headed up by monster CEO's who owe allegiance to nothing except money.
Meanwhile, and secondly, as the Middle Class is eroded, too many people use their democratic power to put in governments that take the hard earned wealth of middle class Americans and ''redistribute'' it to an ever increasing parasitical 'welfare' class.
This is what is destroying America.
This kind of cultural decline what Donald Trump is trying to stop. And THAT's why the multinationals and globalists who are in bed with the Welfare Barons of the Democrat Party are trying so hard to destroy him.
Suburbanization, White Flight, Deindustrialization, & Car Dependent Infrastructure destroyed many of our current mid-size cities.
The tale of St Louis is echoed through many cities along the Rust Belt and beyond. From Rochester NY to Detroit MI, American cities use to be cosmopolitan & architectural jewels that rivaled an even surpassed some European counterparts.
They went from gorgeous monuments to humanity to overblown parking lots. The cookie-cutter suburban project was & is a mistake, lets preserve & reclaim this way of life.
I agree except for Detroit as it wasn’t just a mid size city but a massive one with almost 2 million people at it’s peak and was the 5th largest city in the country for the 1950 census. It was regarded as the Paris of the Midwest.
It’s all because of crime lmao
@@Daniel-pc2ov No crime is only an effect of the Suburbanization, White Flight, Deindustrialization, & Car Dependent Infrastructure which destroyed large amounts of homes, business and etc in those cities which made the people effected by all of that turn desperate and turn to crime.
It is funny in Europe we call Paris the St Louis on the Seine ha ha. I think you may overstating its architectural beauty a tad.
I doubt it. Follow the money. Lack of money did in St. L and Detroit and Buffalo, etc. Google Maps the county of "Fairfax County, VA" a suburb of Washington DC where taxpayer money flows (the DC area has 15% of all federal workers, and the federal government consumes 20% of the economy, as well as taking about 33% of the money). You will see that Fairfax county looks like an architectural wasteland, ugly buildings abound, but every household here averages $150k a year and there are no poor people that I know of. Follow the money.
St Louis' "most scenic drive" is a 40 foot concrete wall
nah they dont really show any of the nice neighborhoods in this, there are many; but like the other half of the city does look like this with several exceptions in certain areas.
Right padd the wall down that roads the arch and surrounding park. It is pretty. Unfortunately, the heroin addicts think so too
Yeah that isn't at all what I would call a scenic drive. I live in the area, plenty of other roads with better views of the city, river, arch, and natural beauty of the region.
Spoken like someone that’s never been to St. Louis
@@tobylucido1512 the nice neighborhoods are in St Louis County but not in the city proper. this is showcasing the city itself to which its quite accurate
That theater in the beginning is East St. Louis, in Illinois. Actually quite a few buildings in the beginning are in ESL, which was truly devastated.
As a St. Louisian I love the arch and its park but at the same time I hate the arch and the park it sits on, why?, because nearly 30 entire city blocks were bulldozed and destroyed to make way for it. 30 city blocks of historical buildings, parks, houses, people and stores were all bulldozed to make way for a park and a giant metal arch. I mean like Peoples entirely Lively goods were destroyed and never put back together for it. All in all I love it because it carries a lot of good sentimental value, but I also hate it for what had to be destroyed in order for it to exist.
How many times has the Elite used some rational to destroy large swaths of urban America? 🤔🤨 The Elite surely didn't bulldoze those 30 city blocks out of reluctance (just like Pruitt-Igoe).
Seriously? Can you name one historical building that existed where the arch is now?
They didn't demolish any buildings for the arch because the area was literally a giant vacant lot for 30 years before the arch was built. The arch was the winning design in an architectural competition to decide what would occupy the empty space. The neighborhood that existed where the arch is now was a low population density, mixed used area with mostly run down, decrepit buildings. If you miss it so much go visit the north side riverfront neighborhood. It's the same thing. Seriously, what motivates people like you to talk about 'love' and 'hate' over shanty apartments and old warehouses demolished almost 100 years ago? Do you know how many truly historic buildings there are rotting away in N. STL right now that no one could care less about? If you want something to be angry about, Bridgeton was demolished for a $1 billion airport expansion in the early 00's. Air traffic fell afterwards, so tens of thousands of people were forced out of their homes for nothing. The people responsible for that are still influential and alive so be angry about that.
