Timothy Birdnow

My recent article in American Thinker on the continuing saga of the Mike Brown affair in Ferguson considerable digital ink was spilled by many who wanted to comment on the matter and a lot of great comments were left - both at AT and elsewhere. I thank all of you who took the time to leave your thoughts. But there was a refrain I kept encountering that goes straight back to a media lie told often enough it is not accepted; Ferguson was an impoverished hellhole. No, it was not and is not.

I grew up near Ferguson.
The St. Louis metropolitan area is a little different than most big city areas in that the city of St. Louis is NOT in St. Louis County. On August 22, 1876 St. Louis seceded from St. Louis County and became a "free city" aka contained within it's own county. (It presents much jocularity when I'm on the phone with some millenial customer service rep "what county do you live in sir"..."the City of St. Louis" ..."yes, but what COUNTY?!") At the time St. Louis grew tired of carrying most of the tax burden for then-rural St. Louis County and so pulled out. At the time there were a number of hick towns out "yonder", the most prominent one, perhaps, being Florissant, an old French village. There were a couple of other towns in the northern part of St. Louis County; the historic black village of Kinloch, for example, which was settled by blacks in the 1890's and built around Kinloch airfield, an early airport run by the Kinloch Aero club and home to the first control tower in airflight. also, the first parachute jump occurred there. Kinloch will be important to our story, as you shall see.

My grandfather owned a rental house in Kinloch and my mother used to visit the tenants occasionally when she was a little girl. She said it was "tobacco road", a town with dirt streets in many places and shoeless children wandering about.

At any rate, if Florissant was the king of north St. Louis County then Ferguson was the Queen.

Ferguson was the stopover for the trains that ran to Florissant. With Ferguson hosting a station, the town grew up as a summer home community for the well-to-do seeking to escape the heat of St. Louis. Ferguson sits in a valley with a community at the eastern end called Cool Valley, a natural cold sink which made it more comfortable in the sultry hot summers of Missouri prior to air conditioning. Founded 1866 by William Ferguson, who donated land to the Wabash railroad for a train station. The town grew around that. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wealthy St. Louisans settled, building large, beautiful houses in Gilded Age styles. These homes grace Ferguson to this day, and were no small part of the renaissance of the community (until the Mike Brown affair, of course.) Ferguson could truly be said to be queen of North County, the consort of Florissant. In fact, the two had a child together, the Ferguson-Florissant school district.

(BTW both Cardinal baseball legend Enos Slaughter and Doobie Brothers singer Michael McDonald grew up in Ferguson.)

Ferguson is a fairly large city in terms of geographical area, too, with a little over six square miles - pretty big for a suburban community, especially in the St. Louis area. That is important to understand, because it means there are sections of Ferguson that were developed later, ones with rental properties, cheap post-WWII tract housing and apartment complexes. This was especially true in the eastern portion adjoining the city of Dellwood along West Florissant road, where the Canfiield apartments are located and most of the rioting occurred. There wasn't a whole lot of trouble in downtown Ferguson during the time of troubles.

So what happened?

First, as I have pointed out, Ferguson is a natural cut-through to Florissant, and indeed not one but TWO roads through Ferguson are named Florissant Rd. - West Florissant and Florissant which becomes New Florissant as you pass through Ferguson. Also, there is a street called Airport Road which eventually takes you to Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Furthermore, the city controls a large stretch of the outer belt aka I270. With so much through traffic Ferguson developed a reputation as a speed trap, and for good reason. The Ferguson police spent a lot of time on patrol.

The second thing that happened was that the City of St. Louis, which owned Lambert Airport, came to the conclusion that the airport needed to be expanded.

It did; there were endless delays at Lambert, home to Trans World Airlines. Takeoffs and landings took forever, with planes stacked up in the skies awaiting permission to land. The powers that be decided to expand the place, and three communities were going to take the hit; the white, working class Bridgeton, Berkeley, and most importantly, Kinloch. Kinloch was nearly disincorporated by the airport expansion, losing most of her population. It was no loss; the city was an impoverished hellhole, crime riddled. But those people had to go somewhere. Most went to Ferguson, to settle in the W. Florissant corridor.

