On Going Home
December 9, 2023
ALAN writes:
It has often been said that “You can’t go home again”.
Let me test that idea by considering some of the places that were home to my mother or that she visited over a span of eight decades.
1. Her childhood home on Indiana Avenue in south St. Louis in the 1920s: Now abandoned and boarded up.
2. Places where she lived in the Dutchtown neighborhood in the 1950s-‘80s: Now infested with crime, lawlessness, and lowered standards.
3. Her first home: St. Ann’s Maternity Hospital, where she was born [ “…a maternity hospital for white women…” – St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Oct. 18, 1936 ]: Demolished decades ago.
4. St. Anthony’s Hospital, where she worked as a volunteer during World War II, and where I was born: Demolished decades ago.
5. Deaconess Hospital, where she spent a few days in 1990: Demolished in 2014.
6. Lutheran Hospital, where she spent a few days in 1981: At that location since 1883. Closed as a hospital but now a popular site for copper thieves (police were called to the property more than 80 times this year), boarded up, and vandalized extensively with spray paint. All of that while the buildings have been nominated for the National Register of Historic Places.
7. Alexian Brothers Hospital on South Broadway, where she spent a few days in 2000: Standards lowered dramatically in recent years, now closed after 150+ years at that location.
8. Kristof’s Market on Virginia Avenue, where she shopped in the 1950s-‘60s: Closed years ago; now the site of market operated by very different people for very different people, with bars on door and window and offering EBT.
9. Busiek’s Market on Pennsylvania Avenue, where she shopped, 1960s-‘80s: Closed decades ago; now boarded up and with house in back in advanced state of collapse.
10. Cherokee Street, where she shopped in 1940s-‘70s: Now the site of anarchists, the hip, the cool, the tattooed, and agitators for Communism.
11. Downtown St. Louis, where she worked, dined, and shopped, 1940s-‘70s: Now a ghost town of abandoned buildings, boarded up storefronts, and a playground for car thieves, bums, opportunists, parasites, predators, and vandals.
12. Crestwood Plaza, opened in 1957 and where she enjoyed shopping, 1960s’70s: The whole thing demolished in 2016.
13. South County Shopping Center, opened in 1963 and where she shopped often: Parts of it are still open, but the sense of life that one feels in its corridors and stores today is wholly alien to what it was 50 years ago because of its aggressive pandering to the young and the abominable noise that they inflict on customers and call “music”, both of which would appall her as much as they appall me. For instance, you will hear traditional Christmas songs played there today, but only when alternated with atonal, unmelodic, anti-melodic noise and filth palmed off as “music” to younger generation-customers too stupid to know any better; the purpose being to suggest musical equivalence between the ugliness of the latter and the charm and beauty of the former. There is of course nothing innocent about it. It is all calculated and part of what Lawrence Auster called the (planned) “Breakdown of Western Form”. [View from the Right, Nov. 22, 2002]
14. National Supermarkets, where she shopped 1970s-‘90s: Closed years ago. If she shopped today at comparable supermarkets, she would find some items now kept under lock and key that were always available on open shelves years ago—a direct consequence of theft by blacks, not by Germans, Polish, Koreans, or Japanese, and proof that the “joys of diversity” is a Big Lie.
15. The Jewel Box and Floral Clock, two of her favorite places in Forest Park, 1930s-‘80s: Floral displays in the Jewel Box are now a mere shadow of what they once were, while the Floral Clock disappeared years ago after it was vandalized by youths while “The Law” slept.
16. Chicago, where she and her older brother traveled for a mini-vacation in 1956: Now a city of astronomical rates of crime and excuses made up on request.
17. Detroit, where she visited a friend in 1969: Now a prime example of how to convert a civilized city into utter ruin.
The degradation of 10 those 17 places is a consequence of lawlessness and vandalism by blacks, and of public policies whose unstated but de facto purpose is to punish people who create and reward those who destroy. Doubtless it is all part of the Permanent Leftist Revolution.
“You can’t go home again”, indeed. Nature does not make it impossible. The scoundrels who call themselves “The Law” make it impossible by their inertia, spinelessness, and treason to law-abiding citizens.