They did the same thing in Richmond heights (basically STL to those not from here) to build the Menards, hah.. Eminent Domained entire neighborhoods. Destroyed historic black school and church. Uprooted hundreds of families.... To build a hardware store.. Across the street from another hardware store, and a block away from yet another.
Makes the arch seem really important!
By the time that the old riverfront was razed, very little of the historic buildings remained in the neighborhood, and it was mostly rundown buildings.
Well this gets my 'Saddest Video of the Week' award. Let's hope SL can rise again.
STL not SL idiot.
America is capable of creating so much beauty. We need to do it once again, like our ancestors did.
The majority of the next generation of Americans won’t have any ancestors who lived in this country during its prime. There will be no collective ancestral memory of the way things were.
@@Dan-xt7svBingo
No one knows how anymore. And even if they did, the squabling over imposed White ideals of beauty vs. black would create insurmountable obstacles to doing anything.
This country isn’t worth investing in anymore. Too many foreigners
they'll say it cost to much.
I have hope that all these cities that suffered from de-industrialization (st. louis, pittsburgh, baltimore) will all have a renaissance in the coming decades. The prices for well-known cities (NY, Chicago, LA, Seattle) are going up to insane prices, hopefully that drives people to move.
I've got bad news: it won't happen. We are as if a person with hands and feet bound was pushed over. Falling towards the ground knowing full well that the circumstances which got us here can't be improved in time. All thats left is to hit the pavement and hope it doesn't hurt too much; only then can we begin to untie ourselves.
@@milkdrinker7 everything can improve with time. But we need people to plant proverbial trees understanding they will never feel its shade.
I moved to St Louis City to buy my first house and I love it here. This video shows the decay of the denser, downtown core. Fortunately there is a lot of old world, walkable, historic neighborhoods that are still doing well.
I appreciate the hope for a comeback. I want to see the city grow again too.
@@hootmx198my brother just moved to south city and theres already been shootings and a house burned down since October
Crazy to think it hosted the Olympics once upon a time
St Louis is the epitome of how public transport and walkability being replaced by the dimwitted love for the highway (which, as a resident of St Louis, are awful) and parking lots can destroy one of the greatest creations West of the Mississippi. We could have been the greatest.
It's everywhere. I grew up in Orange County, CA, and when I was a kid, the tracks for the LA street cars were still there, although I think the trolleys actually stopped about the same time I was born. St. Louis had streetcars back in the day, but they were long gone when we moved here.
I just looked it up, street cars and trams started disappearing in the fifties there, and shutdown altogether in 1963, while they lasted another 3 years in St. Louis.
I wonder how it would be if they kept the street cars and didnt dissect neighborhoods with the highways
The only dangerous area are north and east Stlouis. Everything else is decently safe. The population decline is attributed to everyone living in suburbs around the Stlouis area and not in the city itself. There is actually a population of around 2 million in the Stlouis area.
South Side isn’t safe either. Not as a whole anyway
Even in the ruined sections of the north side, you can still see what the buildings were at one point. They still retain that beauty, and their potential for renewal is evident. In fact, parts of the north side are getting fixed up. The old houses were so well built that even with their age and long abandonment, their bones can be restored. It's a testament to the craftsmanship that used to be normal in the country as well as its commitment to basic attractiveness. St. Louis is still full of so much beauty that is often not shown. The media prefers to only talk about the negatives, writing the place off as a lost cause as if many people didn't still call it home and love it in spite of its problems. We were capable of great cities once, and we are still capable of it. People all over are still working at it, trying to revive cities all over America. Even in St. Louis, and indeed billions are pouring into various parts of town. Maybe things will eventually turn around. Only time will tell.
Thanks for showing off some of the beauty of St. Louis. It's a very underappreciated city and far more beautiful than many in the US if you know where to look.
