by Michael R. Allen

Posted December 13, 2005

To many St. Louisans, Taylor Avenue is a glamorous Central West End street running among the mansions, townhomes and apartments of the city's most genteel neighborhood. That perception is real, at least north of Forest Park Avenue. South of Forest Park Avenue, Taylor degenerates into a back alley for the growing BJC/Washington University Medical Center ghetto. Its sides are flanked not with stately brick mansions but steel fences, parking lots and retaining walls. Then, south of I-64/40, the street seems inviting as it enters Forest Park Southeast. Charming renovated homes abound, most two stories tall and bearing curious expressions of locally-made ornamental brick. There's a lovely bakery with sidewalk seating, and plenty of street trees.

That charm ends abruptly when Taylor intersects with Manchester. The intersection is a desolate place where the intimate scale of Taylor is cut up by the wide, traffic-laden expanse of Manchester. Although cars run up and own Manchester at all hours, the intersection can be a lonely place. Its northeast corner is home to a vacant building, owned by PJD Investment Company, which is controlled by the Renard family. Their family business, a paper company sits at the northeast corner in a huge and dull fortress with few sidewalk-level windows. The southeast corner sports a shabby, windowless church surrounded by a parking lot and high fence; the southeast corner is a meticulously maintained parking lot operated for the paper company -- also surrounded by military-zone fencing.

As far as the eye can see from the intersection, Manchester looks like a street of missed opportunity. Lovely two- and three-story commercial buildings and flats line the street, punctuated by the hard scars of vacant lots. Many of these buildings are vacant or in disrepair. People walk around, but they look tired. Some are threatening; this is a very hard corner in many ways.

See photographs of buildings at the intersection.

South of here, Taylor enters into even less inviting surroundings. An alley running west from Taylor is often piled with tree branches and teeming with drug users, prostitutes, homeless people and folks who may be all three. A one-story warehouse at Swan and Taylor, owned by King Dodge Financing, was home to a mission but is now vacant and the source of crime. Another warehouse bears the marks of its owner Washington Unversity’s wealth: a high fence and no windows. Some modest homes and flats standf around the intersection, offering sturdy homes. This part of Forest Park Southeast was laid out in 1875 as the Laclede Race Course Addition to the city; it occupies land owned by Mary McRee, who built the nearby Laclede Race Course for horses. The area is better known as Adams Grove, after nearby Adams School on Tower Grove Avenue. While the street grid is older than much of the rest of the neighborhood, many of the homes are not very old. Adams Grove developed slowly and haphazardly; very few efforts at recognizable subdivision exist. Brick four-flats from the early 1900’s stand next to one-story frame shotguns dating to 1880. The architectural fabric is patchy and discontinuous; many lots were never developed and the area retains a rawness not found in other parts of the city this old. The street names don’t follow any easy logic; starting south from Manchester are Swan (named for the bird), Norfolk (for Norfolk, Virginia), Vista (for its view) and Hunt (for Mr. Hunt, who managed the race course).

See photographs of the intersection of Taylor and Swan.

Taylor was first the western boundary of the Laclede Race Course Addition, and later the dividing line between the neighborhood and the sprawling works of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company, the world’s largest brick manufactory. The brick works grew to surround both sides of the Kingshighway viaduct to the west, and thus served as a strong visual barrier. This appearance likely contributed to the stunted residential development here, and the gradual decline in Taylor’s condition.

See conditions of the street and sidewalks between Swan and Hunt.

The brick works are gone today, though, but the site is not any more assimilated into the neighborhood than it was then. All of the west side of Taylor south from Swan to Hunt is separated from the street by either a fence or a wall, making a continuous boundary. But the biggest boundaries are the cul-de-sacs added at Swan, Norfolk and Taylor that arrived in the 1980's, when St. Louis aldermen were convinced that street barriers made for safter neighborhoods.

Here, these barriers have killed the blocks along Taylor. Their placement creates visual blight as well as creating dead-ends that are easier places for criminal activity to occur. With Taylor Avenue a dead zone already, the cul-de-sacs accelerated the demise of these blocks to the point where now it’s safe to call them dead. The city streets department and the area’s alderman responded to the death by ceasing the resurfacing of Taylor; the surface today must be 15 years old. It is so uneven, cracked and wavy that people have been known to find their cars' tires flat after driving slowly (the only way possible) down the street.

Needless to say, the street is poorly lit and overgrown, and the homes immediately adjacent to it are almost all abandoned. There are only a few sections of extremely narrow, broken sidewalk and most are covered with branches and debris. Taylor here looks like a road running through a fictional low-density third-world metropolis, except that it is often totally devoid of people. Rarely does anyone drive down the street, either, except for big trucks heading to the railroad tracks at the street's end. (These trucks have contributed greatly to the condition of the street, but maintenance could have prevented the damage.)

See conditions at the intersection of Taylor and Hunt.

For some reason, the street does not even make a proper intersection with Hunt. Instead, Taylor rises to meet a sidewalk and enters Hunt through a curb cut. This is public right-of-way, though, and even if it is not surrounded by great vitality serves a basic function. People have the right to connected streets, and the right to the same consideration as other city residents. Emergency vehicles cannot get through to these blocks and their drivers, seeking to avoid having to turn around on the long dead-ends created from the other direction, use the alleys to get through. They alleys have fallen apart and are sometimes blocked by debris.

Taylor south of Manchester offers a glimpse of the terrorism of everyday life for the very poor people who make up the majority of the population of the world. Even these photographs cannot convey the absolute sense of despair one has when one uses Taylor to walk to the bus, or to the grocery store, or to a job. The street imparts a psychological blow to anyone who looks at it, but it truly hurts the person who must use it. How can a wealthy city let it go unfixed?