Abstract
Modern St. Louis, Missouri reflects the myriad challenges faced by many American cites in the decades following World War II. Economic and contributed greatly to the radical social and economic transformation of cities like St. Louis across the industrial North and Midwest. In particular, communities of color have been disproportionately affected by the development of urban crisis issues. The Ville neighborhood of St. Louis thrived as a center of black culture for the first half of the twentieth century before feeling the full effects of urban decline. My study seeks to resurrect a few of the potentially beneficial historical lessons from the often told pessimistic narrative of the urban crisis. The primary issues dealt with in my study are: ghettoization, racial hierarchies, black self-reliance, urbanism, and the social implications of the built environment. \r In addition to tracing the history of this exceptional neighborhood, I seek to analyze the specific effect that the neighborhood’s varied educational institutions had on it’s prosperity and eventual decline. Also, I aim to determine the source of the Ville’s uniquely prosperous and civically engaged citizenry. In doing so, I hope to extract the lessons modern urban society can learn from this community in fostering the growth of the twenty-first century’s civic vitality. As modern urban society faces the task of effective urban renewal, what historically successful institutions and dynamics should it seek to mimic in order to create a dense civic culture. My work is also informed by modern “new urbanist” planning theory and its emphasis on the social implications of the built environment. \r The Ville, as a center of black educational opportunity, provided its residents with an unrivaled level of training and the self-contained neighborhood’s culture. The neighborhood’s talented and active residents were well equipped to dismantle the far-reaching system of Jim Crow racism which had confined them to The Ville’s simple housing stock and segregated schools in the first place. Leaders from the various community institutions which led to The Ville’s rise to prominence in St. Louis’s black community ultimately contributed to its decline as well. The very nature of The Ville as an elite minority enclave compounded the negative impact of deindustrialization, decentralization, and suburbanization which radically transformed St. Louis in the 1960s and 70s. The neighborhood today, with its many abandoned homes and vacant institutional buildings, stands as a monument to its past achievements.