It certainly is sad how much beautiful architecture St. Louis lost, and with only a handful of notable exceptions the modern architecture in St. Louis is mediocre. But the loss of all those old buildings and density downtown are not the cause of St. Louis's fall; they are a symptom of it. Like many cities, St. Louis experienced a terrific amount of suburbanization and white flight in the aftermath of WWII.. This hit St. Louis harder than most for many reasons, but foremost among them is the City of St. Louis's not being part of St. Louis County. So when residents fled the city for the burbs, all the property tax revenue generated by these new suburbanites went exclusively to the county; the city got no share of it at all and had to duplicate all county government services for residents within its borders.
The City/County split is dramatically overstated. Very few older cities annexed significant areas land during post-war suburbanization.
@@jonathanstensbergHad the city of St.Louis stayed with the County in 1877 then the city of St.Louis wouldn't suffer as much as it is right now.
Redlining and hyper-segregation of the north vs. south accellerated the decay as well. It continues to this day. "Unofficially" of course.
@@jonathanstensberg Annexation and the city/county split are not the same thing. While other older cities did not annex land like Columbus, OH and Indianapolis have done, most of them are part of a larger county. Kansas City is in Jackson County, Detroit is in Wayne County, and Cleveland is in Cuyahoga County. St. Louis, on the other hand, is not in St. Louis County. It’s not in any county at all. This is hardly the source of all of St. Louis’s myriad economic woes but it does aggravate them. Recognizing this, many St. Louis citizens would like to reunify with St. Louis County. St. Louis County, however, will have none of that.
I like your "fallen cities" formula for these vids. Keep it up for more cities like this, of which there are many
Please do Norfolk, VA... their entire historic downtown was destroyed in the name of "urban renewal" during the 1960s and '70s.
New Haven, CT also destroyed much of itself in the name of urban renewal, with fools on the faculty at Yale saying it was the right thing to do.
@@bscottb8 Wow!
That is sad as these were started by the British colonist along with New Haven also mentioned in this thread and carried on in the same architectural vein after independence.
@@bscottb8You are correct 💯. I stopped there for fuel on the way to school in Vernont. I couldn't believe how the downtown area looked. I had no idea the people from Yale had such tremendous amount of input in that decision. Please explain Thanks!
I will say that the scenes from the car are slightly misleading. The majority of buildings you see from the car are actually of East Saint Louis, a completely different city across the Mississippi River.
The "bulldoze into Oblivion" aspect pretty much sums up Atlanta because there's practically no historical buildings left and if there are any there more or less abandoned, hidden or just overlooked.
Though sherman did wreck it back in the civil war but i digress.
Urban renewal and redlining are highly involved, devastating countless urban cores. A video in the series dedicated to Kansas City would be highly impactful, as this video was
America enjoyed leveling cities in Germany & Japan sooooo much during WW2 that when it was over they said "That was fun now lets do our own cities"
urban renewal was pure evil
Excited to see where this series goes. Great vid!
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” Joni Mitchell
This leaves me with such a melancholy feeling. I was born in St. Louis and have always loved being in the city when I return to visit. The older architecture carries with it a sense of excitement and civic pride that is just not present anymore.
The crime is terrible now, but even worse is the lack of momentum from the leadership of the city to really try and do anything about it.
The problem is the leadership of St Louis thinks we just need "more money for the programs" to fix the crime, meanwhile the people in charge of these programs are stealing money. St Louis needs a complete reform in the police and needs to crack down heavily on the criminals there. But we can't because STL government likes to severely limit the police.
So sad! We need to know more about this stuff.
I live in St. Louis, and my grandpa is old enough to have lived in the city when it was still beautiful. It was safe, clean, prosperous, and had so much culture. From all of his stories of how the city used to be compared to what it is now, it's clear that it used to be great.
The second shot is from East St Louis (Majestic Theater) - a different city in a different state.
Same metro area though
What a fantastic (but also really sad) video! I can't wait to see more of this series!
You should really do more research vs using google images. Pruitt Igoe is actually the new home of the NGA. A school was also built on that property in the mid 90s.
