First video of a more visually oriented series about the unfortunate transformation of America's once great cities. #urban #urbanism #cities #history #architecture #stlouis #missouri
I've always hated this city with a passion, but now that I know what the city used to be, and now I realize that It's a Body Builder that's now scrawny and suffering from a sickness that leaves him bedridden. I don't hate the city anymore, I just feel sorry for it now. Thanks for enlightening me on what was once a great and important city in the world.
I love St Louis. I think it's one of the US's cities that has not only been least affected by car-centric highways (yeah, I know we have three E-W highways), but also has made putting in bicycling infrastructure a priority. And St Louis is a place that has free festivals/music/whatever darn near every single day of the week, with many such festivals on weekends. It's an amazing city, with its free museums, Forrest Park (possibly the greatest urban park in N America). Some of my favorite walkable places. Central West End. Block parties! Free music! Free dance lessons! Cherokee Street. Free alcohol! Historical tours. Casa Loma Ballroom Soulard. Just walk around here, people are friendly plus there's Venice Cafe. Tower Grove. Just about everything here is great. Free botanical gardens on the weekends, but farmer's market too. Downtown. St Louis's downtown is huge compared to almost any other city except Berlin. There is SO MUCH to do. St Charles. Stay away from here. It's where all the suburbanites who hate st Louis go to live. LaFayatte Square. This is definitely a New Orleans area with lots of odd and weird stores and revived buildings. Its park has some free city festival nearly every weekend. Midtown. Kinda boring but I've taken several walking tours of this area which mostly consisted of the biographies of Irish and German immigrants doing slightly illegal things to make their fortunes. St Louis is a fantastic city. This video is just not accurate because, possibly, he hasn't bicycles its width and breadth.
@@langhamp8912 Wow! You sound so intelligent why is the media constantly telling us Saint Louis is such a dangerous city? It’s really only dangerous in the underserved areas!
@@feelsmcgee1535 Even the underserved (ie North St Louis) have a crime rate that's dropped by 2/3 since 1990. Like all North American cities, violent crime dropped off a cliff after 1990, due in large part by the EPA removing leaded gasoline. People are kinda weird about violent crime and how they define it. I know that most violent crime is a driver breaking the law and injuring/killing someone but most people don't consider an automobile wreck as violent crime. So despite an automobile wreck being the biggest danger to a person in the US, most people consider it neither violent nor a crime. Traffic violence sounds odd, doesn't it? An easy way to see the value of a city is to just go on Zillow and look at housing prices. St Louis has become highly gentrified (which may or may not be a good thing, but it sure doesn't mean "decayed") as all those houses are 300K to millions.
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.
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.
Cities come and go, but what makes the death of beautiful Midwest cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, large parts of Chicago, ect., so extra heart breaking is to know what has replaced them. The booming cities of today’s America are car sprawl sun belt cities. Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Tampa, ect.. Cities that in large part lack any interesting or engaging urban design other than the same lifeless car centric design you’ve seen a million times before. So not only did we lose these national treasures of Midwest urbanism, but nothing of quality has come to replace them, leaving only the few other dense U.S. cities remaining to become overpriced and unlivable, like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, DC.
Exactly! The thing is, "lifeless car centric design" is where most Americans want to live. Why? Because most Americans want to live in splendid isolation: away from the hard-core losers (i.e., homeless people, panhandlers, drug zombies, the "youth," etc.). The N.I.M.B.Y. crowd wants everything undesirable to be dumped in places like St. Louis (so that they can live in perfect tranquility). Of course, they're merely trading one danger for another. Last year, how many Americans were killed/badly injured by vehicular accidents?🧐🤔🤨 Americans can be so fearful of crime, yet fearless about vehicular danger. Parking is another factor. Most Americans want to live where parking is always plentiful, and free. They want lots of room for their ego machines.
Please see my comments above on the UK as your comment absolutely hits the nail on the head. People in the USA would have more choice to live in attractive city centre locations in the mid west and Deep South if the cities you mentioned and along with probably Memphis, Nashvile, Birmingham etc if they were not destroyed in this urban renewal programme. Thus slightly easing housing presuure on SF, NYC, DC and Boston. It is truely shocking what has been lost.
