The entrance of the Railway Exchange Building in St. Louis. It once housed the Famous-Barr department store

ALAN writes:

The last remaining department store in downtown St. Louis has announced it will close this summer.

That came as no surprise to me. Only the willfully blind could imagine downtown is not dying. A man who opened a restaurant downtown in 1968 was calling it “done-town” by the time he retired in 2005. I knew he was right because I, too, had watched it decline, year after year.

The department store is Macy’s but it was known for most of its life as Famous-Barr, a May Company store with ten floors of merchandise in a beautiful building called the Railway Exchange Building in the heart of downtown. One of my uncles worked there in the Katy Railroad office from the 1920s to the 1950s.

How well I remember walking into the store through its brass revolving doors and riding the escalators to the upper floors. My father and I spent many hours browsing in the large book department on the sixth floor. Mannequins in a display window of the soon-to-close department store now wear backward baseball caps – a splendid example of trickle-up stupidity that Diana West could include in an updated edition of The Death of The Grown-Up. It symbolizes what happened between 1959 and now: A department store run by grown-ups was surrendered to people who take their cues from adolescents.

Famous-Barr was famous for its Christmas display windows with toy trains and animated figures. A woman wrote in a local publication in 2001:  “I remember as a child the excitement of going downtown at Christmas time to look at the windows and walk through the Famous-Barr winter wonderland.” So do I. My mother took me there when I was a boy. In later years, we shopped there often. In the 1960s, the building’s exterior featured a seven-story Christmas tree of white lights. It was always a pleasure to visit Famous-Barr.

A photograph from 1959 captures the ambiance of the main floor interior exactly as I remember it. Observe the clean, uncluttered décor and the way customers dressed: Men in suits and women in dresses.

At an intersection one block from there, two old skyscrapers stand on opposite corners. They were once the site of bustling activity in shops and offices. Now they are the site of abandonment and decay.  Each is boarded up at ground level; one has been that way for two decades. Some sidewalks remain in disrepair for years. Take a casual walk around and you will see dozens of other storefronts vacant. One corner building has been vacant for ten years.

On the periphery of downtown, tall factory buildings stand vacant for years. So does the six-story, red-brick hospital building that Catholic nuns opened in the 1880s as St. Mary’s Infirmary. In later years, it was used as a teaching hospital for nurses.  It has now stood vacant and vandalized for decades. All of its windows are gone and there is a huge gap in one wall.

These are the unmistakable signs of what Jared Taylor has called “the late, great American city.”

When I was a boy, thousands of St. Louis families took their children downtown to board the S.S. Admiral excursion steamer for a day cruise on the Mississippi River. On night cruises, orchestras provided music for dancing in its two-deck ballroom.  In later years it was converted into a gambling casino. It is now gone.

In my first job many years ago, I delivered prescription medicine to people who lived in the Alverne Residence, a Catholic retirement home with a chapel on the ground floor, four blocks from Famous-Barr. It opened in 1957. In a picture from 1963, six nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary are seen sitting and enjoying the sunshine on the roof. The residents and nuns departed many years ago. When a trendy “hip-hop club” was opened there, nearby merchants complained of windows being broken, trash, vandalism, and car break-ins.  The building has now stood abandoned and boarded up for years.

As late as 1961, the offices, factories, and showrooms of more than fifty garment manufacturing companies were located in downtown St. Louis. All are now gone.

The Jefferson Hotel was opened in 1904 and thrived for decades afterward. I remember walking through its elegant lobby in the 1960s, past a five-tiered Grecian fountain and eight-foot gold-and-crystal chandelier. In later years the building was made into retirement apartments. But all of its residents were evicted by a developer who had Big Plans for the building…..plans that dissolved into oblivion. It has now been boarded up for six years. A restaurant across the street is closed. Trendy shops open nearby but then close a few years later. A photograph taken in the 1920s shows two young women walking through the small park behind that hotel. They wear hats and ankle-length dresses, not blue jeans, baseball caps, or tattoos.

Much hype was expended on a spectacular new shopping mall that opened in 1985 and boasted more than a hundred shops and restaurants. It made a big splash. My mother took pictures there at Christmas time. She never expected it would become a ghost mall within twenty years. But it did. It is now dead and gone.

