- I'm Jim Kirchherr and Living St. Louis' Summer of the 20th Century is coming to an end.

When we produce the Decade series, at the end of the last century, we decided not to go much past the 1970s because anything more recent then, just didn't seem like history.

So in this episode, you will see a lot that's familiar, you'll also see a lot that has changed.

This time on Decades.

St. Louis in the 1970s is a model of urban decline.

But as the region struggles with its national image and internal squabbles, there are those who look at the remnants of the city's glorious past and see the possibility of a promising future.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Decades was co-production of the Missouri History Museum and the nineNetwork of Public Media.

- When St. Louis was planning its worlds fair, Mayor Rolla Wells pledged to create a New St. Louis, And just about every generation since has said the same kind of thing.

But in the 1970s, a lot of people looked around St. Louis and wondered if the city ever could be renewed, reshaped or revived.

(birds chirping) (crickets chirping) In 1970 you didn't have to look very far beyond the new Gateway Arch to see not only that St. Louis wasn't what it used to be, but probably never would be again.

When people who had grown up here came back from their homes in the suburbs, they often didn't find the old neighborhood the way they remembered it.

And despite all the improvements, even downtown wasn't what it used to be.

(horns honking) People remembered a downtown before interstates and shopping malls that had stayed busy day and night.

Back then, all the big stores, offices, and hotels were here.

So were warehouses and even factories.

Washington Avenue was the center of the garment and shoe industries, and they not only employed thousands of people every day, but they also drew designers, salesmen and buyers.

In its heyday, downtown was a local, regional and a national attraction.

- Walmarts and the other big chains didn't exist as yet.

People came into the city still at that time from all surrounding towns where they had stores, owned the small department stores, the hardware stores.

And they would come in to St. Louis to buy.

When they were here, they wanted to be entertained, they stayed in hotels, had ballrooms with big bands.

Dancing was very, very popular at the time.

- [Jim] By the 1970s, all this was St. Louis' history.

Some of what had driven the downtown economy had moved to the suburbs.

Some of industries that had been centered in St. Louis for decades had gone to different parts of the country and the world.

Since the end of World War II, there had been extensive changes in technology, energy, and transportation, and businesses found they didn't need to be tied to coal fields, to armies of immigrant workers or to railroad switching yards.

(train wheels clicking) - Businesses found that it was now cheaper to pick up and move to perhaps where your raw materials came from.

You could move where labor unions were not as prevalent.

You could even break up your process now.

Instead of doing everything here, you could do only part of it here.

You could move another piece of the process away and technology and transportation enabled so much this to happen and it just really transformed the face of urban America.

- [Jim] At the turn of the century, St. Louis bragged that it was Americas fourth largest city.

By 1970, the whole metropolitan area wasn't even in the top 10 and was being pushed even further down the list by the newer cities of the south and the west.

The booming sunbelt.

St. Louis was stuck in the rust belt, where older cities were hemorrhaging people, jobs, and money to the suburbs, leaving their inner cities with growing problems of decay, crime and poverty and shrinking resources to deal with them.

In 1973, the Rand Corporation, a think tank, took a close look at St. Louis and found a worst case scenario come true.

- It said in the end, the only future we see for St. Louis is that it will continue to be a declining city.

It will be, whether it wants to admit it or not, it will be a suburb of St. Louis County.

Rand was predicting in 1973, we can't see any way out of this for the city of St. Louis.

That's what got Civic Progress terribly unhappy.

Because they still had that confidence that we could do anything that was necessary to bring St. Louis back.

- [Jim] And the view from the downtown offices was still pretty good.

The Gateway Arch and the new Busch Stadium had brought a new look and new life to downtown in the 1960s, and corporations followed with impressive new structures.

In 1976, Mercantile Bank opened its 35 story building, the city's tallest so far, and other banks and insurance companies followed with their own showpiece headquarters.

- That happens in every town in the United States.

If you got to Chicago and one banks builds a building, the bank across the street's going to do it five years, two years later, whatever it is.

I think I built a better bank building than the Boatman's and Mercantile.

They probably think they did the same, but oh, yeah, there's always competition between bankers.

- [Jim] The new skyscrapers were giving St. Louis' a fresh, modern look, but this building boom still could not come close to what was happening in the sunbelt cities, and the top St. Louis business leaders who belonged to Civic Progress knew it.

- The '70s was a time where we were re-assessing what we needed to be doing in St. Louis.

