TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061289/06128900.031

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 8KB | 145 lines

AMERICAN SCENE, Page 10

East St. Louis, Illinois

A City Without Bootstraps

In this place, the hottest ticket is a ticket to somewhere else
By Lee Griggs


    In the seamy Mississippi River city of East St. Louis, Ill.,
the grim local joke is that the crime rate is finally starting to
level off because there's not much left to steal. Block after city
block is boarded up or burned out. Many buildings have been reduced
to rubble as thieves cart away everything of value: bricks,
aluminum siding, copper wire, even heavy cast-iron manhole covers
from the potholed streets to be sold for scrap. The housing
authority complains that aluminum downspouts are swiped from its
buildings within hours of installation. Trash-strewn vacant lots
along the river stand in stark contrast to the gleaming Gateway
Arch of St. Louis, in plain sight less than a mile away across the
river.

    Time was when East St. Louis enjoyed a modicum of blue-collar
prosperity. In the '40s and early '50s it ranked second only to
Chicago as a national rail and stockyard center. But almost all its
industry has left, driven out by high crime rates and property
taxes. Thousands of jobs have gone with the factories, leaving the
city a pocket of nearly hopeless poverty in the generally
economically well-off St. Louis metropolitan area, and quite
possibly the worst-off urban center in America.

    The biggest employer left is the local school district, which
pays no taxes, is $11 million in debt and plans to lay off a
quarter of its teachers for the next academic year. The tax base
has eroded from $175 million in 1965 to less than $50 million.
Property values are so low that the town's tallest structure, the
vacant twelve-story Spivey Building, was sold for $25,000. The
number of retail businesses is less than 200 and steadily
declining. The population, once 80,000, has shrunk to 55,000, 97%
black and two-thirds on welfare.

    There has not been a municipal audit since 1985, but estimates
of current debt run as high as $40 million. The city's mercurial
third-term mayor, Carl Officer, 37, has gone so far as to propose
selling city hall and six fire stations to raise cash, assuming
anybody would buy them. City employees routinely get paid a month
or more late.

    The police force of 70 officers is at half the authorized
strength because of layoffs. Its newest patrol car is nearly five
years old. Many cars no longer have functioning two-way radios for
lack of repair funds, and some cops have had to buy their own.
There is no money to hire recruits, and the average age of the
force is up to a doddering 46 1/2 years. "We just don't have the
money and the personnel to keep the peace," sighs Inspector
Lawrence Brewer, a veteran of nearly 22 years in the department.
"There are guys literally jumping on our car hoods to sell us
crack, but there's no money to pay informants or make buys. We have
the highest homicide rate in the state, and people come across from
Missouri to buy crack and dump bodies here. The bad guys know we
can't handle it all."

    The financial stress worsened dramatically in April last year
when city assets were temporarily frozen after East St. Louis
failed to begin payment on a $3.4 million judgment arising from the
beating of one local jail inmate by another in 1984. The city is
now beset with dozens of lawsuits. Firemen have sued successfully
to collect three years of back uniform allowances, only to be told
that the award left no money in the till to pay their salaries. A
bill making its way through the state legislature will erase the
deficit in the current budget and finally put an end to payless
paydays for city employees, at least for the time being.

    Until then, toilet paper will remain a rarity in city hall rest
rooms. The city cannot even afford new bulbs for its traffic
lights. Parking meters work, but nobody feeds them because there
is no money to hire meter maids. Garbage collection stopped for
several months after the city fell $262,000 behind in payments to
its trash contractor, and remains sporadic at best. Residents
routinely dump garbage in vacant lots or abandoned buildings. As
fast as buildings are boarded up to stop looting and dumping,
thieves steal the plywood. Bob's Board-Up Service in St. Louis no
longer accepts jobs in East St. Louis because customers there don't
pay their bills.

    Last December a task force appointed by Illinois Governor James
Thompson declared a financial emergency in East St. Louis and
noted, in understatement, "There is growing public concern over the
city's ability to provide basic municipal services required to
ensure public safety and the welfare of its citizenry." Protested
Mayor Officer: "I do all I can with the revenue I have." The task
force offered a loan but conditioned it on Officer's accepting a
state-approved financial director with total control over city
spending. So far Officer has not agreed to that condition, and the
municipal crisis deepens.

    Antiquated city pumps break down all too regularly, backing up
raw sewage into East St. Louis High School and forcing the
cancellation of classes. At the Villa Griffin public housing
project, a persistent pool of sewage on a playground, dubbed Lake
Villa Griffin by angry residents, led to the filing of criminal
charges against the city to force sewer repairs. When Mayor Officer
failed to appear at a hearing on the matter, a county judge clapped
him into jail briefly for contempt.

    State police, moved in to supplement the understaffed local
force, are concentrating on drug arrests and housing-project
security. Selling crack has become the city's biggest business, and
is so widespread that peddlers sometimes flag down motorists on
nearby I-70 to hawk crack packets at $20 a pop. Traffic backups on
city streets often turn out to be buyers lined up at drive-through
crack houses.

    Much of the crack trade is conducted in the housing projects,
which have been run by a private firm since 1986, when the corrupt
local authority was ousted by the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. "Living here is hell," says Villa Griffin resident
Rosie Kimble, 44. "I'm scared to go out to church at night for fear
someone will break in while I'm gone. It's already happened once.
With all the dopeheads around here, there's shooting almost every
night. You walk out the door, they're liable to shoot you dead."

    It wasn't always that bad in East St. Louis. Katherine Dunham,
a grande dame of the dance, was able to operate a studio in the
city in the late 1960s. Heptathlon gold medalist Jackie
Joyner-Kersee recalls a happy childhood there and still returns
occasionally from the West Coast to visit friends. But today the
hottest ticket in East St. Louis is a ticket out of it. The two
high schools produce perennial state champions in football and
basketball, putting a few gifted athletes on the road to college,
hoping for stardom in the N.F.L. or N.B.A. For other youngsters,
there is profit in peddling crack but not much else.

    "There's nothing here for me," says Jeffrey Hickman, 18, a
Villa Griffin resident. "Only dope, gangs and shooting every night.
I'll stay and graduate from school, but there's no way I can make
something of myself here. I got to go someplace else, anyplace.
Maybe the Coast Guard."

    Over at city hall, Mayor Officer somehow manages to remain
determinedly upbeat, citing an ambitious $437 million plan for
developing the East St. Louis riverfront that would include a cargo
port, recycling center and high-rise apartments overlooking the
river and downtown St. Louis. But no work has been done on the
project for three years, and the tax-exempt status of the bonds
sold to finance it is under review by the Internal Revenue Service.
"I'm still optimistic," Officer insists. "We'll haul ourselves up
by our bootstraps." But attorney Rex Carr, a lifelong resident of
the city, has a dimmer view. "East St. Louis today doesn't even
have bootstraps," he says. "I see no way out."