by Michael R. Allen

In the middle of a warm December day in 2003, I stand on the roof of the Gateway Community Hospital in East Saint Louis and look at the proud skyline of Saint Louis. The view is typical of many found in the eastern suburbs of Saint Louis, but the clear sky and the height of my vantage point make the scene all the more compelling. I am reminded of that moment long when I was riding in my parents' car across the Poplar Street Bridge and first saw the downtown skyline. The view was awesome; the jumbled mix of angles, sleek glass surfaces and the glimpse of smaller, older buildings intrigued my young imagination. Today, the view is much the same. I don't think that I have paused in this way before the skyline for years. Sure, I pick out the flaws in the skyline easily. The banal HOK-designed trio of the Eagleton Courthouse, the Southwestern Bell tower and Metropolitan Square undermine any originality that this mass of buildings might present at first glance. Yet the massing of the buildings behind the Arch has a certain pleasant rhythm that reveals itself today.

I gaze out at architecture that looks best from afar and hope that the postmodern movement that spawned much of the skyline is as dead as critics claim it is. The graceless pastiche of the 1980s and 1990s perpetuates the minor shortcoming of the International Style: a tendency toward building-block detail that leaves buildings boring on the personal level.

"Michael!"

Angela's familiar voice calls out to me. Suddenly, both Angela and Sarah are standing behind me, expectant. I shouldn't have stood out on the roof alone for so long. After all, we are three unarmed young people who are taking photos of an abandoned hospital in the former murder capital of the Midwest. I end my reflections and join my friends in descending the stairs that lead back into the torn-up hallways of this hospital. We have been here at least an hour, a long time for a building of this size. Certainly Sarah, who has worked on a documentary website about Long Island's giant Kings Park Psychiatric Center, has seen more interesting places than this dingy hospital. Possibly the only person who would be intrigued by this place is someone desperate for shelter.

Yet it's unlikely that anyone will go inside of this building today. As bad as the reputation of this city is, East Saint Louis is eerily calm most days. On this weekend day, one might expect a few young folks seeking refuge in this building so that they can get away with something that they wouldn't dare do in broad daylight. Not so -- at least to our knowledge. This crumbling building attracts nothing but three so-called urban explorers who come here to photograph the ruins of what was an ordinary operation.

This hospital had a conventional life. Opened in 1940 as the Christian Welfare Hospital, the place has been a temporary home to more poor people than other hospitals in the area, but nothing spectacular happened here. The four-story building was divided into the specialized units that most hospitals are divided into, treated patients regularly and otherwise lived out its purpose until its closing in 1989. By the time of its closure, East Saint Louis had fallen from its status as a vibrant industrial suburb (already waning in 1940) into one of the most notorious suburbs in the country. Both the industrial and residential tax bases had collapsed after years of commercial and residential migration, and much of the neighborhood around the hospital was empty.

The hospital had trouble justifying its utility in a city of only 40,000 that already had another, more profitable large hospital (Saint Mary's) and was located in a metropolitan area where the interstate highway even gave East Saint Louisans easy access to better medical care -- if they could afford it. Thus, Gateway fell into disuse and eventually slid into decay. Today the hospital is missing most of its windows and sits amid heavy scrub growth. The sign in front is still intact, but nothing else is. The drab rooms have been wrecked and rummaged through, and the drop ceilings have fallen in to leave the pulp of ceiling tiles everywhere. The windowless openings let in breezes that remind one of the strange listlessness of East Saint Louis: a somewhat chilly movement of air that nonetheless portends of nothing but more of the same. The hospital's rooms also follow this pattern; after awhile, one forgets which ones are which. Some contain interesting equipment or records, but as many are so commonplace that even their abandonment provokes only mild interest.

The building is too young to have been of an age where details mattered in institutional architecture. By 1940, detail at a hospital -- especially one devoted to "welfare" -- largely pertained to wall colors. Gateway suffers from a lack of ornament. The most elaborate decorations are several oversized murals of the Disney versions of the Seven Dwarves, and even those are marred by their easy identification as popular icons.

Wandering through Gateway, I recall the John Cale lyric, “life and death are just things that you do when you're bored.” I imagine being a patient here in the later years of the hospital's life, and think about laying in bed looking out at empty lots through the window and ceiling tiles above. What a poor space for rejuvenation, although by 1989 it was likely almost a luxury in East Saint Louis.

