East St. Louis
Treadmill to oblivion

In this first of two articles on East St. Louis, Ben Dobbin takes the city's troubled pulse by talking to people who live there and to some of those who are trying to help them. Next month's article will focus on the efforts of various government officials, including Mayor Carl E. Officer, to deal with the city's staggering problems.

Over 1,200 East St. Louis homes stand abandoned — windowless eyes staring hauntingly through dense and tangled underbrush. The city's businesses have also fallen prey to disrepair and fire, their storefronts — now boarded up — bespeaking a dim and more prosperous past.

GWEN McGEE is a 25-year-old unmarried mother of three, poor and unemployed. She lives in East St. Louis and wishes she didn't.

Unable to afford rent out of the $348 she receives monthly on public aid, McGee stays at her mother's on Veronica Street, in one of the city's bleak, dishevelled, huddled houses. The McGee's front door is boarded and patched, the hallway cluttered with boxes and the front room with photographs and a couch that serves as a bed. Children run in and out. McGee's brother sits sullenly in the corner watching soap operas in black and white.

Her life doesn't hold much promise right now, and she talks as if it has already passed her by. She looks to her kids for consolation. "When you're a kid coming up," she smiles wearily, "you dream. 'I'm going to have this, I'm going to have that.' After awhile, you get growing and you're still stuck with your dreams and you wonder, 'Where did I go wrong?'

"The only dream that I could dream right now . . . would be to change the way it is. That my kids could get the things that I couldn't get. That they could get a job. . ."

She points at the Stars and Stripes sticking out of a box in the narrow hallway. "See that flag," she sneers. "That flag's not going to help me nothing. Why should I stand up to that flag? I'm not free. Somebody got a rope on me someway."

Benjamin Heard is also 25 and unemployed and black and living in East St. Louis. He spent most of his youth in reformatories.

"I was great at school," he jives. "Coming up in the street, at times I thought school wasn't where it's at. I was doing my own thing, running around committing all kinds of crimes and whatever — breaking into trains, armed robbery — and I figured that would make me stay living. But I realized that wasn't worth it, because some people were dying, because of things that they do. I see and realize that it was no kind of goal."

Since his release from Menard Correctional Center in 1978, he's been out of work. "I took a voluntary job at a community high school," he says. "It will help me in the future to get a better job. I'm trying to get me a vocational to get into junior college." He nods with determination, "I know I can."

He hangs his head a bit when an old school friend greets him on the bi-state bus. "Hey, brother, what's up?"

"Going to school in September," Heard replies, betraying some uncertainty. His friend, who's just been laid off, wishes him luck. He knows things don't always work out, despite the best intentions.

Ben Heard and Gwen McGee have much in common. Neither of them feels confident they can straighten up the mess they've made of their lives. Their predicaments are not unusual in East St. Louis. Here, almost 50 percent of the households are fatherless; the crime rate is double that of the state as a whole; the average yearly income of $2,856 is far below the poverty level; the schools have one of the state's highest dropout rates; at least 50 percent of the city's residents receive some form of public aid, and close to 40 percent are unemployed.

Heard and McGee face enormous disadvantages by virtue of where they live. They have a lot in common with their city, a place of quiet desperation.

'A very real Maginot Line'

East St. Louis is no ordinary town. Among its superlatives, it holds claim as the nation's most glaring example of urban decay. Described by Bobby Mays, an attorney and former city commissioner, as "an all-American

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city in 1958," it is now a ghetto for blacks, a town that has deteriorated to the point of desperation, an outland struggling for attention. Surrounded by predominantly white, thriving towns — Belleville, Fairview Heights, Collinsville — East St. Louis is also, as one observer put it, "a very real Maginot Line."

Jerry Hasenstab, a white social worker with the Catholic Urban Program, came to East St. Louis five years ago. "I grew up in Belleville, on the hill," he says. "You could always get the feeling there that 'this was how it was' or 'keep them where they are.' If that meant letting them [blacks] have the city, then let them have it. The federal government's approach is, if it's black, then you don't do anything to improve it. Businessmen are just waiting for it to bottom out. They could have worked it up with the blacks, but I don't think they want to; it goes back to prejudice and racism."

