65 Years Ago, Decision to Clear Mill Creek Valley Changed the Face of the City
Date Posted: August 9, 2019
Posted In: Discussion,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: In the years after World War II, civic leaders believed in solving big problems with sweeping projects. That sort of thinking, after all, had won the war.
They regarded old, decaying neighborhoods — slums — to be the city’s biggest postwar challenge. Their answer was to fire up the bulldozers.
On Aug. 7, 1954, Mayor Raymond R. Tucker announced plans to demolish commercial buildings and 5,600 dwelling units across 465 acres of the Mill Creek Valley, running west from Union Station to St. Louis University. For three more days, front-page headlines spread praise all around for Tucker’s bold vision. It would become the city’s biggest urban-renewal project and, for a time, the largest in the nation.
The Mill Creek area dates to 1765, when Joseph Miguel Taillon built his stone grist mill along a creek that ran from present-day Vandeventer Avenue to the Mississippi River. A man-made lake called Chouteau’s Pond was a local attraction until pollution and cholera epidemics led to its draining in 1852. Railroad yards and smoky factories moved in, although some of the neighborhoods remained fashionable into the 20th century.
By World War II, Mill Creek’s tenements and faded town houses were home to nearly 20,000 people, many of them poor blacks who had migrated north from the cotton fields. More than half the dwellings lacked running water, and 80 percent didn’t have interior bathrooms.