This program shows the story of how East St. Louis, Illinois became one of country’s largest rail and industrial centers. This program from the Nine PBS archives originally aired in 2003.
I was in East Saint Louis working as a Sign Painter in 1969 had learned Sign Painting in Kaufmann Supply, Centertown, Missouri 65023. Jack Kaufmann invented the Kaufmann Method which is Still the Top Sighn Painting Methos Today. I learned from him In Person Kaufmann Supply, Centertown, Missouri
All welfare recipients, drug addiction cases and dope dealers. My parents were one of the first mixed race couples in EAST SAINT LOUIS. My mother was black and father was white. Mom used to tell us about when the decided to leave in 67. As she put it from a black woman's perspective. The more of the blacks that moved in from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Arkansas the worse it got. I don't know because I was not born till 1968. All I have to go on is what she said she saw there.
Just about a ghost town, crime has decreased because there are so few people there to rob and commit crimes against. Hopefully the percent of criminals has decreased too.
Lucky to have that I can't belive there's actually enough homes that are still standing the jig a boos don't work on nothing their Lime locust destroy use up all the resources then move on
I’m 19 was born in 2002 east st.Louis is where I was born and I can honestly say the way you guys are describing it is sad man it’s a culture full city and full of love and hate just like every other city just flaws stand out more than the good
@@fredg8834 I wouldn’t say that bro a group of ppl which is all the criminals I guess that’s what you talkin bout but ts don’t determine a city bro it’s youth coming out of there with high hopes that I grew up with and I watched them give yo because after high school there is no alternative but college and most students can’t pay and financial aid don’t help enough you sleep bro don’t let the people who you see doing and determine a city that’s on the rise
In 1972 I was hitching back to Washington DC from a trip out West. Near sunset my ride dropped me off in East St Louis and spread out before me was the grimmest most frightening looking human landscape I'd ever seen: as far as I could see, a stretch of low ramshackle shacks and shanties, dark, smoky, colorless. I had the sense that if night fell before another ride came I'd be in more danger than I might be able to handle. A ride did come but I'll never forget that ghastly reality of East St. Louis.
i was there just passing through, and seen things a country boy had not seen, like homeless people camped out on the library lawn, and a gas station barred up like a jail and people that refused to help you with directions.
I think it’s ok now. The Illinois side of St. Louis has some nice shopping centers if you go out a little further. Kind of bland and somewhat generic though
This was eye-opening. I've always looked at East St. Louis like it was a black failure when it was a failure long before it fell into black hands. It all makes sense now
That's the truth in most places where people blame black residents for the danger and crime in an area. They usually live in an area after the white people use it up and move on.
@@Malone_The_Maestro1 no, they are living in the poor decisions of many of those who left the city in the past as well as by many who still live there some of whom lead East St. Louis today. The city remains a failure as always, only now it is being abandoned to unprecidented degree by its remaining residents over time with no one to replace them. I can't say I blaim them!
I absolutely wholeheartedly agree with this comment. And it also applies to many other cities large and small, such as Detroit, Baltimore, Flint, and Youngstown.
I was stationed at Scott AFB for 4yrs. Drove around the east side plenty. You can actually see all the old delapadated, abandoned, factory buildings, and that tells the story of what used to be there! Excellent story 🙂
been a while since you have been there - the stockyard area is no longer there mate - but all the burned-out homes that the east-side is known for are still around
@@juliannastaccato3764 not true. Some want to stay there. I grew up there. Are you aware there are some new developments that have gone up. I saw that Caucasians are are running for offices there.
Hazel I take it you're an elder, cause I'm 41 and been here my whole life. There hasn't been new development in East Saint Louis in some time. Maybe in the town's around us but not directly here in at least a decade. Buildings have come down but nothing put up or restored yet. Until the powers that be get it how they really want it here, I don't see much growth happening too soon. Just my opinion and observations.