Hasenstab helped recently to move a family — man, woman and child — out of their decrepit home on the south side. "The house they were living in was just filled with waste," he utters, in a modestly astonished voice. "Pots they had used for toilets. Rats, mice everywhere. It used to make me sick physically; it's very depressing. The people are so beaten down, they don't even see the need to keep clean. It's kind of frightening that people's spirits can be that crushed."

In his office on North 14th Street, Rev. Buck Jones, director of the HOPE Project, one of East St. Louis's many community groups, reports that over 75 percent of people in the city are receiving some form of public assistance.

"It's not easy being poor," he says with a shrug and a half-smile, aware of his rhetoric. "It really hurts them — they really hate to come in here. Applying for welfare is even worse. Most people would prefer to be independent. But then for some people, they don't have a choice. You freeze or go hungry."

The aid that people do get is not enough to get them off welfare, says Jones. "The way you block the welfare cycle is by empowering people so that they can engage in upper mobility. Getting a welfare check, it's very difficult to educate a child. We see too many people out of money before the end of

Photo by Roger McCredie Few businesses have been able to thrive in East St. Louis. All-night discos and lounges, such as Buckingham's, are exceptions. These places will suffer too if Missouri starts to issue 3 a.m. liquor licenses.

the month — they have to go upstairs [to a neighborhood center located in the same building]. A little over $300 for a family of four!" he scoffs. "It's far below the poverty level. I think it should be above the poverty level: give people independence and self-esteem. Of course, that's wishful thinking." The system just isn't designed that way, he concludes.

A tale of two cities

Annie Nicholson lives nearby at 24th and State. The walls of her house are cracked and the bricks need pointing. The smell of age hangs like a shroud in the doorway. She sits in her dark living room, curtains drawn in the noon swelter. The floors are bare and the ceilings are flaking. The yellow-brown rooms have not been decorated for years.

The Nicholsons do not get public aid. "I used to, before I was married," she explains, "and I was so-o glad to get off it. I get a fairly well-to-decent income compared to a lot of people. But when you look at the doctor's bills I have to pay, I don't get anything."

The Nicholsons receive almost $1,000 monthly in social security, supplemented by $75 Annie brings in every other week as a part-time secretary with the HOPE Project. Her husband, Benny, 32, suffers from hypertension and has been in and out of hospitals all this year. Annie has three children and two step-children (from her husband's first marriage), all under 10 years. The six-year-old has sickle-cell anemia. They are "above income" to receive a medical card, and hospital bills have run them over $5,000 in debt.

"I really don't have a dime when the check day comes around," she says. "I'm down very bad right now; right now I'm down. It kind of gets under my skin sometimes, you know, looks like the walls is closing in, where you just can't make it. And I just say, 'forget it.'" Annie Nicholson didn't have the debts four years ago, before she was married and before she got her job. "I don't think I had it this hard when I was on public aid," she says jokingly.

The future, as Annie Nicholson sees it, doesn't bear thinking about. "Reagan is hurting us as it is, with food prices," she says. "Soon as he gets all his budget cuts passed, there's no way in the world that poor people gonna be able to survive."

Under Reaganomics, the future does bear thinking about, says Rev. Jones. "I think we're going to return to the days when you had people suffering from malnutrition and eating out of garbage cans. People are going to steal before they go hungry. Every time you cut food stamps, there are spin-offs. Crime will go up, incidences of break-ins. It has to go up because people have to survive." He thinks the cuts will come down harder on East St. Louis, because of its special problems and its isolation.

Jones has worked in the city for more than a decade, though his home is in St. Louis. He sees contrasts in his daily trips across the river, almost a tale of two cities. "East St. Louis is basically black," he points out.

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Photo courtesy of Illinois Department of Transportation Its riverfront lined with stately old riverboats, its skyline punctuated with modern new highrise hotels and corporate offices, St. Louis is separated from East St. Louis by much more than the Mississippi River.

"There's a big difference. There's no resources and jobs here. What's happening in St. Louis is poor people are being displaced. You don't have that over here."

The differences between the two cities are undisguised, and they begin on each side of the river, on the riverfront.

