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.

Meet me in the dollar bin

Went to St. Louis today, mostly to go to the Greater St. Louis Book Fair. It's not technically a "book fair," it's more of a "giant used book sale in the bottom of a mall parking garage."

Either way, I raked: Five books. Eleven dollars. Including:

-Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry
-Joseph Mitchell, Up In The Old Hotel (read the back of the book and it looks like a pretty badass collection of nonfiction journalism)
-Jonothan Franzen, The Corrections (hardback)
-David Halberstam, The Best American Sportswriting of the Century

The real gem, though, is this book called Oh, How They Played the Game!: The Early Days of Football and the Heroes Who Made it Great (hardcover, three dollars). I looked for a link on Amazon and it's out of print. I think it's from the 70s, or thereabouts, and basically consists of a bunch of old-time newspaper and magazine articles about football from the 1870s to the 1930s, all compiled by this crotchety old former New York Times sportswriter.

As you'd expect, it's nothing short of awesome. Among accounts of the first Princeton-Rutgers game and the whole Grantland Rice "Four Horsemen" article (neat, but obvious and everywhere), it has a bunch of random, interesting pieces on all sorts of things, from the first Army-Navy game to a bunch of old pieces on the U of M football team from the Michigan Daily.

The best of these, so far, is an article from Colliers from 1931, written by Pop Warner about his days coaching for the Carlisle Indian School, which closed in something like 1918 but had sweet teams in the late 1890s. The star player on this team was Jim fuckin' Thorpe.

It has some interesting views on race, seeing as how all of the players were Native Americans. I guess Carlisle was one of those evil Indian boarding schools which attempted to "de-savege" Native Americans...which sucks. But Warner has some insight:

Like [the University of] Chicago, Carlisle had no traditions, but what the Indians did have was a real race pride and a fierce determination to show the palefaces what they could do when the odds were even. It was not that they felt any definite bitterment against the conquering white or against the government for unfair treatment, but contests between red men and white men had never been waged on even terms.

'You outnumbered us, and you also had press agents,' a young Sioux once said to me. 'When the white men won it was always a battle. When we won, it was a massacre.'

And so on. I somehow never realized that Jim Thorpe went to an Indian school like that, nor that they were a powerhouse for about four years in college football. Warner's entire article (about 10 and a half pages in the book) is a pretty in-depth retelling of his time there. At the end he says that the white players he coached were whiny bitches a lot of the time (I'm paraphrasing there, if you couldn't tell), but the players at Carlisle were some of the best men he had ever coached on or off the field.

Basically, this book is an essential for anyone interested in college football. And sports. And sports writing. Too bad the damn thing's out of print.

*Also, three albums bought tonight: new Super Furry Animals, new Thermals and old Les Savy Fav. Quickly, on each:

-SFA was vinyl only with a free HQ mp3 download. Why every record label doesn't just do this for every album is beyond me. It really is more of a rock record than Hey Venus. On first listen, I'm not sure it's technically "better," but Venus was way too short. It had 11 songs, but they were all under five minutes. This one has 12, but the songs are a bit longer and more meandering so it doesn't feel like they short-changed you on content. For that reason alone, I think it gets enough points to boost it above Venus.

-Les Savy Fav has weird songs and awesome track names. If you can find their performance on Conan you'll wonder who booked them, because they are NOT made for TV (not necessarily filthy, but bizarre as hell, on record and onstage).

-Thermals production values are high. So much so that it doesn't even sound like them. Compare this (from their first album) to this (from Now We Can See). I used to think that their lo-fi nature was the main reason why I liked them, but....damn, do they write some catchy guitar hooks. And choruses. (Although nothing on this album touches the hook on Pillar of Salt. Nothing.)