We innately love it, but we don't want it to be a big showy, flashy town.

We're not showy, flashy people and that makes it very tough for us to market against cities like Atlanta.

And that's why Atlanta did so well in the '70s and '80s compared to us.

- [Jim] This is how boosters wanted the rest of the country and the world to see St. Louis, Missouri, but there were other powerful images dragging it down.

In 1972, demolition began on the 33-building Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in the '50s as the vision of the future of urban America.

It turned out to be a symbol of all that had gone wrong with Americas older cities, and this image would be played over and over again on national television and cited by the commentators and academics.

And then there was East St. Louis, once the heart of the east sides thriving smokestack economy, now, in the shadow of the Gateway Arch was one of the most troubled cities in America.

- East St. Louis was experiencing in 1970s the kind of pain that a lot of other places were experiencing in the 1930s during the great depression.

There were tremendous, tremoundous amounts of job loss in east St. Louis.

It was an old smokestack, heavily industrial city and as those technology and ways of doing business changed, businesses were pulling out of east St. Louis, businesses that had been there for a hundred years or more.

(soft music) - [Jim] This had once been a robust, ethnically diverse factory town, but it had all been set up by industry and for industry.

And when industry left, it left behind unemployment, poverty, and crime and few institutions that could deal with it.

East St. Louis became increasingly poor and mostly black, an inner city with no outer city.

In 1971, voters elected the first African-American mayor in east St. Louis history.

- East St. Louis was one of those hollow prizes that blacks had struggled so long for political representation and political voice, and when blacks finally came to control, and so many American cities big and small.

They were decimated cities.

The were cities that faced unprecedented problems and had the fewest resources to deal with those problems.

- [Jim] And yet at the very time many Americans were shaking their heads at the state of the American city, a St. Louis school teacher was seeing something very different.

In 1970, she was on a group tour of the city which included visits to some of St. Louis' most rundown sections.

- The verdict of the instructors was that St. Louis was pretty awful and that nothing was being done about it.

What the last stop on the tour was Lafayette pPrk, and they pointed out what used to be the beautiful mansions all around the park, but their verdict there too was that nobody was going to buy them even though one house pointed out was available for $15,000.

So the next day, I began searching for a big house in Lafayette Square.

- [Jim] The Lafayette Square neighborhood was built after the Civil War.

The location on a hill overlooking the city made it one of St. Louis' most exclusive neighborhoods.

But less than a hundred years later it was marked as an area to be cleared out for urban renewal.

Most people thought that moving a family here in 1970 was irresponsible if not down right crazy.

A decade later, Ruth Kamphoefner looked like a genius.

(soft music) St. Louis was living with the consequences of the city-county split.

The great divorce of 1876 had been the city's idea, but since the '20s, the county had been rejecting reunification.

Now it seemed even less likely with the city's declining population, property values and tax base, and the changing neighborhoods and schools that many in the county had moved away from.

After the Supreme court decision of 1954, St. Louis was praised for moving quickly to dismantle its segregated school system, but in the years that followed, the school board was faced with the difficult if not impossible task of trying to follow the law without driving more whites out of the public schools or out of the city altogether.

- The St. Louis Board of Ed was in a bad situation.

I mean, there was white flight already going on from the city.

So they were saying they were going to strict neighborhood schools but they were drawing the boundaries in ways that kept the schools segregated.

They were also doing something called intact busing, where they would bus African-American kids to the south side, but they arrive at school at different times of the days.

They'd be in separate classrooms from white students.

They'd leave at different times.

So a lot of the praise that St. Louis got in the '50s, was people began to realize, really by the '60s that it was unfounded, that they hadn't really been very forward thinking.

- [Jim] The issue went to the courts in 1972.

The city school board responded by opening the first magnet schools to try to achieve true classroom integration, but it wasn't enough.

In 1980, the U.S. appeals court ordered a district-wide plan to integrate the city schools.

By then, white enrollment was down to 23% and the court recognized that any real desegregation plan would have to reach across the city limits.

The case was expanded to put the suburban districts and their history on trial.

- So, there was a lot of evidence that the suburbs had helped to create the segregation in the city.

So before this case even went to trial, the suburban districts agreed to be part of the settlement agreement, and I think the settlement agreement with the voluntary desegregation plan was better than what they thought would happen to them if they were found guilty, which would be a metropolitan-wide school district with mandatory busing back and forth.