The only reason sun belt cities are booming is because they're cheaper to live in (although they will be screwed as the planet warms up). Not so many would choose Phoenix over SF/DC if the rent was actually the same. Unfortunately, you need to put food on the table and a roof over your head in the end. People often live the life they can afford, not the one they always want.
@@machtmann2881 those cities are getting expensive really fast. My theory is that a lot of boomers are retiring to these warm, car centric cities and the youth who already live there are also competing with the boomer generation driving up the price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Thank you for making this video. Ignorance in society prevails as nobody seems to understand that every American city in the present day is a shell of it's former self. If more people could just see for themselves what American cities used to be like they probably would have a hard time accepting current situation of automobile slums we're forced to call home. These once prosperous metropolises of progress now lie in ruin as shadows of the past in a seemingly endless state of decay. Please make more of these, Detroit would make a great next video in this series as it is probably the most extreme case of a fallen American city but there are so many different cities you could also cover.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
It’s sad that cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and others seem like such great cities back then, but now are just abandoned and horrible places to live
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I knew my city would make the list! Though, I'm sad the CZcams 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?
Thank you for your effort! I am from Germany and I am also interested in how Germany looked like pre World War. I collect old Postcards. Truly saddening what happened to St. Louis and all these once great citys..
St. Louis had a lot of German immigrants who brought their masonry skills with them. We have thousands of gorgeous brick homes over 100 years old, still inhabited, still in great condition, thanks to those German immigrants who came to our city so long ago..
@@Zymil273 I was just in the old part of St. Louis two days ago...the old brick homes are absolutely beautiful! If you send me your email, I will email you some photos, if you like..
We bombed German cities into oblivion in WW2 and then we felt remorseful for it. So we demolished our own cities to smother the guilt and lie to ourselves that it was just a natural part of progress. The belief in futurism was strong in the mid 20th century. The creed at the time stated that the old must give way to the modern in order to pave the way for the glorious future that was about to unfold. The thing is the future never arrived and now we regret what we have lost. We cannot bring back what was destroyed and must live our lives among the of the ruins of a once great civilization.
@@Novusod Also Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s was beautiful to live in. At the end of the 1960s they started to torn down many monuments and old buildings. Then many foreign came to germany. In Frankfurt am Main where I lived is the Central Station famous for crack junkies in every corner. There you see only foreign people and barely any german. This wasn't like this in the 60s.
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.
The truly heartbreaking part is that it was deliberate. It wasn't a fire or an earthquake or a war, but someone who approved the destruction of these beautiful cities in the name of *progress*.
@@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.
I used to live in St. Louis. It was already far in decline even then, but it is much worse now. I just makes one sick. What we did with bombs to the cities of Germany and Japan with bombs during the war, we did with interstates and modernism to our own cities in the decades after the war.
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.
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 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’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.
My parents grew up in the area. Mom was from Florissant, Dad was across the river in Granite City. Dad made a good point about the city. St.Louis was at one point the 4th largest city in the country. It isn’t even the largest city in Missouri anymore.
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.
This is why native st louisans come across as so obnoxiously protective about st louis. It's because we know or have heard from parents or grandparents about what the city was in living memory. Even in my lifetime st louis feels a ghost town now more than ever. The st louis history museum is very cool. For one, it's a building that itself is a relic of this time and also the staff does a fantastic job of preserving this memory.
A lot of the riverfront area where the arch was built was pretty crummy and architecturally uninteresting old warehouses. The arch grounds are a big improvement. You can look thru rose colored historical glasses and yes the St. Louis core had almost a million people in the early 1900s Almost 3 mil people live in the area now but mostly in the suburbs. It still is a nice looking downtown tho compared to many cities. All major sports facilites are downtown...
I live 30 miles west from St Louis. The city still has nice places to visit, especially near the arch, Busch Stadium, etc. The north area showed here is really dangerous...
