Posted June 26, 200618 yr Would you like a seat on the lovely Illinois riverfront? East St. Louis' Skyline Hope you enjoyed your visit.
June 26, 200618 yr Very familiar pics to fans of your website :wink: Nevertheless, always a pleasure to look at!
June 26, 200618 yr Some pix look like West Third before they remodelled it for that Wright-Dunbar thing.... East St Louis waterfront. There's no there there.
June 27, 200618 yr Never noticed how much the St. Louis arch looks like a frown. KF You win. "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
June 27, 200618 yr I think East St. Louis' grit has grit. It doesn't get any sadder than this. Not even in Detroit. KF
June 28, 200618 yr I'll leave the exploration of those areas to those who are better human beings than I.
June 29, 200618 yr I have never seen anything like that place. We'll have to ask Volguus for some photos of Chester and/or Camden then.
June 29, 200618 yr I was in St. Louis for the first time a few weeks ago and just could not get over the total lack of development along the river. Besides the park around the arch there is absolutly nothing to connect downtown to the river. It truely makes you appreciate what we have in Cincinnati, Covington, & Newport along with the stuff we are trying to do to improve our riverfronts even more.
June 29, 200618 yr this thread calls for some appropriate music while you look it over. like the theme from omega man: http://www.eccentric-cinema.com/downloads/The%20Omega%20Man%20-%20Surprise%20Party.mp3
June 29, 200618 yr Wait a minute, I just noticed in photo #4 a banner announcing that "Bar-B-Q" is under new management. Things are about to turn around, folks. I look forward to an updated thread in a year from now. Something tells me we won't even recognize the place. Maybe they can sell Omega Slabs. KF
June 29, 200618 yr This is what Beale St. in Memphis looked like before the city bought all the vacant buildings. A developer contracted with the city to lease it to him for $1 a year. Then, he starting bringing in the clubs and its now a huge success. Keep in mind that it is surrounded by ghetto on 3 sides. (I'm not suggesting that this will be the next Beale St. :) )
June 29, 200618 yr East St Louis is where a lot of people go to drink and party all night when the bars in St Louis close. I think the Missouri drinking law is 3:00 am...and in Illinois it's like 6:00 am. I am surprised how bad it is because there is a waterfront and Metrolink access. It makes no sense. Mid America airport was built in Illinois as a reliever to Lambert and to try and boost the economy on that side of the river but it was a complete failure. With TWA gone, Lambert is half empty. I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time when St Louis was a big hub.
June 29, 200618 yr ^And coincidentally, this is the preferred method for creating the ghetto. KF wow, good one!
June 30, 200618 yr East St Louis is where a lot of people go to drink and party all night when the bars in St Louis close. I think the Missouri drinking law is 3:00 am...and in Illinois it's like 6:00 am. I am surprised how bad it is because there is a waterfront and Metrolink access. It makes no sense. Your thinking of Sauget, Illinois not East St. Louis.
June 30, 200618 yr Holy Sh*t! I knew E. St. Louis was rough, but damn. Between E. St. Louis and Gary, IN, those have to be a couple of the grittiest cities I've seen. I remember just driving through on the freeway through Gary on my way to Chicago and you could tell it was a gritty place. I can only imagine what it would've been like had I exited the freeway and gotten to explore some of the neigborhoods.
June 30, 200618 yr One of the things that distinguishes Gary from a place like, say, Youngstown, is that the downtown was completley abandonded by the buisness community. At over 100,000 pop Gary was not a small town, and had its own banks and proffessionals and so forth, but they left en-masse for the suburban areas around the Lake Mall. The hospital was going to leave too, but the city government had to play hardball with things like federal grants and state liscensing to force it to stay in town.
July 9, 200618 yr I have never seen anything like that place. Visit Gary, Ind. No wait, visit Cicero. No wait, visit Youngstown. Er, maybe Warren. Or Flint. Or East Cleveland. Or Detroit. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few more. So many urban masoleums. Greatest country on Earth. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
July 9, 200618 yr ^ I have been through Cicero and never seen anything like East St. Louis. I also find Gary's downtown to be better off, maybe not in terms of businesses but in overall looks. Here are my Gary, Indiana photos of the CBD. http://www.pbase.com/montecarloss/gary_indiana
July 9, 200618 yr Cicero still seems pretty healthy to me, too. The wierd thing there is they tore down most of the huge Western Electric plant and turned it into a big box retail shopping center (places like Home Depot), yet kept a few of the Western Electric buidlings (including I think the smokestack). Which is maybe something EStL (or Gary) should think about...redeveloping vacant land by building a discount power center or outlet mall as a way to re-use vacant land, and give the poor people there some cheap places to shop.
July 10, 200618 yr I always thought that St. Louis Mills should have been built in East St. Louis instead of in the farmland on 370.
July 10, 200618 yr I always thought that St. Louis Mills should have been built in East St. Louis instead of in the farmland on 370. It would've been a better waterfront, certainly. And perhaps less parking. "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
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