Along the St. Louis shoreline, the tourists are everywhere. There is gaiety, ice cream, antique coast guard and Huck Finn riverboat cruisers. The Gateway to the West is shining, opulent, reaching to the sky — the Mercantile Tower, Mansion House, Stouffer's Riverfront Towers, the Gateway Arch — and the people, mostly white, are in a holiday mood.

Nothing shapes the horizon on the east side: no skyscrapers, no hotels, no monuments. There are barges; there are trains crawling slowly along the river bank; there are cars streaming across the modern highway bridge and along high-rise overpasses that skirt the town. A grain elevator stands alone and further along, a huge coal company billboard, smoke clawing the sky behind it. Behind the railroad yards are vast tracts of land and more than 1,200 abandoned homes.

The white exodus

Three blocks back is Collinsville Avenue, the Main Street of East St. Louis. Road construction has begun at the south end of the street, outside City Hall. Jackhammers, reverberating in unison, send hollow shocks throughout the downtown, temporarily enlivening the area. Collinsville Avenue is three blocks of small shops, half of them boarded up, several large clothing stores, three banks, one supermarket. The striking architecture of the Majestic Theater is a reminder of the city's former glory; it is a shell now, dull and grimy, its windows torn out, a testament to the city's regression. The avenue ends suddenly in a wasteland, an area cleared some years ago to provide a downtown entertainment district. Yet another wild-dream project that evaporated in the planning stage.

East along State Street, just a run from the city center, many side streets are steeped in dilapidation, the abandonment distorted and magnified by open lots where houses have been demolished or are burnt-out shells. There, the tall grasses grow, weeds, bush, undergrowth, like mini-jungles. Nature has overtaken whole blocks, augmenting the weird sense of desolation. Stately buildings are boarded up, the owners long departed. Even churches are burnt out. In every section of town, usually at a crossroads (and usually burnt-out or in disrepair), there is a National Hall — Croatian, Czech, you name it — evidence of East St. Louis' formerly diverse mix of peoples.

Today, the Caucasians are gone. Ninety-five percent of the residents are black, as little as four percent white (though whites were still a majority as late as the 1960s), and there is a scattering of Asians whose fast-food shops are beginning to spring up along State Street and the main streets that run parallel inland from the river.

The main streets in East St. Louis extend for about 90 blocks through the sprawling, elongated city as far as the foot of the hill, where Belleville begins. Back streets are another story. They sometimes peter out entirely or dwindle into overgrown laneways with tall grass on both sides, where the potholes must be driven over at a crawling pace.

Further out are the housing projects, almost all long blocks of two-story buildings, tiny rooms crammed in terraces. It is late in the afternoon and the children are everywhere. Out of 55,000 people in the city, more than 20,000 are school age. At night there is the unmistakable sound of gunfire, and doors and bolts are drawn. Crime and small-gang warfare are constant fears in the projects. (The city, according to Mayor Carl E. Officer, has the highest homicide rate in the country. Reported crime continues to rise, 3.4 percent in 1980. Aggravated assault and battery went up almost double, to 9.6 percent in 1980; all other categories had a decline.)

In the 1950s and 60s, a large influx of poor, unskilled, semi-literate blacks from the South led to a corresponding outflow of whites to nearby suburban townships. In the summer of 1968, when black militants were making demands on the white political leadership, and there were 28 consecutive days of sniper shootings with whites as the targets, a major exodus started.

Now, middle-class blacks are also leaving. There are still areas within the city limits where the houses are well-maintained, where the curbs are not crumbling, where families (as in any down-home town) congregate on the veranda. But those areas are not expanding.

One important reason for the flight is the burdensome tax rates. East St.

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Louisans have the highest nominal property tax rate in the state. The current 6.27 levy on property is more than seven times higher than in Belleville. Until the 1970s, there had not been a reassessment of property for tax purposes in East St. Louis for over 50 years. And with some reason — reassessment would deprive the city of revenue it desperately needed. In 1977-78 there was some reassessment, mostly of residential property; there has been none since then. The total assessed valuation of property in the city has dropped from a high of $192 nillion in 1957 to a low (with the state multiplier taken into account) of $32 million in 1980.

