Scene from a Vanished World
November 9, 2018
(Source: Serving ice cream)
ALAN writes:
This photograph was taken in 1950 by Philip J. Hasser for a magazine published in St. Louis. It shows a savvy customer at Ed’s Ice Cream Parlor on Chippewa Street in south St. Louis.
Observe the metaphysical essence in this photograph: The little girl grasping the cup in anticipation of a delicious treat, handed to her by a Catholic high school student who worked there; the dress on the girl and the blouse and skirt on the woman at left, perhaps her mother (no pants, no blue jeans); and the cleanliness of the storefront. And then imagine the metaphysical setting—the context of cultural rules, standards, and manners—within which countless scenes like this one were once common in American towns and cities.
A woman who grew up one block from there in the 1930s-‘40s wrote:
“Ed’s Ice Cream Parlor was ‘the’ place to go after a movie or a date. It was home-made ice cream and 5 cents for a large scoop. The sodas and sundaes were delicious…. These memories are very vivid to me and I feel very fortunate to have been a child in those less stressful times.”
[Louise Workman McDonald, Letter to the Editor, South Side Journal, Jan. 23, 2000]
From 1958 to 1962, I lived within walking distance from the corner where that ice cream parlor had been. A small movie house was across the street from Ed’s Confectionary (he lived upstairs). Another movie house was two blocks away. People did not drive to those places; they walked there. Another ice cream parlor was four blocks away. A store that sold electric trains was one block away (the owner lived upstairs). There were barbershops and corner taverns along Chippewa Street. And there was Mrs. Smith’s Confectionary (she lived upstairs). One of my classmates lived a block from her corner store. Another classmate and I walked anywhere we wanted on summer days in 1959. I can picture the two of us there, walking up the two steps into Mrs. Smith’s Confectionary and exchanging our dimes and nickels for a few packs of Topps baseball cards. I remember the scent of the powdery pink bubblegum as we opened the cellophane-wrapped packs and hoped we would find cards picturing our baseball heroes Ken Boyer and Stan Musial.
A man who grew up near that confectionary in the 1950s also remembers it:
“My mother and I walked there from our home on Michigan Ave. one snowy November 7 to buy a Howdy Doody marionette for my birthday… …The Lionel Train store [was] across the street and a little further west on Chippewa. …The Sears store on South Grand. I could see the red “Sears” sign from my bedroom window. I remember going to sleep with the window open looking at that sign.”
[Memories of Marshall Hill, posted April 14, 2018 here]
It was common for shop-owners to live above their shops, a practice extending back to medieval times. A market, a bakery, a shoe repair shop, and a radio-TV repair shop all were owned and run by people who lived above them.
Crime was unheard of.
All of that is gone now.
In 1989, a neighborhood organization opposed a proposal to open a storefront charity in the middle of that eight-block streetscape. They got called bad names for doing so. They opposed it because they wanted to keep their neighborhood Up, not allow newcomers to take it Down. Some residents had already lodged complaints about undesirable tenants, noise, drunkenness, vandalism, and litter. Between 1994 and 2018, within a half mile radius from where the ice cream parlor shown in this picture stood in 1950:
A print shop was burglarized; an attempt was made to break into a pawn shop by men who were caught on the roof by police, who shot and killed one of them in a struggle, whose family then tried to have the officers charged with murder, a claim that was dismissed and the officers cleared of wrongdoing (Does that sound familiar?); men were robbed, stabbed, shot and killed on the streets; a woman was raped at knifepoint; a bank was robbed; a 5-year-old child was raped by a “Honduran immigrant”; a 5-year-old boy was allowed to play with a gun and kill himself; a car thief crashed into six vehicles; other car thieves were busy: At 11 a.m. on June 14, 2004, I saw four police cars converge at an intersection on that street and apprehend a car thief; some residents were charged with multiple crimes; and others took delight in breaking windows.
If you drove along that street in recent years, you would have seen windows broken or boarded up in numerous buildings and houses, and a two-story laundromat building in complete ruin. Renovated houses and flats remain vacant for years. I saw a sign on the window of a grocery store that said “Grocerie’s”, and a sign on the window of a barber shop that said “Barber’s Wanted.” No such imbecilities appeared on any store windows in that neighborhood in the 1950s because the people who lived and worked there in those years cared about doing things right.
Can’t use words properly, can’t spell, can’t obey laws, can’t stand the sight of houses or buildings with no broken windows, can’t protect their children from their stupidity, can’t leave other people’s property alone, can’t do anything but destroy what others have created.
Nothing like this picture can be seen anywhere in that area today. Indeed, it is extremely rare to see any white children there at all. When that picture was taken, it was a patriarchal neighborhood. It is not a patriarchal neighborhood today. It is “inclusive, diverse, and feminist” — which is why it is what it is and will never be what it was.
— Comments —
Jean-Paul writes:
The excellent piece by Alan about the ruin of a neighbourhood rings true, even for a Canadian with no direct experience of the American underclass.
My own intellectual/spiritual neighbourhood in the fifties and sixties was the Catholic church and schools. Same thing happened; infestation by a class that left it in ruins.
Laura writes:
I highly recommend Dr. E. Michael Jones’s book Slaughter of the Cities to understand some of the forces at work in destroying those neighborhoods.
K. writes:
I love the site but these posts from Alan depress me and I can’t take it anymore. I’m taking a break from Thinking Housewife.
Laura writes:
There are many good things to read elsewhere.
Patrick O’Brien writes:
“Scene from a Vanished World” is magnificent. Without a word about it, the article shows how the Vatican II apostasy filtered down to the destruction of a neighborhood. And that makes sense, now that the salt of the Church has been made insipid, and the Church is being trampled by men.
My old neighborhood on the far southwest of Chicago is still virtually lily white and very stable. Public employees of Chicago are required to live within city limits, and my old stomping grounds is the beneficiary of that rule. Of course the old parish is a model of Vatican II junk. But some sense of normalcy still exists there.
I now live, at age 68, in a Denver neighborhood which is becoming gentrified. Things are “nicer” than when we moved in 42 years ago, but my impression is that most of the newer neighborhoods are simply well-mannered pagans. Still, that is an improvement of ill-mannered barbarians, who live in that old St. Louis neighborhood described in the article.
Our Lord must weep when He looks at His Church and sees it in action, instead of trying to save souls and better society, now rather ignoring the four last things and sounding so much like the Communists whom it opposed when we were young.
Your website is usually quite interesting. I am not in agreement with everything, but no difference. Heck, I am not now in agreement with everything I thought five years ago. I am a Bergoglio-sedevacantist, and I wouldn’t have bet on that just two years ago. I used the term “Vatican II apostasy” above, but it is not at all a far-fetched guess to consider out period as being part of the great apostasy mentioned in the Bible. I am happy that I am old; my poor children and grandchildren.
Laura writes:
Thank you.
Again, I recommend Dr. Jones’s book. What happened to these neighborhoods goes beyond Vatican II. Major foundations and social engineers sought to break up that burgeoning Catholic voters bloc. And they did it by pushing birth control and demonizing the racial homogeneity of city neighborhoods, even inciting racial conflict. The growing materialism of Catholics was a factor. It’s a long and dense book. But there are interviews with him about it online.