St. Louis City retains a lot of original architecture. St. Louis City fell victim to white flight in the 50’s, along with an egregious city plan that mapped what out we see today.
Another American city destroyed by greed and misguided "planning". When I see our nation's strip malls, parking lots and freeways, I think, "Is this the best we can do? Is this all that "progress" can deliver"? We built great, walkable cities in the past. We can still do it. Thank you for your research and commentary. -Jim
Good old STL, I live in Soulard, still get a little experience of what the city was like back in the day but it’s definitely a far cry of what the city used to be.
You should try a full length one about STL! This is very well researched and concise, but as other people mentioned you just scratched the surface of the city's history. Just from watching this video I know it would be a banger. Subscribed!
Such a good channel idk how you dont have ten times the subscribers if not more! Keep uploading please
Wow. I've seen a _lot_ of bad in my own city but holy shit, this is even worse than some of the places I've been to in the Netherlands like Lelystad, Almere or Rotterdam.
How you can remove such platinum designs so cold and calculated for... a vast array of _nothing_ is beyond me. Truly horrifying.
There are a lot of false narratives on UA-cam designed to garner clicks and subscribers. You only scratched the surface on a very complex issue. Many of these narratives are self-defeating for the restoration needed to make SL a better place.
amen bruh
Such a shame, so much lost, maybe one day our children will build something like it again
Buddy this rings so true for my hometown, Reading PA. You may have already covered it but if not, would love to see it. Subscribed
heartbreaking, I still
will be confused as to why we had such magnificent architecture and world fairs but have the ugly and uninspiring architecture and projects we have now
It's cuz the people who came later cared more about standardization and functionality over creativity and beauty.
Now no one cares enough to put beauty into architecture, now its just copy, paste and repeat for everything:
Buildings, vehicles, appliances, etc its all basicaly copy pasted.
Theres nothing unique being made anymore, nothing that stands out enough to inspire or enlighten, nothing that stirs the creative mind or soul.
I've only seen tidbits of the little historic architecture we have left and even then its still slowly disappearing.
The National register of historic places is a good example of this: on paper it protects structures but those structures can still be destroyed even if there on the register.
There's countless examples of buildings, vehicles and other stuff on the register that have been destroyed since being listed.
If you dont believe me feel free to look it up.
@@RailPreserver2K I don't think it's all standardization and functionality. The St. Louis Art Museum is a beautiful traditional building form the time of the World's Fair. They recently added a "modern" wing to it, and instead of using similar architecture they tacked on something that could be a giant mobile home (if you squint). Sometimes bad/ugly is just a reflection of the ethos of the people in charge. Our culture today is largely sick, and it's reflected in architecture. For non-art museum type stuff, though, I think cost plays a big part. Municipalities should revive the idea of architectural standards.
You're right. Most cars today are pretty much the same rectangular block with 4 wheels. The cars back then were far for unique.
@@PhilipCouncilor true
Where's the building at 5:47?
Pruitt-Igoe ISN'T like soviet housing. Because soviet 'microregions' near always were built based on the needs of their residents, including social infrastructure, transportation, work places, medicine, environment and leisure.
Unlike meny social housing projects in West Europe and America.
to be fair the pictures u showed of STL now are mostly the really bad parts and sometimes East STL which isn't even part of the city
George Floyd was a delinquent
Was going to say there are some really nice areas of St Louis and downtown isn’t too bad either. My friend lives in Lafeyete. The architecture around there is beautiful
My grandfather is 82 years old. He grew up in downtown St. Louis in the 1940’s and 50’s and has witnessed the city’s decline firsthand. It’s crazy to think that the few remaining beautiful neighborhoods like the one he grew up in were once plentiful, with hundreds of thousands of people residing within. I knew St. Louis was a shadow of its former self, but I had no idea just how drastic its decline was until watching this video. This makes me want to ask my grandfather a lot more questions about his childhood and what St. Louis was like back then
I lived in downtown STL in 1985-90. Years later I learned how highway construction destroyed thriving Black communities, such as what was bulldozed for I-44. And so many of the lost buildings fell to developers, who only cared about profits.