And they didn't want to lose their school districts.

That was very important to them.

- [Jim] The deseg plan was implemented in the fall of '83, with voluntary transfer of students between city and county schools.

15 years later, the courts agreed the plan could be phased out.

While area-wide integration was limited, it was also unprecedented.

But there had been no permanent changes made in the structure of school districts or in the 1876 line dividing city and county.

In 1979 that division was as deep as ever, the county supervisor and the city's new mayor were feuding over the issue of a new sports arena.

Supervisor Gene McNary wanted to build an arena in the county but the state bill he needed was blocked by city legislators.

An angry McNary said if the city and county couldn't cooperate then they could compete.

Mayor James Conway said he needed to protect the city's interests and that included its three sports facilities.

City and county were dependent on each other but neither leader was willing to take a back seat, and the crisis threatened regional cooperation on transportation, tourism, and support for the zoo and museums.

But the city-county rift wasn't Conway's biggest problem that year.

That was the closing of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, a decision that may have cost him his job in the next election.

Conway needed to cut services and budget, but on the north side, Homer G. was more than a budget item.

It had been built during the depression as the city's segregated Negro Hospital.

It was a source of pride and jobs for the black community back then, and in the 1970s, it still was.

- It was a major anchor in a city where we had no other anchor.

You know.

And anchors are what give people a sense of community.

To close that hospital shattered and in effect destroyed a community, and it'll be a long way to recovery.

Because it was a way that kept our people feeling a part of this city.

- We're not going to allow this to happen in this community.

(people cheering) - [Jim] Community leaders fought the closing.

There were demonstrations and protests.

On the final day of operation in 1979, police had to be called out to clear away barricades and make arrests.

The last patients came out under police escort, transferred to city hospital number one, which itself would shut down six years later.

But the huge Honer G. Phillips building remained, not just a monument to this community's past but also a hope for its future.

At least they hadn't torn it down.

(soft music) St. Louis had spent a lot of years tearing down buildings thought to have outlived their usefulness.

The riverfront was cleared in the 1930s, the Mill Creek neighborhood in the '50s.

The mansions of the once-fabulous Vandeventer Place were torn down for the new VA hospital.

The massive Merchants Exchange building didn't fit into the plans for the new downtown.

And bulldozers had cleared wide pathways through the city to make way for the new highways.

Laws would be passed in the mid 1960s protecting historic sites and structures, but before that, it was only the local citizens who stood between the landmarks and the bulldozers.

- There was specific concern over individual high-art pieces of architectural the DeMenill House, the Bissell Mansion on the north side.

And so, landmarks was incorporated in 1959, and I think that parallels a lot of activity throughout the county in cities with tremendous amounts of 19th century historic resources that were being blown away, not building by building but in huge clearance programs.

- [Jim] Lafayette Square had been one of those areas once slated for likely clearance and replacement with something like a housing project or a trucking terminal.

But Ruth Kamphoefner and a few others could see beyond the crime and obvious decay.

She moved her family here in 1970 into a house that cost her just $2,700.

- The particular house that I bought was absolutely the worst house that could be bought.

It was just crawling.

I could pick up a piece of wallpaper in the corner and click, click, click, the roaches would come swarming out.

So it wasn't a very nice thing to be doing, but we all pitched in, got busy and did what we had to do.

And to get a repairman to come into our neighborhood was almost impossible.

They wouldn't come near us.

The place had such a terrible reputation.

They didn't want their trucks stolen, they didn't want their tools stolen, so they would not come.

- [Jim] It would take years to bring about the transformation of the neighborhood and to change attitudes, not just of repairmen but of bankers, real estate agents and city hall politicians.

Their first big victory was convincing their alderman to have the neighborhood declared St. Louis' first local historic district.

The preservation movement had first looked at the old mansions of famous families.

Now it was now looking at whole neighborhoods LaSalle Park, Soulard, Hyde Park, the Shaw neighborhood and the west end.

And when new federal laws started giving tax breaks for saving instead of tearing down old buildings, preservation became good business.

And St. Louis was soon recognized as the national leader.

- It is an old city.

A lot of it was still around, even though a tremendous amount of it has been destroyed.

A lot of it was still around.

A lot of that had been documented.

A lot of it was on the national register.

So the combination of a willing bank or two, some developers with imagination and creativity.

All that came together to boost economic development through historic preservation.