@@hazelgoodwin9707 in what East Saint Louis did you see new development, and where? It would be nice if folks did their own research and observations, actually took time to speak with actual citizens(who grew up and still remain or spent at least half their life here) to get a real perspective of this place. However, this was a nice documentary on how it all began. It explains why it's still what it was meant to be-America's Bottoms.
At 3:13, the clue: Urban Renewal and highways were the great destroyers of urban America during the 1960s. Gutten neighborhoods, ruined tax bases, vertical slums replacing communities: Federal policies every one.
I moved to the area in 2017. From an HBO special I learned what a 'Superfund' was... Toxic areas on a list to be cleansed. There's a grimace marking several Superfunds in the area. Incredible!
And then there's Sauget IL and Monsanto's chemical plant down the street. The only town in the world with two Superfund sites. The 100 people living there are paid to live there for tax and environmental loopholes.
I live next to a superfund in Renton Washington from Pacific Car And Foundry smelting operations. The Space needle was built here and tanks for WW2 as well as train cars. Just two miles north is another clean up site on the shores of lake Washington were they made the black stuff to preserve railroad ties and telephone poles. The middle of Washington is the Hanford nuclear clean up that will never be technically be done. We have gone way off the path and I do believe it's is simple as greed almost all of these technologies were know to have horrible long term effects 50 to 100 years before anything was done to even slow the effects.
My parents met shortly after my father had been discharged from the Army post WWII. They married in 1947 and I was born in 1950 . I remember my mother telling me how nice it was in East St. Louis when they married. Although my paternal grand parents lived in East St. Louis, my parents easily transitioned to St. Louis, Mo which is where I was raised, educated in both high school and college. My paternal grandparents divorced yet my grandmother stayed in the home that they had owned in East St. Louis. She eventually developed health problems so my father brought her to live with them since I had by then already married and moved out. While she was hospitalized and later moved into a skilled care facility, vandals broke into her home and removed the copper piping so that they could sell it for scrap value. My father discovered this when he got his mothers utility bills and noted a huge water bill as a result of the water pipe removal. It has been over 5 decades since all of this happened and I think back on all of that as I watched this video. I think that East St. Louis never rose to it's highest potential for many reasons. Perhaps it was because of those who lived there and the politicians who exploited that city used it for their own purposes and never were fully committed to its success
I could not agree more on this trying topic of discussion. And If you want your city or state to flourish you have to put a whole lot in it, & not just take a whole lot out of it okay.
I grew up in Centerville/E St louis. I left there in 1964 for the USMC. I wasn't aware of all of the problems then. Of course, I was just a young kid fresh out of E St Louis Senior High.
@Sue Elias 35 cents in the early 1900s was the equivalent of 11 dollars and change in 2022, according to online inflation calculators. Not exactly a king's ransom, but transit fares and newspapers cost a few cents, for example, and there were far fewer consumer appliances to buy which are total or near necessities now. And it must have looked pretty substantial compared to primitive farm life in Eastern Europe.
They had little opportunity in their very progressive home countries. Think back to Obama's presidency and how difficult it was to get ahead. Now you know. Progressivism sucks
Never give up on your mental illness. No jobs during Obama as Bush 2 burned the economy down. Obama just walked into it. As for the country they came from? Monarchies, not known to be "progressive ". If you actually watch and understand the video it shows the same class division and fear being spread by fox news today.
@@frankgrabasse4642 umhm. obama got handed a flaming bag of dogshit and republicans swore they would never work with him (and they didn't). There will always be someone like grabass that comes along and oddly forgets this and will put it onto obama.
Born at a hospital there in 1951 though we lived in Belleville. Many of my family moved there in the early 1900's but almost all had left by mid 1950's. Uncle and aunt owned a grocery shop there but were robbed so many times they had to close it and leave. It became one of the first and worst of blighted cities in the US, blighted by corrupt politicians who still control it.
I had the unfortunate 4 years in st Louis following a job. Never had witnessed such a level of accepted corruption. While there there we 3 govs in prison at the same time. I lied in Troy IL and was so glad the day I got relocated out. My son got introduced to drugs in esl. Luckily got he clean and away.