Ferguson's demographic flipped, from 73.8% white in the 1990 census to 44.7% white in the 2000 census. Almost all the remainder were blacks, who moved into Ferguson after their communities were dismantled. By 2010 the white population had fallen to 29.3%.These were people who, by and large, were living on government assistance, and they were angry at having been displaced. Ferguson became a cauldron of discontent.

Meanwhile, Ferguson had begun a revival.

The man largely responsible is a fellow named Joe Lonero. Lonero was an auto body man, and my mother helped him get his start when, as an eighteen year old kid, he began doing body work out of his garage. My mom was perhaps his first customer, and his business thrived, growing to several shops. Lonero expanded into other areas, and eventually began doing rehabbing. He loved Ferguson, his home town, and began an aggressive campaign to rehab the aging buildings in the downtown area. He would rehab them and sell them to businesses. One such job was the construction of a micro-brewery. The potential owner lost funding and Joe was stuck with it, so he opened it on his own. It became the Ferguson Brewery, hardly something one expects to find in an "impoverished" neighborhood. There is also a wine bar and several very nice restaurants in Ferguson.

Why? Well, the University of Missouri St. Louis is just down the street. Ferguson is rather a college town, with a lot of professors and grad students and administrative people choosing to live there. With the improvements made by Lonero the community took on new life, and a lot of the old houses, big, beautiful victorians and whatnot, began to sell for more. They began calling Ferguson the "new Maplewood" in honor of the economic miracle that happened to another St. Louis County community, also spearheaded by a brewery opening in an old grocery store there. Prosperity seemed inevitable for the Queen of North St. Louis County.

The shooting of Mike Brown changed all that. The riots only touched one small portion of Ferguson, but the damage done to her reputation was insurmountable. Now urban pioneers will no longer go there, nor will anyone else. The city is destined to become the hellhole that the media portrayed it to be. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, even good conservatives buy into the claim that Ferguson is an impoverished hell-hole, and I saw numerous comments in the message threads, at Free Republic, at Lucianne, etc. guffawing at my characterization of Ferguson as trendy and gentrified. One fellow claimed to be a lifelong resident of the area. Well, he or she should know better. No doubt this is a "southsider". In St. Louis people from the southern portion of the area think all of north county is what President Trump would call a, well, colon hole. It's not, although it is on the decline. But even when I was in college in the '80's south siders wouldn't go to north county to save their lives.

I think I know a bit more about the matter. Not only did i grow up in the area, I have also been in real estate for years, and I saw the rise in interest in Ferguson and the improvements to the old buildings and the general tenor of the neighborhood. Ferguson was close to the airport, close to UMSL, close to a couple of shopping malls, near several major highway. It had a great municipal swimming pool (which used to host the metropolitan area swim team championships when I was a boy on the local swim team). It has January Wabash park, as well as several other great parks. There are restaurants, the wine bar, the brewery. The DMV had an office in downtown Ferguson. There were festivals and picnics. It was an island in a sea of broken down communities nearby.

Now it is destined to join them.

If the race hustlers would leave it alone it could heal, but they have no intention of leaving it alone. The will keep picking at the scab until it becomes permanently infected.

They have learned nothing. North St. Louis was once a vibrant area as well. Both of my parents grew up there. But as it became increasingly black white flight to the suburbs turned St. Louis County into the new North City, and the city, now full of crime and falling into disrepair, turned into a true ghetto. The very same problems that ended up destroying North St. Louis are now at work in St. Louis County and especially in areas like Ferguson. After the damage is done and the dust settles the politicians and race hustlers will blame it all on lack of funding and white racism, rather than on their own actions which drove the tax base away. They will them begin spearheading a move into the exurbs, where the whites fled after being chased out of places like Ferguson and the process will begin again. People - white as well as middle class black - do not want to live in crime infested, dirty, dilapidated areas. You can't blame them. And it doesn't need to happen but the grievance industry will make it happen anyway.

It's sad to see my old neighborhoods die. It's especially sad to see it happen when it is so very unnecessary. These neighborhoods are being murdered by the ambitions of small and petty people, who sacrifice them on an altar of political correctness so they can make a few dollars and win a few elections.

Pathetic.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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