Walked around the arch there on my way through back in 2008. Thought to myself where is everybody? Vast areas of nothing... I now see why... such a shame
I can remember St. Louis in the mid 1970s and it was bad but not all bad. Now it's mostly a big slum with some nice spots for the few tourists still around. Or so I'm told. Like the music of the video btw.
"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!"
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'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"..
Mill creek valley’s wide scale demolition and the Raze of opulence Vandeventerplace was the greatest architectural crimes St Louis has ever done to their once great city!
Missouri was the 5th most populous state at one point. We have the natural resources, but bad policy and leadership for a century ruined us. Now it's just a car-centered hell
Things would be some different, but I say no way that the tax money of the county would be anything but a bandaid on the city's problems, though. Familial disintegration and the resultant crime caused the great slide of St. Louis.
I've always hated this city with a passion, but now that I know what the city used to be, and now I realize that It's a Body Builder that's now scrawny and suffering from a sickness that leaves him bedridden. I don't hate the city anymore, I just feel sorry for it now.
Thanks for enlightening me on what was once a great and important city in the world.
Born and raised here and it hurts every day.
i watched a video about cincinnatis´ downfall before that, but it´s still a beautiful city. compared to that st.louis is just madness, decay and crime
I love St Louis. I think it's one of the US's cities that has not only been least affected by car-centric highways (yeah, I know we have three E-W highways), but also has made putting in bicycling infrastructure a priority. And St Louis is a place that has free festivals/music/whatever darn near every single day of the week, with many such festivals on weekends. It's an amazing city, with its free museums, Forrest Park (possibly the greatest urban park in N America).
Some of my favorite walkable places.
Central West End. Block parties! Free music! Free dance lessons!
Cherokee Street. Free alcohol! Historical tours. Casa Loma Ballroom
Soulard. Just walk around here, people are friendly plus there's Venice Cafe.
Tower Grove. Just about everything here is great. Free botanical gardens on the weekends, but farmer's market too.
Downtown. St Louis's downtown is huge compared to almost any other city except Berlin. There is SO MUCH to do.
St Charles. Stay away from here. It's where all the suburbanites who hate st Louis go to live.
LaFayatte Square. This is definitely a New Orleans area with lots of odd and weird stores and revived buildings. Its park has some free city festival nearly every weekend.
Midtown. Kinda boring but I've taken several walking tours of this area which mostly consisted of the biographies of Irish and German immigrants doing slightly illegal things to make their fortunes.
St Louis is a fantastic city. This video is just not accurate because, possibly, he hasn't bicycles its width and breadth.
@@langhamp8912 Wow! You sound so intelligent why is the media constantly telling us Saint Louis is such a dangerous city? It’s really only dangerous in the underserved areas!
@@feelsmcgee1535 Even the underserved (ie North St Louis) have a crime rate that's dropped by 2/3 since 1990. Like all North American cities, violent crime dropped off a cliff after 1990, due in large part by the EPA removing leaded gasoline.
People are kinda weird about violent crime and how they define it. I know that most violent crime is a driver breaking the law and injuring/killing someone but most people don't consider an automobile wreck as violent crime. So despite an automobile wreck being the biggest danger to a person in the US, most people consider it neither violent nor a crime. Traffic violence sounds odd, doesn't it?
An easy way to see the value of a city is to just go on Zillow and look at housing prices. St Louis has become highly gentrified (which may or may not be a good thing, but it sure doesn't mean "decayed") as all those houses are 300K to millions.
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.
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
Cities come and go, but what makes the death of beautiful Midwest cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, large parts of Chicago, ect., so extra heart breaking is to know what has replaced them. The booming cities of today’s America are car sprawl sun belt cities. Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Tampa, ect.. Cities that in large part lack any interesting or engaging urban design other than the same lifeless car centric design you’ve seen a million times before. So not only did we lose these national treasures of Midwest urbanism, but nothing of quality has come to replace them, leaving only the few other dense U.S. cities remaining to become overpriced and unlivable, like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, DC.