It's why I-170 doesn't go all the way across the county. Wealthy Whites in South County were able to stop it.
@@drh3b
There were never plans to go past where it is now in Brentwood. 170 is meant to be a short cut north for the commuters coming out (and in.) of the city (St. Louis) on HWY 40 northward instead of going all the way on 40 to 270. Also, giving access to the Clayton business area instead of having to use two-way streets to get to work for thousands of Clayton employees.
170 has been around for many decades. When I was a teenager in the mid 1970s my grandfather lived in U city off Delmar about a block from 170. I recall my dad telling me that one day 170 will go north all the way to 270. We lived in Florissant about a mile from 270 and where 170 would be. We had to drive Hanley Rd. north to Florissant back then. Unfortunately, grandfather died before 170 was completed to 270.
You want to go from north county to south county or vice-a-versa? That's why 270 was built. Most (if not all.) major cities have a HWY that circles or semi-circles in the county around the urban city.
Your "idea" doesn't hold weight about wealthy white people stopping the HWY. Why? You forgot about 170 going through some of the wealthiest area in St. Louis county. It's called Ladue and Clayton.
One of my favourite Christmas movies is meet me in St.Louis. I always thought as a kid it would be so cool to go there. Now, not so much. It’s so sad that this is the reality for so many cities. Thank you for this great video. It’s so nicely put together❤
Still visit. There’s still amazing architecture all over the city. Big city amenities with a small town feel. Forest park is truly a gem and the food here is great too.
Exhibit A - prime example of how the Republican Reagan Revolution in 1981- in antitrust law enforcement where they thought it should be fine if their big corporate buddies got to all merge with each other. In 1980 St Louis was home to 23 Fortune 500 companies. Now it is home to just 7. The rest were bought up by other companies. Think of once proudly independent Anheuser-Busch for a good example. Think of all the ancillary businesses associated with a big corporate headquarters - law firms, catering, advertising, all kinds of office services, upscale restaurants and shopping because of a concentration of wealth., etc., etc.and what happens to a city when it loses those companies and their headquarters - and then look around at empty downtowns like St Louis, but also places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee. What happened to them wasn't necessarily as organic as it was political. It didn't happen by accident. Jobs do matter. Take them away and cities decline and we can specifically point to Republican antitrust policy for causing this over the last 40 years.
Soul crushing video.
Heartbreaking. And yet, Ive always had a sweet, soft spot for St. Louis. What's left of pre-war architecture is fantastic.
A wonderful, sad video. It's really almost beyond belief. As a young guy I worked for a few years doing architectural history surveys. We did this sort of damage to ourselves everywhere.
It’s so tragic what happened to this once great city. I would love to see the town return to prosperity someday. It’s crazy to imagine that just urban renewal and car culture could ruin a place this significantly, the sheer about of demolition is just crazy. I would love to see a deeper dive into how it happened and what could help save the place.
really enjoyed this although it saddened me. St Louis for all its problems has some of the most beautiful architecture and parks anywhere. the video Brick by Brick tells the story.
this video you've done was short to the point and covered a lot. also excellent music.
St Louis has a remarkably well-preserved historic area of residences close to the river.
In my architecture program in the 1980s, I took an urban planning course with one of the Pruitt-Igoe designers. I was critical of him and almost got thrown out of the program for questioning the validity of “urban renewal.”
The stories of other grand and important cities in the Midwest such as Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati , Milwaukee, Dayton, Akron, KC, have similarities to this one.
*Misleading video (!)* Many of these photos of dilapidated buildings 0:18 . . . are NOT from St. Louis. They are from another city across the river in Illinois . . .
Take _that,_ East St. Louis!
Same difference. Both sides are shit
As a St. Louisan, I appreciate the quality of the video. However, this is just the surface level telling of the story. It goes much deeper with institutional racism, red-lining, white flight, urban sprawl, etc.