Wait; it must have been a luxury, or else its owners would never have closed it. Few people have ever been willing to give East Saint Louis any luxuries, and I cannot imagine the hospital owners who renamed Gateway being charitable. The hospital's decay does not even make it a choice home for squatters or criminals. The only point of entering the building seems to be for documentation or desperation. Like many other commonplace structures in this city, Gateway has become a desolate and useless space that is still as harmless as that chilly breeze I feel.

Without stretching Gateway Community Hospital into a metaphor for the current state of East Saint Louis, I do want to point out how indicative it is of many institutional buildings in East Saint Louis. Church, school and club buildings here largely were built in the early twentieth century. Since East Saint Louis was an industrial suburb, most of its residents worked in the factories that controlled the government of the city. The residents thus were governed by their bosses or at least by their bosses' friends. This arrangement was based upon the fact that the majority of East Saint Louis land was put to use by industry that needed to keep control of government to keep taxes low. Thus, the revenue to the city government was lower than needed. The residential population largely lived there for expediency; the homes weren't planned and the city didn't expand city services in anticipation of residents. Residential development was haphazard and unsupported. The city was governed by men who wanted to protect industry, and they weren't prepared to preside over an actual city.

Thus, services and institutions for residents came into place slowly, the late fruit of small battles to make East Saint Louis a home. When many institutions built buildings, the city was already on the verge of decline. By the 1940s, the city's fate was certain: manufacturing companies no longer needed to rely on the proximity of industrial suburbs like East Saint Louis, and could easily ship from unincorporated areas where land was cheap and taxes were even lower. Manufacturers could also escape liability for their ecological effects on East Saint Louis, leaving residents with the shells of factories and the devastated tax base.

Thus, places like Gateway Hospital were born almost at the moment at which their death began. By the time the residents of East Saint Louis were enjoying the meager standard of living that they had pulled from the tight fists of the manufacturers' lackeys in City Hall, it was almost too late. Yet the city makes a certain persistent effort at staying alive in the midst of this death. It seems that some people really want to call it home, and some people still travel there frequently for seedy nightlife. Between the different groups who want to use East Saint Louis for some purpose (in my scheme, for either a hometown or for a bargain-version Sin City), there is shared tendency to overlook the fact that the East Saint Louis that they contest barely exists at all.

To the casual observer, East Saint Louis that is more decaying shell than anything else. Although there are parts that appear conventionally residential or commercial, there are so many flaws in the appearance. Stand in the parking lot of a new Walgreens, and you may glimpse the abandoned Corno Mills Elevator in the distance. Drive down Broadway, and the active factories and businesses are almost evenly matched by the rows of abandoned factories and warehouses. Just a few hundred yards from the roads leading to the Casino Queen stand the buildings of the Collinsville Avenue commercial district -- most vacant, and a few positively dilapidated like the Murphy Building. This city would seem like an oddly decaying rural county seat, except for the fact that the Gateway Arch and the Saint Louis skyline dominate every part of the city. Thus the decay of East Saint Louis has been the bulk of its life since at least the end of World War II. Therein lies the calm magic of this quietly dying industrial suburb.

~

The sun is setting fast. Angela, Chris and I have spent a day in East Saint Louis and are heading back to Saint Louis when we pass the former B & O dispatch tower, now standing empty on the edge of I-64/40. Once the epicenter of miles of local tracks, the tower now has no impact on the commercial activity of this town. It isn't even used for storage. It's just and empty little tower that is somewhat hard to access. While the tower is easy to locate -- thousands of commuters pass it daily, and a few have probably even guessed its former use correctly -- the route to it is not obvious. We decide to finally go to the tower, driving down a road that doesn't lead anywhere before figuring out the tower's location.