Exactly! The thing is, "lifeless car centric design" is where most Americans want to live. Why? Because most Americans want to live in splendid isolation: away from the hard-core losers (i.e., homeless people, panhandlers, drug zombies, the "youth," etc.). The N.I.M.B.Y. crowd wants everything undesirable to be dumped in places like St. Louis (so that they can live in perfect tranquility).
Of course, they're merely trading one danger for another. Last year, how many Americans were killed/badly injured by vehicular accidents?🧐🤔🤨 Americans can be so fearful of crime, yet fearless about vehicular danger.
Parking is another factor. Most Americans want to live where parking is always plentiful, and free. They want lots of room for their ego machines.
Please see my comments above on the UK as your comment absolutely hits the nail on the head. People in the USA would have more choice to live in attractive city centre locations in the mid west and Deep South if the cities you mentioned and along with probably Memphis, Nashvile, Birmingham etc if they were not destroyed in this urban renewal programme. Thus slightly easing housing presuure on SF, NYC, DC and Boston. It is truely shocking what has been lost.
Well said
The only reason sun belt cities are booming is because they're cheaper to live in (although they will be screwed as the planet warms up). Not so many would choose Phoenix over SF/DC if the rent was actually the same. Unfortunately, you need to put food on the table and a roof over your head in the end. People often live the life they can afford, not the one they always want.
@@machtmann2881 those cities are getting expensive really fast. My theory is that a lot of boomers are retiring to these warm, car centric cities and the youth who already live there are also competing with the boomer generation driving up the price.
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.
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.
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.
Well this gets my 'Saddest Video of the Week' award. Let's hope SL can rise again.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Crazy to think it hosted the Olympics once upon a time
I like your "fallen cities" formula for these vids. Keep it up for more cities like this, of which there are many
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.
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!
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.
urban renewal was pure evil
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.
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.
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
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.
Excited to see where this series goes. Great vid!
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!
Thank you for making this video. Ignorance in society prevails as nobody seems to understand that every American city in the present day is a shell of it's former self. If more people could just see for themselves what American cities used to be like they probably would have a hard time accepting current situation of automobile slums we're forced to call home. These once prosperous metropolises of progress now lie in ruin as shadows of the past in a seemingly endless state of decay. Please make more of these, Detroit would make a great next video in this series as it is probably the most extreme case of a fallen American city but there are so many different cities you could also cover.
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment! And I certainly will. Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati are all on the list
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.
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
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"
So sad! We need to know more about this stuff.
What a fantastic (but also really sad) video! I can't wait to see more of this series!
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.
Such a shame, so much lost, maybe one day our children will build something like it again
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.
Soul crushing video.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a shell of once was
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.
Heartbreaking. And yet, Ive always had a sweet, soft spot for St. Louis. What's left of pre-war architecture is fantastic.
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.
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
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.
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
It’s sad that cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and others seem like such great cities back then, but now are just abandoned and horrible places to live
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.
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.
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.
Thankyou for covering st Louis I thank you personally as someone born in st charles county
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.
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.
I knew my city would make the list! Though, I'm sad the CZcams 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'm glad you're part of the urbanist movement too.
Thank you for your effort! I am from Germany and I am also interested in how Germany looked like pre World War. I collect old Postcards. Truly saddening what happened to St. Louis and all these once great citys..
St. Louis had a lot of German immigrants who brought their masonry skills with them. We have thousands of gorgeous brick homes over 100 years old, still inhabited, still in great condition, thanks to those German immigrants who came to our city so long ago..
@@anthonykarakas6391 Thank you for your comment! I like to hear this : )
@@Zymil273 I was just in the old part of St. Louis two days ago...the old brick homes are absolutely beautiful! If you send me your email, I will email you some photos, if you like..
We bombed German cities into oblivion in WW2 and then we felt remorseful for it. So we demolished our own cities to smother the guilt and lie to ourselves that it was just a natural part of progress. The belief in futurism was strong in the mid 20th century. The creed at the time stated that the old must give way to the modern in order to pave the way for the glorious future that was about to unfold. The thing is the future never arrived and now we regret what we have lost. We cannot bring back what was destroyed and must live our lives among the of the ruins of a once great civilization.