So, St. Louis was poised to be able to take advantage of laws that looked as if they'd almost been written specifically for this community.

(soft music) - [Jim] In the 1890s, this was the sign of changing times.

Big important cities built big, impressive train stations, and St. Louis' Union Station was one of the grandest and busiest.

It had served the city well for many decades, but the building designed to handle a flood of travelers was handling just a trickle in the 1970s, and finally it would be closed, a relic of the past.

But at least you could look down market street and see the symbol of the future.

Just as interstate highways had helped kill Union Station, they had sent carloads of vacationing families criss-crossing the country in their station wagons.

A lot of American cities had empty train stations, but only St. Louis had an arch.

- I remember Stuart Symington saying, we got that pork barrel which it was for only $28 million and think what that has done to this community.

It makes it fairly easy to do it from a marketing standpoint to identify it in terms of pictures and things like that.

Like Paris, you see the Eiffel tower.

Seattle, they have their tower, and we have our arch.

And it's just been a great thing.

- [Jim] Whatever St. Louis wasn't anymore, it was still smack dab in the middle of the country.

And that could only help bring people to the tourist attractions, and visitors and conventioneers to the brand new convention center that opened downtown in 1977.

And it was location that brought the Six Flags company shopping for land.

It had looked at 13 possible locations around the country for its third theme park and chose a sit off Interstate 44 in far west St. Louis county.

The company said more than 70 million people lived within 500 miles of their new Six Flags over Mid-America, which opened for business in June of 1971.

While is was far from the city's center, the company said St. Louis' rich history was an important factor in picking this location.

History gave the park its them.

The brand new buildings and rides were built to look old and historic.

By then, a lot of St. Louis civic boosters realized it was time to stop tearing down the real thing.

- What cities have to offer and what began to be apparent in the 1960s and 1970s that they had to offer that no suburb could offer was the past.

An interpretation of the past, and that past could be seen in an environment of grand architecture, of street patterns and amenities.

(soft piano music) - [Jim] You could see the city rebuilding on its historical foundation on Laclede's Landing, a section of the old riverfront that hadn't been cleared out as part of the arch project.

Warehouses that had served one kind of economy, were being turned into offices, restaurants and shops for a new kind of economy, entertainment, tourism, conventions and business meetings.

- It's a historic city with a great architecture and a past rooted in the 19th century, of river trade and industry.

So it has a lot to sell and that's what cities do sell for the most part.

Unless you're Las Vegas, and you sell something else entirely, like gaming, you're going to sell heritage, you're gonna sell past, and you're gonna sell an interpretation of culture.

- [Jim] In 1979, an East Cost developer made a chance visit to the empty Union Station and began to see possibilities, first as the site of a new hotel.

But then the plans grew much bigger into a new kind of urban shopping, hotel and tourist complex.

And as the work began, it was clear that the success revolved around the careful restoration of the building's past glory.

This was one of the largest projects of its kind in the county, and it wasn't the only downtown project underway.

1985 would be a year of grand openings.

(people clapping) First there was the new St. Louis Center, and while connecting two big department stores with a suburban-style mall would eventually fail, it opened with huge crowds and great hopes of revitalization downtown shopping.

(upbeat band music) That same summer, the brand new Union Station opened with great fanfare.

And once again there was talk of a new St. Louis.

- There was a lot of popular understanding and information about neighborhoods, historic buildings, tax credits and that all worked together to people's surprise, in other parts of the country, culminating almost with Union Station, which wasn't just a gosh gee, look at St. Louis from the outside, but I think even more importantly, a gosh, gee look at St. Louis from this region.

When fireworks are going off on national television with this marvelous project that is getting international publicity, I think the community has a different feeling about itself.

- The following year, congress rewrote the tax laws again.

The incentives for historic preservation that had fueled St. Louis' rehab industry were drastically cut, and this golden age of urban restoration was over.

But St. Louis had resurrected parts of a decaying city that a previous generation had thought could only be saved with a bulldozer.

(soft piano music) Our first Decades program began with the year 1900.

Then we did the teens and '20s and so on.

But when we hit the '70s it just didn't feel so much like history anymore.

20 years wasn't enough time to adequately assess the triumphs or the failures.

But we were confident in borrowing from Mark Twain in saying that the reports of St. Louis' death had, in fact, been an exaggeration.

For Decades, I'm Jim Kirchherr.

(soft music)