Some of it was violence. See the book slaughter of cities ethnic cleansing. It talks of how the white people who built these places had their lives robbed of everything g they built after the great migrations of the 1960s. I had no clue Harlem was built by Europeans.
White people should just stay and get killed because their ancestors were mean.
Where’s the racism with black on black crime?
Never understood how white flight is a bad thing. If you had the means to leave a dangerous criminal neighborhood, wouldn’t you?
I blame Democrats for destroying St.Louis.
I knew my city would make the list! Though, I'm sad the UA-cam algorithm didn't try to show me this video immediately after upload, I'm always looking for this content. You didn't lead the others with the crime reports... is it not so bad elsewhere?
I've driven around the city plenty in my lifetime and St Louis has a surprising amount of great architecture and impressive buildings. Of course like most cities the impressive work and the skilled sculpture is all old.
Everything new is usually either simple boxes or giant preschool-looking creations. And we all dress and look a lot skankier than people in the 1900s that's for sure. Society everywhere seems to be generally deteriorating over the decades but it appears to be a nationwide thing.
What I always find interesting is that when people make model buildings even today, they often look beautiful and impressive just like they did in the old days. Just look at the monuments and classic old houses companies like Department 56 churn out yearly, like "Christmas in the City". These are the ones people buy by the truckloads to decorate their homes. But the actual structures we build to live in today- and especially workplaces and civic centers- are for the most part simple and ugly.
And our behavior with public statues is even more bizarre. We kick down and remove the old attractive renditions of ourselves from times past... and instead put up new ones to replace them are distorted and kinda grotesque humanlike figures instead. Why is this? Its very strange!
I don't know what 😍 structures you are looking at. I have a brother living there and even he doesn't see it. The entire city is crime ridden as hell.
@@Leroy-tj9jg Well, they once had a beautiful Famous Barr department store building downtown, all sculpted with brass ornamentation and with ornate wrought iron escalators. I believe its closed and possibly torn down now. You will be having no more of that, said the city apparently..... lol
@@e.gadd.1 I think you touched on something that has not been brought up in this thread, and that is moral decay. It just happened to coincide with societal decay all across the USA.
@@Leroy-tj9jg There are a lot of older buildings and former mansions in St. Louis that even in decay you can tell used to look great. St. Louis used to be rich, and had several downtowns each with their own impressive buildings.
I'm from the STL metro area, and it hurts to think about what we've lost. The waterfront was bulldozed in the 1930s (which is where the Arch now stands), Interstates 64, 70, 55, and 44 diced up the heart of the city in the postwar era, our urban industrial zones are old derelict structures collapsing into themselves, and historic neighborhoods like Wellston and North St. Louis are warzones now.
However, even though so much is destroyed, we still have some greatness left. The old Union Station building you showed is an architectural marvel, the Lafayette Square neighborhood (among others) is still gorgeous, and Forest Park (where the 1904 World's Fair was) has our beloved zoo.
Also, the driving footage you showed at the intro isn't in St. Louis proper, but East St. Louis, which is in Illinois. It was once called the most beautiful city in the United States in the early 1900s, but now it is reverting back to nature. I know people who grew up there, and it started to go downhill when the industry started to leave in the 1950s-1960s, which caused a demographic shift. It really became unpleasant and violent in the 1970s, and that's when most people decided to flee.
ESL used to be a rough city with jobs, and now it's an even rougher city without jobs.
I visit every once in a while and it’s so sad
I’m from St. Louis,and when I went to the history museum and saw what the city used to look like my mouth dropped to the floor,it used to be such a beautiful city,it’s a shame what happened to it.
this video fills me with despair. i love cities, they're alive with their own personality and this one has been beat within an inch of its life. it deserves so much better.
As a Brit whose best friend lives in St Louis I have to say you picked areas where there is specific degradation. However all cities have this. I have to say I see St Louis as a second home I love the city. It’s not too big or small and has some amazing architecture. I love Lafeyete area and Forest Park and botanical gardens
There is plenty of neat stuff left, but you wouldn't have to work hard to make a long video tour of deteriorating areas. I would give you some recommended driving, but there's a lot of crime in some of those areas.