We walk around the base of the tower, trying to find an open doorway. While small, the tower may be of great interest should it still carry its switchboard and some maps. Unfortunately, we may never learn if it does. Once we enter the tower through a side door, we discover that there is no interior staircase. Against the growing disinterest of my friends, I urgently search out an exterior way to the upper two floors. I fail. The stairs between the second and third floors are obvious, but the connection from the ground does not exist. I see some rust stains on the brick in a pattern consistent with a ladder, and determine that once the ladder that went up was located there. Yet I could be wrong. This could be one case among many where I try to force a theory onto a potentially vexing situation. I sometimes think that it's better to explain a mystery away than revel in its uncertainly, especially when it comes to buildings. I think that tendency is a residual effect from the many dreams that I have had set in the City Hospital. These dreams involve parts of the hospital that never existed, but are plausible in the dream logic and remind me of the all-too-real fact that I never visited all of the City Hospital buildings before demolition and renovation work began.

After failing to find access to the upper floors, we watch as a train moves slowly down the track next to the tower. Excited, Angela runs out as close as she can get to the track. Chris follows her, and I soon catch up after making a few vain attempts to probe the tower for a hidden route to the second floor. Chris begins to walk alongside the train's cars, and within a moment he's jumped on one and is holding onto the rungs of it side ladder. He stays on for about thirty seconds before jumping off. The train must be traveling about ten miles per hour. I watch Angela stand next to the train, likely contemplating a jump onto a car. She hesitates, but with encouragement from Chris makes a leap onto the side of a coal car and stays on for a few seconds before jumping off. Of course, I know what is expected of me next. Chris tells me that it's time for me to jump the train, and I politely refuse. I intend to jump on the train, of course, but I don't want to appear motivated solely by peer pressure. And I'm not terribly interested in the cheap stunt of jumping on and off a train heading into the East Saint Louis riverfront switching yards. I'd rather jump onto a box car, get inside, and ride the rails for a considerable distance.

Yet I join in the fun and leap onto a car when Chris is walking away. I'm on for a few seconds, riding in the cool late winter air while wishing that I was headed to some distant city as beautiful as East Saint Louis. I tell myself that soon I will make such a move, but in the meantime I leap off of the car, careful to land far enough away so as not to be pulled under the train. Even at this slow speed an accident like that could occur. I wonder if Chris or Angela understands my careful deliberation about these and other matters. To me, the thrill of random acts must be contained within some larger framework of deliberately actualizing personal desires. That is, I love a good train jump, but I want it to be meaningful. Anyone can come to East Saint Louis to fuck around.

~

The death of East Saint Louis is far from a playful or benign force, though. Although my experiences have provided a basis for conceiving of East Saint Louis as a place infested with deathly magic, other peoples' experiences preclude any enjoyment. Many residents of the city live amid intolerable scarcity. Roads crumble until they seem like gravel, roofs collapse on rental units whose tenants are then evicted, schools lose students and funding yearly, industrial pollution continues, joy-riders from Saint Louis profit from and contribute to the petty capitalist prostitution and drug trades, and the only new commercial development in recent years has consisted of fast food restaurants, strip malls and the huge, fenced-off Casino Queen. Living in East Saint Louis surely is not easy, and definitely isn't always fun. The sort of magic that I describe probably insults many residents who find life in the city to be perpetual repression, and who would find the idea of jumping trains to be foolish.

I have difficulty reconciling my experience with theirs, although we likely share many political assumptions about economic power. To me, the East Saint Louis situation is best met with a creative resistance to the notion that decay has left the city uninhabitable without wholesale change. The material circumstances of East Saint Louis can certainly be improved, but accepting the decay of the city's unhealthy old industrial structures is part of working toward improving the city. The factories may have employed people, but they prevented the residents from ever enjoying fully-developed city services at the same time they caused massive pollution. East Saint Louis was built on a myth of industrial progress that no one in the city believes, so the decay of the physical part of the myth is a necessary step toward remaking the city. The city can never be a boomtown again, but it can be a quiet and modest residential suburb with lots of open space. Of course, its own city leaders keep trying to make deals with casinos and warehouses to keep tax revenue flowing, a move that is as much a nod toward desperate circumstances as it is toward the notion that East Saint Louis can be set back to the old ideal of progress. These leaders ought to move forward on remaking the city, not on restoring it to circumstances that led to its death. At some point, the snake stops swallowing its own tail and gives up.