At 15:44 the map shows towns in the northern part of the American Bottoms. My father was born in Hartford, Illinois ( which was also near the camp that Lewis and Clark used before their trek west in 1802 ). I was born in Alton, Illinois and attended Roxana High School. This map clearly shows the ancient river flow of the Mississippi River before any humans lived in the area. The cut between Hartford and Granite City ( just to the right of the river ) is the Chain of Rocks barge canal. It was cut because the river is very shallow and bedrock is close to the surface. This enabled barge traffic to move freely up and down the river.
I'm not so sure about the early history part of the story. The American bottoms was also abandoned because the Catholics had the land west of the river, and the protestants had the land east. I'm talking 1600s. When there was a country called New France. The first white settlement was onthe east side because the Native Americans had the west side. They were French, part of a country called New France - drawn from people fleeing French Canada after the loss in the French and Indian wars.
I was born in East St Louis in 1960 in St Mary's Hospital. My grandparents, and many aunts and uncles, moved here the 30s. My father moved here in 1951. They all loved it there.
I always thought East St Louis was All America City in 1957. Guess I was wrong. The trains used to run underneath the Eads Bridge. My dad worked for Swift & Co. at the Stockyards. My grandfather worked in the Coal Mines, very dangerous. My grandparents on my mother's side came to East St Louis from Germany in the late 1800s and so did a lot of Germans and they all settled in the same area and a lot on the same street. Even when I was in my early twenties Ober Nester glass was still in business and I worked there part time and it was terrible. If the temperature was 90 outside it was well over 100 in the factory. East St Louis had a very prosperous red light district. The "BlueNote" was a very popular black entertainment place that had a lot of the 50s musicians performing there. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and East St Louis was a great place to live. The issue was that there was very little industry and most people caught busses to St. Louis across the bridge to work. As the blacks moved farther and farther west the white people would move out to Belleville, Fairview Heights and others. Eventually East St. Louis turned almost 100% black. Alvin Fields was someone I don't even want to talk about. Carl Officer's family owned the Officer funeral homes and you hoped that with his stake in the city would turn things around. He made no difference at all. My family stayed until 1977 and by then it was not the same. The entire downtown area was boarded up. It is really a shame about all the corruption in East St Louis. The city will always have a place in my heart as my hometown and where I grew up. My High School, Assumption, is now a prison. There are some things that can really make you cry about the demise of East St. Louis.
Great documentary. My family were settled around Kansas City, on the opposite side of the state, but were of old Pennsylvania Deutsch/Dutch stock and old New Netherland stock (hence my north German/Netherland name). I've always been interested in St Louis and "East St. Louis". Just like Kansas City, its location confuses people.
St.Louis, and East St.Louis , both have interesting histories. St.Louis, both good and bad. East St. Louis , sadly, more bad than good. I lived in K.C. For some time. I liked it. - Lived in Shawnee Mission. 📻🙂
My father and his people were from the Kansas City area too. German ancestry like yourself. Since our past focused on the KC area I never realized that there was a parallel between KC and St Louis in regard to being on both sides of the river. St Louis usually was mentioned only in passing in family conversations as most of it was concentrated to the Kansas City/Independence area. I found this documentary interesting and illuminating.
Thanks for making the documentary. I always wondered what the story was concerning East St. Louis. Driven through there a couple times in my life. It looked depressed the first time I went there in the late 70's.
I was born in Christian Welfare Hospital in East St. Louis and lived there until I got married. It was a beautiful place to live and grow up in. It was the safest place I've ever lived. I'm very proud to say East St. Louis is my hometown.
@@a.whyattmann5057 People there who are scrounging the bottom are the children of people who scrounged from the bottom. With no positive role models to teach & guide them how to properly rise to the surface, they remain stuck in a vicious cycle. One thing's for sure, walking or standing by pointing fingers & blame isn't helping or changing the situation. A run down family in a run down city filled with poverty and crime, hurts us all as a Nation.
