In 1954, more than thirty tall, modern apartment buildings intended for “public housing” were opened near downtown St. Louis.  They are “a shining addition to the city’s skyline” and people of different races and faiths will live there in peace and harmony.  So said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (June 19, 1954). Sixteen years later, those buildings had been made into the site of out-of-control crime and vandalism.  Six years after that, they were dynamited into dust. “Twenty-story tombstones” is how Lillian Boehme described such apartment buildings in her perceptive review of the premises, costs, and consequences of “urban renewal” schemes (American Opinion magazine, May 1971).

Martin Anderson offered an earlier indictment of the “urban renewal” craze in his 1964 book The Federal Bulldozer, in which he concluded that the “urban renewal” bandwagon should be halted.

After five murders took place in 1994 in a group of low-rise government-subsidized apartments in south St. Louis, that neighborhood’s alderman said, “I frankly see results of a federal housing policy that has gone out of its way to ruin neighborhoods.”  (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 15, 1995)  Doubtless that could be said about who knows how many other city neighborhoods throughout the nation.

I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950s in city neighborhoods that had not yet been targeted by “urban renewal” do-gooders.

In a Sept. 3, 2009, essay, you wrote about the “peaceable order” you observed when walking through a patriarchal neighborhood.

I grew up in one such neighborhood in south St. Louis.  My mother, grandfather, and I lived there from 1957 to 1962.  It was home to us, and we were happy there.  Summer now brings with it the priceless memories of that time and place.

The neighborhood was largely German and largely Catholic. When walking anywhere, it was common to see other residents or their children on the sidewalks or working in their front yards.  They took pains to keep even the alleys clean.  Quiet, hand-propelled lawn mowers were used to cut the grass.  People who lived there walked there—to visit neighbors, to church, to school, to the park, to local shops and markets.  Some families had six to ten children, but they were not on welfare.

We lived within walking distance from our Catholic church, where my classmates and I were altar boys in the waning years of Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass.  The parish was thriving and the neighborhood was rock-solid.  The church had multiple Masses on Sundays and weekday mornings.  It was not air-conditioned.  But there was no such thing as casual clothing in church.  Every year the Corpus Christi procession was held on the streets around the church.  Fathers, priests, and other men in the neighborhood had not yet begun to surrender their masculine authority, and women had not yet swallowed the poison called Feminism.  Rules were enforced, and no one apologized for enforcing them.

Children could always be seen at the city park two blocks from the church, playing baseball or other games, or at the playground or tennis courts or swimming pool, or waiting in line at the drinking fountains or the snow-cone vendor’s truck.  One of the school buildings had a popular bowling alley.

A Catholic hospital, a Catholic college for girls, two parochial schools, a Catholic supply store, a Sears department store, two Ben Franklin dime stores, seven grocers, a meat market, three bakeries, four confectionaries, three drug stores, a candy store, a cookie store, two restaurants, three sandwich shops, an ice cream stand, a flower shop, a jewelry store, a hardware store, a shoe repair shop, a bicycle shop, an electric train shop, a pigeon fanciers club, two movie theaters, the studios of the Emil Frei art glass company (renowned for their stained glass windows), a radio-TV repair shop, many beauty shops, six barbershops, a VFW Hall, a post office, and a dozen or more taverns – all were within walking distance from where we lived.  Most were family-owned and operated.

The shoe repair shop had been there since 1933; its owner lived upstairs.  The lady who owned a bakery in the next block lived upstairs from it.  The Catholic nuns who taught at the parochial school lived across the street.  One of the grocery stores had been there since 1936, and one of the drug stores since 1913.  Such people made the neighborhood rock-solid and kept it that way for decades.

I fed coal into a furnace in our basement to keep the house warm in winter.  There was no air-cooling in summer, just open windows and oscillating fans.  We had one, heavy, table-model black telephone.  We did not carry it around with us.

On Saturday evenings residents came out of their homes to purchase one or both of two big weekend-edition papers from paperboys who pulled their newspaper wagons up and down the streets.

Sounds are an essential part of these memories.  On summer evenings we heard the familiar sound of the bell on the blue-and-white Mr. Softee ice cream truck.  It moved slowly through the neighborhood and stopped every now and then as people came out of their houses to treat themselves to an ice cream cone or sundae.

On summer days we heard the familiar sound of the bells on a large red-and-green cart being pushed along the streets by Tony, the scissors and knife-sharpening man.  His cart was red and green to show his pride in his Italian ancestry.  In her book A Portrait of the Italians in America (Scribner’s, 1982), Vincenza Scarpaci wrote of him:  “Even in the postindustrial age, a few artisans retain their pride and devotion to family traditions.  Antonio Gagliarducci, a knife and scissors grinder in St. Louis, still pushes his cart through the streets as he did in 1925, when he emigrated from southern Italy.”  (Page 220)

“The bells on Tony’s cart have resounded on south St. Louis streets for more than six decades.  Everybody in south St. Louis older than 5 knows that sound,”wrote St. Louis teacher, musician, and newspaper columnist Jack Maier when Tony retired in 1988. “His life and his cart are one and the same,” said his son Jim.  Tony was the last of the old-time knife sharpeners in St. Louis.  When he retired, he donated his cart to the Missouri Historical Society.  Today his gravesite is in a Catholic cemetery just down the hill from that of my aunt and uncle.