East Saint Louis cannot grow its industry again, nor can it expect great economic growth. It must tend to its residents by paring down its ambitions and building a stable base of taxpaying homeowners. The city should demand restitution from the industrial companies that devastated the city, and charge pollution fees to remaining businesses. But it should not stake the well-being of thousands of people on corrupt industries that use destructive methods -- this may include the gambling industry as well. We shall see. East Saint Louis must embrace the revolution that nature is carrying out: the death of its old self, and the birth of something new that could give its residents the original power (never before realized in the city's history) to determine what their city looks like. Imagine one of the most notorious Midwestern ghetto cities being reborn as a transitional garden city with lots of city farmland and a “homestead” program in which vacant land is sold off to first-time homeowners who receive assistance on building durable ecologically-sound homes right where Alcoa, Armour and other companies once killed off lively wetland life. It's worth a try, but first everyone needs to note that East Saint Louis is a different place, and that difference doesn't have to be viewed as a detrimental change.

~

Unexpectedly, one day in July, Angela and I come across a strange, small building at Broadway and 18th Street. In the middle of a vacant, slightly overgrown concrete lot stands a modest four-story brown brick tower. The building appears to be roughly square, with broken-out windows on each floor and a doorless entrance on the ground floor. There are exterior ladders and metal frames that suggest a possible old industrial use, but the distance between the building and neighboring buildings is odd. Besides, the closest buildings on the block are houses; across the street is a bar and a new emissions inspection shed on a homogenous lawn that attempts to insult its prettier neighboring greenery.

This little tower is picturesque and suggests any number of uses. One scenario that I imagine is that the tower was part of a larger complex that once occupied the lot, but the pavement seems continuous and old; no building footprint can be seen on the lot. If this is the only building ever to stand here, it must have been a solitary, simple operation: dispensing water into trucks, perhaps? But that sort of operation really doesn't exist, and is suggested by visions of old railroad cooling towers and such. This little tower is a half-block from any tracks.

If it is a relic of a complex, why would someone spare it? Beside the minute beauty of the little tower, there is no other reason to save it. Looking at it, I guess that most of it is a staircase. No one could possibly use it for anything alone. We leave the tower for a few days and return late on a Saturday morning to go inside. We walk toward it to find that most of the lot is indeed paved, making it unlikely that other buildings ever stood nearby. Across Broadway is a bar that is fairly active at this time of day. Older men are coming and going from the place; perhaps they socialize after breakfast by sitting around the bar. Perhaps they eat breakfast here, talking about how the city government needs to tear down the half-standing factory a half-block away. Regardless, one man walks to his truck, which is parked across a curb-cut on the lot. Angela asks him what the strange little tower had been, and although he seems surprised that we care, he replies with what must be true. He tells us that the building was a training tower for the city fire department, which had a station right next door near the street corner. That building, he says, sat empty until the fire department tore it down last year.

I tell him that I would have never imagined that this building was a training tower for firefighters, although close inspection convinces me that I am silly for not considering that possibility. First, the end of the lot near the street corner is covered in gravel, not concrete, and thus could be exactly where the station stood. The building itself also supports the man's story: its interior is bare and insignificant save its pointless concrete stairway -- a perfect place to train firefighters who once had to climb into East Saint Louis' taller buildings. Today, most of those buildings are vacant -- like the landmark Spivey and Murphy buildings -- or gone. It's no wonder that this training building is abandoned: most everything it is supposed to imitate is abandoned, too. At least someone remembers.

The bottom two floors of the building are slightly wider than the upper two, and thus each have a proper room each instead of the extended landing areas (perhaps 12'x15') that make up the other floors. This makes the building visually interesting in minor ways, such as its shape and the slight differences in the layout of each landing. Otherwise, the floors all have cinder-block interior walls and concrete floors. There is a basement, accessible by a set of steps that lead down to a door on the building's north side. The basement is ordinary except that it has an odd upside-down “L”-shaped pipe that extends from the wall down into a small pit that is now full of trash. Its shape suggests a firefighter's pole, but it probably has a utilitarian function.

Another interesting thing about the building is its clear view of the St. Louis skyline, which is probably stunning from the rooftop. We don't go onto the roof during the day, since we are already conspicuous to the bar patrons and don't need any other witnesses. While standing on one of the tower's little iron balconies, I get the notion that this tower would make a great house. I envision someone living in the tower, each floor a separate room. One could use the basement for storage space and tear up the concrete lot in order to plant a large vegetable garden. The roof could be used as a patio, or a platform for solar panels. The building is structurally sound from all appearances, and could be adapted easily to domestic life.