Mann, if you were left a house by your great great grandparents who abandoned it and the city/state don't keep up the streets and property around it would that be your fault that you were left in that situation? Now imagine if you want a better life and decide to move to Belleville, Fairview or O'Fallon only to be treated like sh!t because the knes who left the city in ruins don't want you living in their new environment. How would you feel? No brown skinned person ruined East St Louis. Once the jobs left and the State stop funding the city it just never healed.
I was a second generation of my father's family born and raised in East St. Louis. I find this to be a very accurate historical depiction of the size and fall of the community. It may not have been the safest community to live, but I enjoyed living the friends I made and education I received at both St. Elizabeth and Assumption High. After Cleve, graduate school and military service my wife and Isettled across the river in St. Louis to raise our family.
My cousins lived in East St.Louis , my mother took us there starting in early 1960's I was last there in 2008 it was like our second home ect... Now I see people lining up begging for work in Honduras where a days laborer gets 5.00 dollars a day it's like a ironic circle going around the globe .
Ditto for Camden, New Jersey; Gary, Indiana; Youngstown, Ohio; Lima, Ohio; and the Bronx, NY. With the exception of the Bronx, all were industrial communities that suffered as heavy industry evolved. Camden is across a river from Philadelphia.
@@KSmall109CAB I don't think Lima really belongs in your list. To be sure, they failed to adapt from coal to diesel-electric as well as other locomotive manufacturers, and their version of diesel-electric locomotives didn't sell well. However, Lima still stands as a functional community, with good, acceptable, and, yes, some low-income areas - and if you don't like it, you can get a very quiet life only 5 miles out of town.
@@vickiegrant3325 I will admit that outside of the jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson I don't know about the people of Lima. I do recall a PBS documentary done a decade or so on the economic and social struggles of Lima, including the loss of manufacturing jobs and a growing opioid addition. I worry about American cities large and small. The communities that comprise our cities of all sizes have become appendages of large mega-corporations like Amazon or Wal-Mart. East St. Louis and Camden may be the extreme but they're a reminder of what Christopher Hedges calls "sacrifice zones." They are one-proud cities that have been sacrificed in the name of global capitalism. Hopefully Lima will never become an East St. Louis or a Camden. Hopefully people will continue to keep it a vital small-sized city. And if you do live in or near Lima, lobby to make Joe Henderson's birthplace a local landmark! He was one of the great jazz saxophonists of the second half of the 20th century.
East St. Louis served its purpose. The big money goes where there is big opportunity. That's how it should be for efficiency. All the big cities were built with the output. Yes, workers have to move. They always have and always will. Camden, Gary, East St. Louis. They helped build their big neighbor cities. They were the dirty industrial areas serving the greater community. It is what it is. We all like cheaper, competitive products. These large factories allowed that.
In 1990,I had 3 personal friends,all White,murdered in cold blood in East St Louis,Illinois. Wrong Road,Wrong Place,Wrong Time of the Night. Robbed and Murdered. East St Louis was featured in National Lampoons Vacation Movie where the family was asking for directions and had their Tires stolen at the same time. It's worst than that.
@@vickiegrant3325 the scene where Clark asks for directions and the Family trickster gets its hubcaps stolen and spray painted with graffiti was depicted as East StLouis, although the scene was filmed on a soundstage. “Roll ‘em up”
There is a bridge near where the farm plots were and a creak full of crawfish up the road twords madtown, man i miss the feeding times/grooming the animals and being with my dad learning about the truth, the Ofay.
This story of out of area control is prime example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Very similar to what is happening today.
I visited East St Louis the first night I was in St Louis, where I was on an IBM project. It is a fascinating place but the history is even more interesting. I am going to watch it again.
@23:00 in plants like foundries, chemical plants you have to run 7-24 BC typically if takes DAYS to start up a plant and days to shut it down (think how long it takes to start a fire and heat up a blast furnace). Many industries that require a chemical or physical reaction run at "Steady State" and that can only be accomplished by continuous operation
I was born in East St. Louis in 1973. My family exodus in 1978 is the only reason I believe I'm alive today.. I haven't been back since my father pasted. No need to go back now. There is nothing there.