One reason why downtown became done-town is its flourishing population of panhandlers, drunks, bank robbers, thugs, and car thieves. They are able to prey upon visitors and shoppers because of spineless law enforcement, lenient courts, diversity mongers, and do-gooder churches. A few examples: A 64-year-old white woman worked in one of those churches and prided herself on “reaching out” to “help the homeless.” One day she made the mistake of asking a Negro bum not to be so loud. So he knifed her to death in her office.

In 2006, I stood at a transit station downtown and saw a post there defaced with these words:  “Blood Gang,” “Lasalle Lane Killas,” “Down Town Area,” “Wreck Squad,” and “Catfish Blood.” In 2010, security guards at a prep school downtown used pepper spray to stop a fight in the hall involving a dozen students. Last winter, a former Missouri governor was robbed one afternoon while walking to a restaurant.

But in all fairness, I must acknowledge one of the good things about downtown St. Louis:  The “Serra Sculpture.”  Installed in 1982, it consists of eight large rusting slabs of steel set upright in the center of a city block.  It is a magnificent work of “Art.”  Experts said so.  City officials said so.  Hip art critics said so.  Cool people said so.  Unfortunately, ordinary, hard-working, tax-paying St. Louisans did not agree.  In letters printed shortly after it was put there, they said it was “atrocious and ridiculous”, “an insult”, a “monstrosity”, “a useless piece of nothing”, “a nightmarish junkyard”, an “atrocity”, and “a terrible, disgusting eyesore” – thereby proving that they had not been sufficiently brainwashed.

The Serra Sculpture in done-town St. Louis

A man wrote to a newspaper in 1995:  “As an old-timer who remembers downtown as a colorful, delightful, crime-free place to visit, it saddens me to witness what so-called ‘progress’ has brought about…”  And a woman wrote in 1997:  “St. Louis is almost a ghost town. In the 1960s we had good times there, going to the shows. People were all over the place. I’ve seen the best: 1940 to 1960s.  Now I see the worst….”

I can confirm those judgments. “Going downtown” in 1965 was as pleasant as hearing Petula Clark’s cheerful song “Downtown” on the radio that year. Downtown pulsed with life and activity.  But I have now seen three department stores, clothing stores, jewelry stores, two bride’s wear stores, two dime stores, three music stores, four candy stores, five drug stores, seven cafeterias, eight book stores, and a hardware store dating from 1881….all closed or demolished; and two beautiful old movie theaters demolished (the Ambassador and the Loew’s State).

The fifteen-foot-tall cast-iron clock standing outside a department store;  the brass-and-bronze chronometer outside a jewelry store;  classical music in the park across from the Library;  carillon chimes three times a day;  the flower vendor;  the barber college;  the store specializing in pens and pencils;  the tobacco shops;  the office supply store with a map shop below street level;  the antiquarian book shops;  the Visitors’ Center, staffed by volunteers since 1964;  and the old, family-owned drug store in business since 1907, with hundreds of small wooden drawers along one wall – all those things and places are gone.

More than twenty-five years ago, I became friends with a retired bookseller.  He had worked in a Catholic book store three blocks from Famous-Barr.  He was a quiet, thoughtful man who loved old books, old movies, and classical music.  He enjoyed dining in two restaurants downtown.  Both are now gone.  He told me how, when he was a boy, his mother would take him on a streetcar ride to the big department stores downtown.  He always came back home with the impression that the places he had seen or visited would stand there forever.  But now he had lived long enough to see some of those very places being closed or demolished.  He died four years ago, and I am now repeating his experience.  It concentrates the mind upon the brevity of life and the passing parade.

—- Comments —-

Joseph L. Ebbecke writes:

Baseball caps have no place off the ballfield in any case. Backwards caps are a major symptom of cultural decay. How horrifying to put one on a defenseless mannequin.

The current San Antonio Central Library is the old Sears store. Riding the escalators there brings back wonderful memories of childhood Christmas shopping.

SA’s downtown is much better shape than that of most major cities; but no one would dream today of putting a department store there; or a new car dealership. In the 1960’s they were all there.

Excellent comments by Alan. I’m saving that 1959 photo.

Laura writes:

Most people take our urban ruins for granted. I’m sure there were many Romans who were the same way.

Only someone who has loved a place as much as Alan has could express such burning indignation.

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