Day 71/ May 8th – East St. Louis, IL to St. Louis, MO: Mississippi burning

You probably haven’t heard of the Morgan Quitno Press, a small Kansas publisher that each year compiles crime statistics from American cities and produces a list of the most dangerous places in the country.  But you can probably guess many of the places featured – Detroit, New Orleans and Compton are all in the top ten, for example.  You might be surprised, though, to learn that St. Louis has been ranked in the top three most dangerous cities in the country (of 500 studied, we should point out) for each of the last eight years.

The Gateway Arch seen from East St. Louis

The most dangerous part of St. Louis isn’t even in the city itself, but in East St. Louis, across the Mississippi in Illinois.  This, truly, is a tough place to live.  In 2007, it had the highest murder rate in America – 102 (the national average is 5.6) per 100,000 people, so that simply by living in East St. Louis you effectively have a one in 1,000 chance of being murdered in any given year.  Last month, a local mayor was gunned down as he sat in his car.  Other crime rates are just as bad: the rate of robberies is seven times the national average, rapes eight times and assaults 17 times.  So it was with a spring in our step and a song in our hearts that we set out to walk across it today.

As far back as the 19^th century, East St. Louis was a place for the things that St. Louis didn’t want on its doorstep: meat-packing and stock-yards, then steelworks and rail-yards.  Its peak – if you can use such a term with a place like this – came in the late 1950s, when it was named an ‘All-America City’ (a sort of civic merit badge).  Soon afterwards, though, the industrial backbone of the city collapsed and a long, downward spiral of debt, unemployment, crime and white flight began: what was a racially diverse city of 80,000 people in 1960 is now a black ghetto of barely 30,000.  It’s difficult not to see it still, over a century later, as a place for the things that St. Louis doesn’t want.  Like a lot of deprived cities, East St. Louis developed a thriving music scene – it gave the world Miles Davis and Tina Turner – but those days are long gone, and now the city is most famous as a byword for crime and urban squalor.

We set out from the metro station in Fairview Heights to walk the 90 blocks along State Street to the Mississippi, with the Gateway Arch looming over the treetops in the distance like a beacon.  The first neighbourhoods we walked through were unremarkable suburbs of modest bungalows, but inside the loop of Route 50, the city took a marked turn for the worse.  We passed vacant lots surrounded by listing barbed-wire fences, the shells of abandoned mini-malls and the cement outlines of what might once have been petrol stations, now being reclaimed by bushes and grass.  There were lots of these ‘urban fields’, where buildings had been torn down and nothing built in their place, and it was curiously unsettling to see how easily sizable chunks of a city could be erased and swallowed up once humans left.

Abandoned petrol station in East St. Louis - not yet picked clean

Almost every shop – even the laundromat, for God’s sake – had metal shutters or bars over its windows.  Off the main drag of State Street, the roads were cracked and potholed, some so badly that they were effectively unsurfaced tracks like the ones we occasionally walk on deep in the country.  Across a railway line, the neighbourhood reached its nadir – no small feat – with boarded-up houses, a couple of burned-out shops being used as squats, a low, forbidding bar called ‘Club Rolex’ and, saddest of all, the brick skeleton of what had been George Rogers Clark Junior High School.  It stood like the shell of a dissolved monastery behind a high wire fence in an asphalt yard grown into a meadow of waist-high weeds, its roof gone, every window smashed and its walls slowly collapsing.

Junior high in East St. Louis: Drug-free, gun-free and now student-free

There were a few hopeful signs in the general blight.  More than in any other place in America, there were people on the streets here, mostly waiting at bus-stops (even if only because they couldn’t afford cars), and this gave the city an air of bustle and community that many smarter, carbound towns in the country have seemed to lack.  St. Louis’s metro system had recently been extended across the river here – though there were already complaints that it had caused a spike in crime downtown as the denizens of East St. Louis now had easier access to the big city.  There were two large schools, one evidently brand new (replacing the ruin we had passed earlier) and the other with the bones of a new wing under construction.  The churches – for the first time in hundreds of miles we were back in Baptist country – were large, well-kept and busy.  And there were police cars everywhere.

A hopeful mural (but NB the bars to stop the air-conditioner being stolen)

We passed a lap-dancing bar and Pawn Pros (‘We Loan on Anything of Value’) and prepared to cross the Mississippi.  State Street dipped below an underpass and emerged between two roaring interstates.  We followed it gamely for a hair-raising half-mile into roaring traffic towards the Martin Luther King Bridge, which Google Maps had helpfully identified as our ideal crossing-point.  As the road climbed onto the bridge, though, the shoulder vanished altogether, and it dawned on us that unless we planned to walk in the middle of the fast lane, we would have to find another place to cross the river.

Hard to believe one of the world's great rivers lies between here and the Arch

We scuttled across waste ground to the Eads Bridge, which spans the Mississippi in three elegant arches and which, mercifully, provided a paved walkway complete with viewing platforms and iron lamp-posts.  It was especially impressive given that its architect, James Buchanan Eads, had never built a bridge before.  When it opened, in 1874, local citizens were so sceptical about its safety that he had to enlist an elephant to be led across it to persuade people of its robustness; when that failed to convince, he sent 14 locomotives over it at the same time.  We had no such qualms, and crossed over it in prickling rain into St. Louis, Missouri and the West.