Mill Creek Valley

Mill Creek Valley was the heart of Black St. Louis. The 454-acre neighborhood — running from Grand Boulevard east to 20th Street, between Olive Street and the Mill Creek rail corridor — held roughly 20,000 residents by the 1950s, nearly all of them Black, along with hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches, and institutions. It was the city's Black professional and cultural core: the People's Finance Building and People's Bank, City Hospital No. 2, the Pine Street YMCA, the Booker T. Washington Theater, Stars Park, the offices of the St. Louis Argus, and scores of congregations from Berea Presbyterian to St. Malachy's. Decades earlier its Market Street blocks had been the Chestnut Valley of ragtime, home to Tom Turpin's Rosebud Café. In 1959 the city's Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority began razing the entire neighborhood in the name of urban renewal, displacing its residents with far too little to rehouse them. The cleared land sat vacant so long that St. Louisans came to call it "Hiroshima Flats." What rose on it afterward — the Laclede Town housing development, highway interchanges, and the campuses of Saint Louis University and Harris-Stowe State University — left almost no trace of what had stood here.