Make sure to check out Tower Grove Park as well
Could you please do one on Worcester mass, it is currently being destroyed and the city planning has no idea
This video is sad, but St. Louis and the greater metropolitan area have life still. We have a wonderful art museum (free admission), the science center (free admission), a world famous zoo (free admission), beautiful parks, historic neighborhoods. I grew up in Southside St Louis and live just outside the city now. There are some neighborhoods that have gone derelict and you showcased them very well here. There are about 3 million people who live in the greater St. Louis area and many of them work and recreate in the city proper and even call it home even though they live in the surrounding counties but most of our crime statistics don’t take that into account. St. Louis is still a great place to live but I will agree that the city really needs a boost. Thank you for highlighting it in this video.
All of your videos are wonderful views into the past. Depressing obviously
Can we get a video on Galveston
As a saint louis resident i am saddened by my city's fall from grace
Urban Renewal was terrible, but the downfall of Saint Louis can be traced back to 1876 when the City voted to leave St. Louis County and become independent. When the white flight and suburbanization in general happened 75 years later, the tax base was doomed.
Do a video on Memphis TN
Oh lord, that would be depressing
@@Moose803 worst place on earth
Remarkable. Not American so it is very interesting to observe old America I knew little to nothing about. How it has been negatively transformed within cities that really had their heydays. The history, character and cultural heritage lost and with it so much gone for the people to appreciate, enjoy and take pride in. Seemingly for development of roads, community housing and another concrete jungle. Very, very sad. Enjoying your channel and will explore further. Thank You.
I thought we had it bad in the UK until I watched this series of videos! Truly shocking and disgraceful, on a much bigger scale than UK.
Good video, but you can't blame all of St. Louis's troubles on urban renewal, and you can't blame all of Pruitt Igoe's troubles on poor architectural design
It is all about the culture. And a lot of people do not really want to be any where near it.
St. Louis still has a lot of amazing architecture and is beautiful still, but we have lost a tremendous amount due to white flight, redlining, neglect, and movement to the suburbs. We still have more beautiful buildings than almost anywhere outside of Chicago or NYC. It is not as dire as this video makes it seem. I live in the urban core and love it.
Unfortunately STL has torn down more historic and significant architecture than most US cities have ever had, BUT there is still a wonderful amount of great architecture and city parks that remain. Suburbia and the decline of the city has been really rough here, but come see how much is left and really wonderful. I love my late 1800s house and largely intact neighborhood
"All these nice buildings make me sick! They're just too damn pretty! They all have to go. We need a good place for families to live; with a lot of strip malls, box stores, and unwalkable neighborhoods. Now that's a city!"
While St Louis likes to bemoan the city/county split, its impact is dramatically overstated. The idea is that St Louis was unable to annex land during post-war suburbanization. However, very few old cities annexed significant areas of land during this time. This is because older cities were already boxed in my older suburban municipalities that did not want to be annexed. The only cities that managed large annexations were you get cities, largely in the south and west, that did not have pre-existing suburbs preventing expansion. In other words, without the city/county split, St Louis would not have been able to annex much land, and would still be in a similar situation today.
Interesting take!
FYI...St. Louis City and St. Louis County are different entities. The County is home to many of the municipalities you mentioned and are not affiliated with the city of St. Louis in any way.
I live there, it would be cool if they had kept it the same. Luckily though now people are much more attached to the old architecture here, and we're much less likely to take them down. :)
The people that are there now will never add any value to this city. We can blame it on highways and such- but it is the work of each generation to improve upon the other.
St. Louis IX, pray for us.
It was also the historic towns. Ottumwa Iowa experienced urban renewal. They destroyed a beautiful and circular walled unique park, a functional downtown, and the character of the city.
St. Louis has its issues, but it is still worth a visit. It is easily the largest collection of historic architecture for a region it's size. Also, keep in mind it's still a region of 3 million and many major institutions, corporations, universities, etc. The sky is not falling.
I'm from the east coast, but spent a month total of the last year in STL, Ferguson, Florissant, etc.