Every country has its dark history. It’s not just the U.S. Just look at some of the countries of Europe and you’ll find history so dark you’ll need a search light to see. just saying. 🤷♂️
Me too. I'm from Alton and used to have an Uncle, Aunt and my cousins living there. I've been told that political corruption also decimated Camden, New Jersey and Chester, PA just outside of Philadelphia. Those towns are still in poor shape, although Camden is slowly changing.
I was born in East St Louis Illinois at St Mary's hospital. I remember when I was young East St Louis was a place to go. Factories anyone could find work. I had a wonderful life. Is my father once said it's a Duke's mixture of nationality. We all helped each other in those days. Many of my friends didn't have indoor plumbing. You see my father knew how to do almost anything. He was always working on a house and helping neighbors. On the street we lived there was only about five houses It was corn fields all around us We live close to the bluffs. But we knew we was grown up whenever we could get on a bus and go to downtown East St Louis. I went to East St Louis high School. I didn't live in downtown East St Louis. I lived in the outskirts which was country.
My grandma’s family moved from Tamms to EastSaint Louis Illinois in 1922. She married my grandfather & raised my mother there. I was born in i1951 at St. Mary’s in St Louis Mo. But we lived in East St. Louis until 1957. My parents separated & we relocated in Wisconsin in 1957. My mother only went back to bury her father & bring my grandma back with us after his death. She never wanted to go back, but my granny loved East St. Louis. This story was told to me as a child.
I pass through Estl once a week or do and when I say pass through, I mean pass through. I'm getting gas on the missouri side and I'm only stopping for weed until I get back.
Is the narrator Charlie Rose?. East St Louis, Illinois was a stopover🍺for me on my way from Fort Worth, Texas to New York in 2019. Cheers🥃from Brisbane, Australia
Being from Cahokia, I was born in East St Louis, back when it was at the beginning of the end in the mid-70's. Look at what's happened the 50+ years after I was born there, and it's a full 180.
I remember my father telling me him and my mother owned I think it was a duplex or a small apartment on Bond avenue in East St Louis. That was before I was born. Then my Father and mother's soul the place on Bond avenue and bought a house in the outskirts that these St Louis. It was more country. Few houses on the street and a lot of corn fields around. My uncle's and brother worked on the railroads. It was in their blood. Woolworths. We knew we was growing up when we could catch a bus and go to downtown East St Louis. Not Christmas time we would go to St Louis and get on the escalators and look to the department store windows and all the decorations.
This is capitalist at its worst and best .. not that socialism was any better . They both have a life span of just under a century before they leave town for greener pasture....
I grew up in Chesterfield, mo which seems like another planet compared to East st Louis. just like old North St Louis, it is my hope that these places get a new lease on life during my lifetime. it's sad to see what these places have become-literally a shell of it's former self
St Louis a lot of corrupt politicians matter of fact today Illinois is still one of the most political corrupt states in America. I remember my father talking when he was a young man in the mafia was around. I should say the last time I seen East St Louis it was absolutely horrendous. Complete devastation.
It's so good to see the TV stations doing their best to give ESTL a positive image Mad props to those corrupt city officials though They just wanted to do their jobs
Even if you set up a factory, pay people a wage they gleefully agree to, you'll still be chased out after Unions convince your employees that they're under paid. Why wouldn't you, as a factory owner, go somewhere else where people will gleefully accept their wage? Detroit's UAW chased manufacturers to Canada and to the South. After watching this, it seems to be a common theme. Also interesting that unions started the race fire which has long burned in STL.
I'm from Kansas City, Missouri born and raised, and I could only imagine looking across the river to St. Louis, Missouri and seeing the flourishing city that reminds you of what you don't have living in East St. Louis that once was booming in the 1960's in the United States history of living the dream. One's local economy can't get a foothold if 1)You have a diminished population 2) No thriving businesses to recirculate into the local economy 3) Contributing to other economy's businesses (purchasing tourism, employment) and tax structure to recirculate into infrastructure i.e. streets, bridges, parks..