With such high levy rates, many people simply stopped paying taxes and lost their property. Default means the property goes to the county which often cannot sell scattered parcels of land, further diminishing the tax base. In 1981, 5,151 of the city's 28,422 parcels of land belonged to the county; another 3,526 parcels to tax-exempt entities like churches and schools; railroads owned 121 parcels of land. According to a 1977 series on East St. Louis by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the county owned an estimated 20 percent of the city's 14 square miles, and the railroads owned 25 percent but paid only 12 percent of property taxes.

Land of few opportunities

If there's anything that is guaranteed to bring outsiders in droves to East St. Louis, it's the whiff of alcohol. All-night lounges and discotheques function as one of the few thriving enterprises remaining in the city. But even this could change if the Missouri legislature approves a recent proposal to allow Missouri bars to stay open until 3 a.m.

Right now, however, they're packing them in down in Buckingham's on State Street. Half of the people are standing, most well-dressed, the working middle class. Mike Miller, a case worker for the Department of Children and Family Services, wouldn't normally stand out in a crowd, but he does here. He's white and everyone else is black. "East St. Louis caters more to the blacks from Missouri, and the whites who don't fear coming over," he says, with a smile and a shrug. He comes here when he has an "early morning thirst," maybe once a week.

There's a shuffle nearby. A man is frisked quicker than he can reach the gun slotted in the back of his belt. A .45 falls spinning on the floor, and within a moment the danger has passed. The man is led away by two plain-clothes security men. "It wasn't pointing my way when it dropped," jokes a big fellow at the bar. His laughter is loud, almost disdainful. He's been in worse.

Despite the unemployment, the closed factories and the large amounts of federal money alloted to social programs, East St. Louis has not become (as some would claim) a ward of the federal government. Its 1980 allocation of $113 million in federal funds may appear unusually high, but it is in line with the state average and lower than the rest of St. Clair County, which encompasses Scott Air Force Base. St. Clair County received $3,013 per capita in 1980, Belleville $2,539 and East St. Louis $2,054.

Photo by Roger McCredie Gazing east through St. Louis' Gateway Arch is like staring into a weird and distorted looking glass. The graceful old riverboats become ungainly and ugly barges. The skyline flattens out, broken only by a grain elevator and a Peabody Coal Company sign. The glamor is replaced with grime.

Vandy Brewer, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist who worked for the now-defunct Metro East Journal in the 1970s, is familiar with the city's problems. "The only thing wrong with East St. Louis," she says, "is that they're poor. They just don't have the means to get out of poverty. There's such an air of defeat down there: it's a constant battle. It just seems they can never do anything right. It's a treadmill to oblivion. It has all the social ills there are — crime, corruption. . ." She pulls herself back. "I don't like to bad-mouth East St. Louis. It's a classic example of rape. People have taken and taken and never given back."

"Somewhere, somebody had a bright idea," reflects Lionel Hankins, owner of Union Clothing on Collinsville Avenue. "'We're going to pick up and leave East St. Louis.' They left it with black in it. They took everything out of it, and they left it to us. They left it with nothing, and we still have nothing." Hankins' laughter is cheerful, softly defiant. "The few that stayed here were the dedicated people of the community," he says. "If the town goes down, they're going to go down right with it."

A prophecy fulfilled

For most residents, that prophecy may already be fulfilled. At least half the population lives below the poverty level. Bobby Mays, a white attorney who works in the city, says the average income is about $238 a month or lower.

"It's not easy being poor." Rev. Jones shakes his head, repeating the words several times. "I would think the greatest frustration of people," he continues, "is not being able to get a landlord to do what he's supposed to do. I had one case where the landlord actually boarded people up in the house and cut off the utilities. Some can't pay their rent and. . . are evicted. It's a hard life. You have people here," he says, "living 14 to a house fit for only one person. Houses with raw sewage in the basement, where there's no heat and no hot water and your toilet is not working. Where you have rats and snakes coming in from abandoned buildings next door." (Seventy-five percent of the housing stock still standing is considered deteriorated or substandard. Nearly 3,000 units or 20 percent of the city's housing has been pulled down in the last 10 years.)

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The crumbling ledges and crannies of the once opulent Majestic Theater in downtown East St. Louis are now adorned with weeds.