@@Novusod Also Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s was beautiful to live in. At the end of the 1960s they started to torn down many monuments and old buildings. Then many foreign came to germany. In Frankfurt am Main where I lived is the Central Station famous for crack junkies in every corner. There you see only foreign people and barely any german. This wasn't like this in the 60s.
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.
Hey. Thanks. Good video. Liked and subd. Keep it up
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.
The truly heartbreaking part is that it was deliberate. It wasn't a fire or an earthquake or a war, but someone who approved the destruction of these beautiful cities in the name of *progress*.
Great video
The second shot is from East St Louis (Majestic Theater) - a different city in a different state.
Same metro area though
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.
I used to live in St. Louis. It was already far in decline even then, but it is much worse now. I just makes one sick. What we did with bombs to the cities of Germany and Japan with bombs during the war, we did with interstates and modernism to our own cities in the decades after the war.
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.
My hometown… really sad
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 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’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.
heartbreaking! i would have loved to have visited at the turn of the century
My parents grew up in the area. Mom was from Florissant, Dad was across the river in Granite City. Dad made a good point about the city. St.Louis was at one point the 4th largest city in the country. It isn’t even the largest city in Missouri anymore.
St. Louis is by far the largest city in Missouri if you measure by MSA population which is much more useful to compare two cities to each other.
Proud and still standing.
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!
This is why native st louisans come across as so obnoxiously protective about st louis. It's because we know or have heard from parents or grandparents about what the city was in living memory. Even in my lifetime st louis feels a ghost town now more than ever. The st louis history museum is very cool. For one, it's a building that itself is a relic of this time and also the staff does a fantastic job of preserving this memory.
It's not just St. Louis. Missouri was the 5th largest state for a while as people migrated west.
I visit every once in a while and it’s so sad
As a native st louis resident this video broke me.
A lot of the riverfront area where the arch was built was pretty crummy and architecturally uninteresting old warehouses. The arch grounds are a big improvement. You can look thru rose colored historical glasses and yes the St. Louis core had almost a million people in the early 1900s Almost 3 mil people live in the area now but mostly in the suburbs. It still is a nice looking downtown tho compared to many cities. All major sports facilites are downtown...
I live 30 miles west from St Louis. The city still has nice places to visit, especially near the arch, Busch Stadium, etc. The north area showed here is really dangerous...
Do about Chicago, which has lost something but still beautiful
Once one of America's greatest cities & now a deserted village.You must be over 70yrs old to understand what happened 😡
St. Louis IX, pray for us.
I'm not even from the US, but it's really interesting to watch.
Walked around the arch there on my way through back in 2008. Thought to myself where is everybody? Vast areas of nothing... I now see why... such a shame
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.
I can remember St. Louis in the mid 1970s and it was bad but not all bad. Now it's mostly a big slum with some nice spots for the few tourists still around. Or so I'm told. Like the music of the video btw.
"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!"
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.
One can't forget Judy Garland's closing lines in the film re: St L.
Do a video on Memphis TN
Oh lord, that would be depressing
@@Moose803 worst place on earth
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"..
@@anthonykarakas6391 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
St Louis has a remarkably well-preserved historic area of residences close to the river.
Mill creek valley’s wide scale demolition and the Raze of opulence Vandeventerplace was the greatest architectural crimes St Louis has ever done to their once great city!
Cars also made every town and city in Europe look as mismatched as a level from the All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2.
Missouri was the 5th most populous state at one point. We have the natural resources, but bad policy and leadership for a century ruined us. Now it's just a car-centered hell
Downtown is now just crumbling factories and beautiful old buildings sitting empty
As a French , the old city was gorgeous... compare, how it,s so ugly now.. sad. I would love to live here before
Can we get a video on Galveston
The great slide of StL started with the great schism between the city and the county in 1876.
Things would be some different, but I say no way that the tax money of the county would be anything but a bandaid on the city's problems, though. Familial disintegration and the resultant crime caused the great slide of St. Louis.