In my series of critical years, I decided to focus next on the year 1930 as part of my series on the history of St. Louis. This year’s federal census revealed a significant change between the county and the city. The county saw more residents than the city for the first time: 110,856 new residents were added to the county, bringing the total population of the county to 211,593. This compares with 49,063 new residents for the total city of 821,960. The City of St. Louis did not gain approximately 100,000 residents in the past 10 years for the first time since the 1880 census. This was a marked departure from the four previous censuses. Even though the west is its rival, St. Louis County was already at 211,593, almost doubling the population in just 10 years. This is another story about the incredible growth of the county since the 1920s.
Let’s focus on St. Louis and the signs that it was a warning of trouble to come. Also, the solutions that were already in place did not work. It is also not true that the St. Louis area is small. Large tracts of Southwest City were built in 1930, so this excuse does not hold water. There were 17 farms within the city limits that year. There are many other reasons 1930 is so important in St. Louis’ history. I also argue that there are lessons to be learned from the mistakes of civic leaders in trying to address concerns about slowing population growth, loss of competitiveness, and the decline of suburbia.
In a classic, St. Louis traditional business interests led by the Chamber of Commerce questioned the validity of census bureau numbers and claimed that government officials had not counted all residents. Amazingly, only a few hundred people were missing from the injustice according to the PostDispatch article. This was part of a wider campaign to save face. Civic leaders had predicted that the city’s population would exceed 868,000 in 1930. It also reflected historical trends. You may recall that in 2011, city officials claimed that the census bureau had failed to count thousands of residents. This was again a case of federal government mismanagement. The Post-Dispatch reported again that the city officials eventually conceded the accuracy of the census. It seems that history repeats itself at census publication time in St. Louis.
The census revealed that St. Louis failed to address the problems facing its oldest parts, which included 15 contiguous districts in 1930. These older wards were located east of Grand Boulevard, mostly near the Mississippi River. They were also losing population. New construction in the southwest and northwest areas of the city was the only reason that the City was growing in population. This was offset by the loss of housing stock older than 50 years. This is what many people may have heard about the aging apartments in St. Louis County. Many of these now-condemned, struggling complexes are reaching half a century. Problem is that St. Louis City wasn’t fixing problems in older wards east of Grand to stabilize the population; instead, they relied on new construction west from Kingshighway to increase population growth. After World War II, this model ran out of space. Before World War II, incentives were provided to landowners to improve their properties. This would have made them more desirable and tax-generating properties over the next 50 years. This is what the historic tax credit and other programs can do to revitalize Soulard neighborhoods.
We start to see modern-day zoning beginning to emerge, something that has been getting more attention lately. There are some terrible ideas, such as the clearing of Kosciusko’s neighborhood, to make way for an urban industrial park. This has not happened. The North Riverfront is a barren wasteland, which is also cut off by Interstate 70. This story will be covered another day. There is little population and a lot of abandoned properties that generate little economic activity other than historic industrial occupants like Mallinckrodt. The Harland Bartholomew Plan is another infamous plan. This plan would have destroyed most of the area that is currently productive, such as Lafayette Square, and other South City neighborhoods.
We see city leaders making reactive choices, and not making active decisions. The recent voter-approved bond that funded the expansion of major arterial roads and construction of a downtown civic space showed that the citizens of St. Louis were open to raising taxes in search of creative solutions. Leaders could have found more creative solutions to St. Louis’s problems if they had properly received the 1930 census results and not re-litigated them. It is important to upgrade aging infrastructure and neighborhoods, not to destroy them as will happen with urban renewal in the next decades. Real industrial competitiveness is not just about haphazard, clearly empty blocks that run along the river. Instead of focusing on superficial fixes, address the root causes of problems.