Cora Slaughter, 32, a divorced mother of four, rents a house and, like many East St. Louisans, has trouble keeping it maintained. "They won't fix it," she gestures forlornly. The floorboards are weak, water comes up the kitchen sink because the sewers are often blocked, and there is a cesspool of sorts in her backyard that she has covered with boards.

The landlord is only part of her problem. She also gets little cooperation from the city. "The property next door is abandoned," she says. "Kids can get hurt, get raped there, and they say there's nothing they can do about it. I've been calling them all week. If you want something done, you want to stay on their backs, call every day."

She is unemployed, struggling to "make ends meet" living on aid. "If I could get me a good eight-hour job, I wouldn't need the aid," she says. "I'd prefer the job any day, paying good money."

Ben T. Phillips Sr., an insurance agent on State Street, believes many young people would work if they could find a job, but he is critical of their expectations. "People have come to the point where everybody wants to make a big salary," he argues. "They won't work for minimum wage. They prefer to stay on aid rather than earn $50 to $100 a week."

Phillips has three children and the eldest, 21, is thinking of leaving to get a better job. "This is happening with a lot of young people," he shrugs. "I think they should stay and get involved and help change the conditions in the city."

When there are no jobs, many of the young feel they have no alternatives. Qulee McGee, 64, Owen's mother, shakes her head. "It just seems like in 10 years, everything has changed. They come out of high school and have no job and no place for them. A lot get into the army. It's bad."

When Annie Nicholson lets her kids out, she goes with them. "I take them to the park or the church," she says, "because the kids on this street are very bad. They have little 'baseball fights,' hit each other with baseball bats. I guess that's just their everyday life, but it's something I don't like. You have to do a lot of praying and talking and chastising. You can't keep your kids from other kids, they're goin' to have to mingle. But everyone out here wants to be hip-hip and know everything, and the next thing you know your child is either smoking dope, drinking whiskey or trying to rob a till."

Jones sees the kids coming to the neighborhood center every day — "if they didn't, they'd go hungry" — and remembers when violence reached "epidemic proportions" in the early 1970s. He says, "I often want to cry when I see the children — eight, nine years old — and there is no success image. They end up stealing drugs, they end up killing each other."

Gwen McGee regards the delinquents with both scorn and sympathy. "The way it is, a lotta people you can't blame," she says. "A lot of people can't take it. That is why you get a lot walking around half-loony. They're getting killed every day. This dude just got killed last Tuesday. I was just speaking to him. He was stabbed to death."

The violence affects young and old. "There used to be a time," remembers Qulee McGee, "we could leave the door open; used to be we could get out and walk at night." (Qulee, who worked 14 years as a dietician in an retirement home in St. Louis, was beaten and robbed outside her home by a group of youths in 1978.)

It is the old people who are most affected by the fear. Helen Ogar, 80, who is white and lives in the Landsdowne high-rise projects for the elderly, hardly goes out her door in a week. "Things sure have changed," she laments. "Landsdowne — it's the roughest. We got rough ones around here that pick on the older people. I was hit with a beer can. I haven't been walking since 'cos I'm scared. We're living in fear, I'm goin' to tell you."

Ogar has lived all her life in the city and can still remember the 1917 race riots "like a nightmare." She feels times are turning for the worse again. "It's going to be worse. I just got that fear lately about the way people are reacting. Everything they do now is meanness, it's hatefulness."

As with everything about East St. Louis, the contrasts are sharp. For some, it remains a very congenial city, complete with its southern hospitality. "If you say East St. Louis, there's an instant fear," marvels Jerry Hasenstab. "People can't realize there are people here that have the same fellings, same hurts, same love that other people have. It's not a place to be feared."

"Insecure, very insecure" is how Bobby Mays describes the quietly depressing lives most East St. Louisans must endure. "You don't have that kind of voice to change much in your life," he says, shaking his head and his fist alternately. "That leads to frustration, leads to the alley being garbage-filled and rat-infested. Sort of a chain reaction. It's a hopelessness and a helplessness. If you can't change anything about your life, you can't change, anything about your city."

He pauses. He may as well say it, for what it's worth: "Some people would like to see it stay that way. It's easier to control people who are poor."

Ben Dobbin is from Dublin, Ireland, and has been in the U. S. a year. In 1980 he won the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette's first Ed Borman Scholarship for promising political reporting. He has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois.

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