East Boogie

Call it a morbid curiosity.

On the way back from St. Louis this weekend — my dad visited me since I'm not going back for Thanksgiving — I had some strange and sudden desire to get a glimpse of what local residents call "East Boogie."

That's right. For reasons unknown even to myself, I decided to venture inside and get my own firsthand glimpse of East Saint Louis, Illinois.

I've already been interested by the rise and fall of East Side's ridiculously good football team. But I wanted to see it first hand.

And now I have.

I didn't take any photos — I didn't have a camera, but even if I did I think I would have been too dumbfounded to actually stop and photograph things.

There is, however, a website where you can gaze upon the horrors of East Side. Built Saint Louis is this great website that documents cool old buildings and architecture — still standing and not — around Saint Louis and vicinity. It devotes an entire section to ESL, which you can find here.

Do I have some sick sense of intrigue? Well, maybe. But I am somewhat fascinated with post-industrial America. Maybe this is a byproduct of growing up in Detroit and being born in Joliet.

At any rate, I wasn't really prepared for what I saw today.

Don't get me wrong. I EXPECTED lots of urban blight and I expected to see a sad-sack city down on it's luck. I guess I just didn't expect it to be THAT bad. Maybe like Detroit on a smaller scale.

But the reality is much worse. Imagine Gary, Indiana (I'd say Detroit, but Gary is a similarly-maligned satellite community of a major city). Then, take away 70,000 people, remove every single worthwhile industry (factories) and leave only a Casino and about 15 strip clubs. Then, detonate a bomb that levels half of all the buildings that are left.

Yeah. THAT'S East Saint Louis.

I saw rows and rows of houses that had plywood walls instead of brick. I saw two project buildings, probabaly built in the 1970s, that were maybe seven stories high and easily the tallest buildings on my route. The only businesses to speak of were: a single convenience store, a single funeral home and a church. There was also a massive junkyard that took up what seemed like an entire city block. It was mostly full of trash.

I only drove down one street — Illinois 15. Basically, I was in Belleville and was on the road anyway and the sign said "East Saint Louis - 4" so I thought, what the hell? Why not at least drive in and say I've set foot in there? You can see my route here — I got as far as the project on 14th St. until I'd decided I'd seen enough. An old man watched me turn around, probabaly bemused that I had no idea what I was doing.

I should note that, unlike Gary, it's not easy just to "pass through" East Saint Louis. Gary is situated right on 80/90, and if one wants to, they could easily stop to get gas or whatever on their way to Chicago.

Such is not the case with East Saint Louis. By diverting the three interstates around the city, East Saint Louis is boxed in on the north, south and east. To the west, of course, is the River. One basically has to go out of his way to get anywhere other than the casino, which sits right on the River anyway. All of the exits have two options: towards East Saint Louis, or towards somewhere else (not that Brooklyn or Sauget, its direct neighbors to the north and south, are better options... Belleville, Collinsville, Edwardsville, Fairview Heights, and the other towns that don't directly border the river are actually livables places, but most of the Metro East suburbs are more rural than their Missouri-side suburban-sprawl neighbors to begin with).

What's the moral of this story? (Well, other than to share my weird fascination with this stuff and urban exploration.) I guess I'm just horrified that this is America. This is a city where 2/3 of the population is on federal assistance, 50 percent live below the poverty line and has one of the worst crime rates in the United States.

We have allowed this to happen to so many places in America. And at least in Detroit and Baltimore and Cleveland and regular Saint Louis there are redeeming qualities to the cities in question. Actual business. And some form of tax base that pays the bills.

The point is, there's something worth saving.

East Saint Louis almost seems like the type of place where no one would miss it if we started completely from scratch. And they might as well have — at its height in the 1950s, there were 80,000 people in the city, lots of factories and a bastion of blue-collar prosperity (at least, according to some articles I read today). Then everyone left, took all the jobs with them and allowed the people who couldn't leave to wallow in their poverty.

It's a sad state of affairs when an American city gets so bad it has to sell its municipal buildings and the residential neighborhoods start looking like a shantytown in the third world. That's East Saint Louis. If any city is a stand-in for American poverty, it is this place.