From a balcony, Angela sees a fire truck turn the corner. This detail reminds us that this building once had an intended use from which it is now free. Let the revision begin!

~

On a warm day in June 2003, Angela and I drive through East Saint Louis on our first serious trip. The weather shows signs of an imminent, intense summer heat wave. While the sky is clear, the temperature is already high. We drive around the city, first arriving via the graceful Martin Luther King Bridge. This bridge has always fascinated me, not really because of its conventional design, but because of the way it so effortlessly spans the Mississippi River and frames the Saint Louis skyline with its structure. The bridge is unassuming but wonderfully cosmopolitan, even if access to its deck is restricted to people in cars. Perhaps someday, when a new bridge is built upriver to carry the burden of Interstate 70's heavy traffic, the “MLK” will find itself disused and then converted to a pedestrian bridge.

Regardless, if one has to drive into East Saint Louis, the “MLK” is a lovely way to enter. One gets a sense that the bridge leads to something profoundly unsettling in Illinois -- something at once separate from life in Missouri but extremely close by. Angela and I had long planned to explore the ruin of East Saint Louis, and today is the day we will do so. At first, we take turns driving my car through the main areas of town: downtown and the Collinsville Avenue district, State Street, Martin Luther King, St. Clair Avenue. Somehow we wind up on the interstate and spot the old Corno Mills Elevator wedged between I-64/40 and the MetroLink tracks, surrounded by a sea of new vinyl-clad houses that is called Parsons Place. The elevator looks well-preserved, but certainly empty.

Getting to the landmark proves more difficult than we anticipate, though. We end up driving the wrong way down a street or two, leading to some amusing taunts from both pedestrians and drivers. It is broad daylight, but we aren't close to anything that normally attracts white people in East Saint Louis. Our presence is an anomaly, but only to the few people we see. We have been discovering that there really aren't many people in town on a weekday afternoon, and the possibility of a carjacking seems remote in the desolate, sleepy city limits of East Saint Louis.

We eventually find the driveway that takes my car to the front of the elevator. Angela jumps our and clears debris from the driveway so that I can park my car close to the building, concealing it from traffic. Of course, this effort is largely fruitless. We walk over to one of the elevator's open doors, and enter a bare and musty concrete space that looks exactly like an abandoned grain elevator. While I have never been in an abandoned one before, I have been in a few in-use grain elevators back home in Monroe County, so I am not terribly surprised. The space smells of rotting organic debris; presumably there must be some grain or chaff in the lower levels. We leave the first large room, walk around the building, and go back inside through a door on the western elevation. We hope to find a way up to the building's heights; I estimate that there are probably eleven floors to the structure. Yet we find only one aperture between the first and second floors, and it's dotted with a disappointing sign: a dangling spiral of metal surrounding a metal pole. The remains of a spiral staircase, sans any stairs. I look up and see that there are no stairs for the six-floors-worth of spiral staircase that once existed. One could presumably use climbing gear and the central pole to work up to the sixth floor, but who knows what one would have to do beyond that -- or whether or not one would be able to descend safely.

We see a set of metal stairs that go down one level, and although we have neglected to bring flashlights, we are interested in investigating the basement. Unfortunately, a quick glance shows that it's flooded with a foot or three of stagnant, reeking water. The basement must be a veritable cistern because it has not rained for days. So disappointed, we leave the elevator and drive back to Saint Louis. Yet we leave knowing that we have explored an abandoned building in East Saint Louis without being accosted or otherwise harmed. So much for the city's unseemly reputation.

I suppose that the city's reputation in part stems from the level of decay of the built environment one finds there. People are always uncomfortable when presented with decay, because it reminds them that life is an organic thing over which they have no ultimate control. Thus East Saint Louis presents people with the chance to see much of an entire city dying, and that's not a comforting sight. If people never murdered each other here, they would still invent murder stories. Few people want to accept all of this decay as a harmless and inevitable way of life, even though that is what it is here in East Saint Louis.

Recommended reading

East St. Louis Action Research Project

Judd, Dennis R. and Robert E. Mendelson. The Politics of Urban Planning: The East Saint Louis Experience. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Thiesing, Andrew. East Saint Louis: Made in USA. St. Louis: Virginia Publishing Company, 2003.