On summer evenings my grandfather, long retired from his job as a pressman, listened to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games described by Harry Caray on the olive-green radio that sat atop our refrigerator.  On summer days he would walk out on to the back porch and toss a handful of bread crumbs for the birds chirping in the shade tree in our back yard.  At age 80, he could walk anywhere in the neighborhood without a fear in the world.

On Saturday afternoons drenched in green grass, golden sunshine, and blue skies, my father hit towering fly balls for me to chase as we played Indian Ball on a grassy corner of the city park across from the swimming pool.  Thirty years later, before the neighborhood was turned into a combat zone, he walked at leisure through that park, stopping here and there to take a few snapshots at the same grassy fields and baseball diamonds where he and I had known such happiness on days and evenings in the summer of his life and the spring of mine.

In 1958 my classmates and I collected and traded “TV Westerns” bubblegum cards, which were inspired by the many westerns on television.  When I hear them today played at slow tempo, the musical themes from two of those TV westerns (“Gunsmoke” and “The Rifleman”) evoke exquisite memories of that time and place:  Of lying on our living room floor on Saturday night and reading the color comics and rotogravure sections of the two big weekend newspapers, with our living room windows open to the ambient sounds of an ordinary summer night and the sight of the moon in the eastern sky between the trees along the street outside; and of lying there, entranced by those stories of good vs. evil in the Old West and absorbing that wonderful, wistful music as my mother stood nearby at her ironing board doing the weekly ironing.

The very feel of summer days in that neighborhood is brought to life by the beautiful melody of Dickey Lee’s 1962 song “Patches”, which I first heard when it became popular late that summer.

Daily life was more tranquil than it would become in later decades.  We visited friends who lived a block away and played card games or just talked.  We visited other friends two blocks away; the grown-ups talked while I gazed in wonder at their tropical fish aquarium in the living room of the little house where they lived contentedly for nearly half a century.  Children did not yet run their parents’ lives or their homes.  Parents had not yet surrendered their proper authority, as many would agree to do in the Revolutionary 1960s.

Few people today will ever know that kind of tranquility or attachment to a particular place they are happy to call home.  Most Americans today seem only too happy to embrace the illusion that relentless movement and commotion mean that they are thereby accomplishing something worthwhile.

To people in that neighborhood in the 1950s, “exporting democracy,” “building nations” on the other side of the planet, and altering American standards and values to accommodate aliens and agitators would have seemed the silliest ideas they had ever heard.  They understood the wisdom in old expressions like “Mind your own business” and “Stay in your own back yard,” and in the expectation that they should attend to the particular responsibilities of their homes and community and leave other people alone to do likewise.

In his book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt wrote about growing up in Chicago neighborhoods in the same years when I was growing up in St. Louis.

“On weekdays now, for long stretches of time,” he wrote in 1995, “no one walks down the quiet residential streets [ of a working-class Catholic parish in Chicago ].  That is in part because the older people worry about crime and fear the streets almost as much as they took sustenance from them in the old days.  …..in the 1950s they considered the streets to be their home, an extension of their property, whereas today the streets are, for many people, an alien place…..”  [ The Lost City, Basic Books, 1995, p. 254 ]

I could write exactly the same words about working-class Catholic parishes in St. Louis like my old neighborhood.  When walking through that neighborhood several times over the past 15 years, very seldom did I see any older white men or women.  They are there, but they know better than to come outside.  In the 1950s they worked hard to make their homes and their neighborhood clean and attractive.  Today they stay inside their houses and beg vandals not to steal their flowers.

The spirit of uplift that was there in the 1950s has given way to the forces of degradation.  Three adjacent houses one block from where we lived are now vacant with windows missing or boarded-up; they have stood like that for the past ten years.  People in that neighborhood today:

— rob local banks (repeatedly)
— rob church collection boxes (repeatedly)
— defraud older residents
— rob elderly women
— beat elderly men
— beat their children to death for not doing their homework well enough
— litter the streets and sidewalks
— deface buildings with the names of competing gangs of thugs
— throw rocks at cars and people
— slash throats
— shoot law enforcement officers
— shoot each other
— knife each other
— cruise the streets playing hip hop “music”
— teach the joys of diversity in school buildings that were parochial schools in the 1950s

This is what Americans get when they agree to exchange the fiber of masculine authority and patriarchal neighborhoods for the mush of diversity, feminism, and “openness.” It is astonishing to live among people who profess concern for the internal affairs of nations on the other side of the planet while at the same time permitting countless houses and buildings in their own cities to stand in ruins in plain sight for decades.  (The huge, red-brick buildings in south St. Louis where my father worked have now stood abandoned, deteriorating, vandalized, and for sale for more than 35 years.)

I cannot forget that neighborhood because I left a part of my heart there in years long past.  But its moral, esthetic, and cultural character in 1959 is gone forever.  That “peaceable order” is now vanished.