Urban decay spreads out to another ring
By Pat Gauen
Of the Post-Dispatch
Monday, Aug. 23 2004

The clutch on the floor of my dad's old Ford Galaxie fought every attempt to
shift gears on the trip down two-lane Illinois Route 157 to Belleville. But I
was learning to drive in the spring of 1966 and thrilled to have anyplace to
go.

On some Saturdays, the place was a doctor's office along West Main Street. It
was my favorite destination, thanks to that thoroughfare's long stretches with
no traffic signals to force a stop (and thus another frustrating run through
the grinding gears as my father covered his ears). Besides, the street had
bustle enough to intrigue a 15-year-old.

I guess that image was still in my head when a midday errand took me down West
Main last week for the first time in a while. Or at least it was the first time
I had taken a good look in a while.

Lots of stores and restaurants I remembered are missing, replaced in some cases
by lesser enterprises or nothing at all. There are fewer signs, fewer cars in
the parking lots, fewer cars on the street. I didn't really count, but I didn't
really have to.

Some businesses have moved to the edges, to be near the faster traffic on
highways that sweep past Belleville to the trendier east fringe of Shiloh and
O'Fallon and points beyond. And some of those businesses are just gone.

With sentimental feelings for friends who live there - and fondly remembering
two stints based in offices near the square, a year for the Globe-Democrat and
three for the Post-Dispatch - I worry a little for my old friend Belleville.

Drive west down the bluffs with me, and you'll see why. The once-vibrant
Edgemont shopping area, which is where Belleville melds into East St. Louis, is
decimated. As the same pavement turns into State Street for its 89-block run to
the Mississippi River, the despair of neglect turns dramatic.

The roadside used to be crowded with doctors and dentists and viable shops
leading to the area's big Sears store, back on the occasion when I'd coax dad's
big Ford two-door down that way. Things have changed a lot since, of course,
but on last week's excursion the conditions were the worst ever - a blighted
representation of shopping power that migrated east almost two generations ago
and never looked back.

Then, looming at 25th Street as if simply dropped from the sky, is an island of
development that any community would be proud to have. There sit a Walgreens
and McDonald's and Blockbuster Video and Foot Locker and some other shops, all
as fresh as you'd see anywhere. On the other side of the street is a modern
Schnucks supermarket.

But Schnucks is poised to close the place, saying it cannot make money while
shackled to a lease up to three times more expensive than it pays elsewhere.

Developer Jim Koman, pretty much the father of this corner of hope, is trying
to put together a better deal for Schnucks, which would have closed the place a
week ago otherwise and now operates month-to-month.

The rescue may depend on some financial help from a city and state
that cannot afford it. Then again, with 75 jobs and perhaps the survival of the
city's most viable retail location at stake, perhaps they cannot afford not to
afford it. The community, which has hemorrhaged people for decades, cannot be
stabilized - let alone turned around - without basic services. How on earth can
a city of 30,000 people lose its only full service grocery?

For lots of years, I saw outsiders turn their backs on the needs of East St.
Louis. Sometimes it was because of racism, sometimes because of the city's
history of public corruption, sometimes because of its lingering industrial
grit. We would turn our backs now at the peril of the next ring of communities,
like Belleville and Fairview Heights and Collinsville, which don't look today
very different from the East St. Louis I saw through my dad's car windshield.

Contact Pat Gauen by e-mail at
pgauen@post-dispatch.com, by phone
at 314-340-8154, by fax at
314-340-3050 or by mail at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker
Boulevard, St. Louis, Mo. 63101.

Chrysler dealership celebrates 90 years in downtown Belleville