So full of highways and stroads and hostile to pedestrians or bikers. Hardly any green space. The city of STL is pretty dead, and you can't really tell where the downtown even is, cause it's just a bunch of parking.
One month doesn't do it justice. We have PLENTY of Parks, (did you not see Forest Park, the second biggest urban Park in the USA?) green spaces and now we have lots of biking paths (St. Louis Green Way)...seriously how do you write such nonsense after "a month"..
@@Handelson Your're glazing over the fact he conflates the county with the city
stroad is not a real word outside of that one Canadian IT guy living is Europe's youtube channel
You can't tell where the downtown is? Dude, there is a 600 ft Arch greeting you? Also, St. Louis doesn't really have wide roads compared to most newer cities, even in the suburbs. Sounds like you're exaggerating.
I'm glad you're part of the urbanist movement too.
I’m a big American fan from East Europe but I can see how the trend is working against you nowadays. America became different and tired over time. I like when you guys had 80. boxy cars and everything looked so unique…
Nowadays on another hand… we have the same looking cars everywhere, skyscrapers are higher elsewhere and many other things. It breaks my heart to see my childhood dream drifting away slowly.
Could you possibly do my home city Memphis?
I visited St. Louis in 2011. A very nice city, not with the glam of New York City, New Orleans or San Francisco, but it has its charm. So sad to see the way it was deprived of its former beauty. I hope it will have the chance to rise again.
With online shopping and remote work etc. the suburban malls and office parks may suffer the same fate. Yet more sad desolation.
They are already suffering the same fate. Most suburban enclosed malls are vacant and many suburban office parks have lost tenants.
As a Brit I walk around our cities - of which even the worst affected by car infrastructure and modernist design principles are still very historic and walkable compared to every US city outside of a couple - and I think how for all the suffering and toil of generations of slaves and workers there is at least evidence of the wealth that they created through their labour.
One of the great tragedies of the great lost American cities is how so much toil and energy has been destroyed. There's so little left in so many places to show what a great civilizational force the USA was at its height of growth. It's so utterly sad.
0:57 that's blocked off because the river floods constantly
I grew up in North County, itself a creation of movement away from the first suburbs that were the original movement away from the City. And so North County is now a past success expereincing crime and dysfunction , where residents retired to ... St. Charles County/O'Fallon/Wentzville.
Because land is apparently infinite, and the cure to fix all problems is to simply abandon them to "the poors."
My grandfather was born in 1900. In ca. 1928, he visited St Louis on government business and wrote to his fiancee that the city was an ugly dump and the scariest, most dangerous place he had ever seen. That's coming from a man living in Washington, DC, who had been in every major city of the northeast and south, and who had seen Paris and other European cities during the First World War. So I don't know where all this nostalgia comes from for these run-down cities. They became run down because nobody wanted to live in them the way they were. That they are even worse now is a function of systematic mismanagement, and not proof that things should have been left as they were. And curated black-and-white photographs and nostalgic music cannot gloss over how horrible the living conditions in the "good old days" were for most city dwellers.
This is hard to watch
What happened was horrible
@@alexanderrotmensz I'm not American but I hope the US can fix the cities and abolish (the soulless) suburbs for better ones or for revitalized old cities. It would make the country a lot better in my opinion
@@toniderdon I 100% agree. That's what this channel is all about
Not only larger cities but smaller cities like Saginaw MI, Canton OH, Niagara Falls NY, Chester PA, Camden NJ, and Bridgeport CT are all once proud and prosperous blue collar gritty cities that are mostly urban decay and abandonment pickled with industrial brownfields.
What a catastrophic tragedy... how could they do this? How could people let this happen? How can everyone not be haunted by what could have been?
My Great Uncle had climbed a church that was being torn down because a parking lot was put there where the church had once been.
He had written about it in a journal I came across after he passed.
Climbed the church to save the cross
The cross they said they would not save.
So I went with the will of God in my spirit and took the cross.
So delicate and beautiful the cross laden in my arms
I weep for this city the once beautiful St. Louis.