You’ve heard the phrase “ghost town.” A town that was there and isn’t today. What about a “ghost city?” When a once-vibrant urban area goes to ground, you can hope for rebirth or say bye bye.

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First, I wish this essay to be a testament to how a random occurrence can lead to greater insight, inspiration, and ideas for the future.

In the process of cleaning house a few weeks ago, a rather large house filled mostly with books, I came across East St. Louis – Made in USA: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town. This was surprising because there aren’t many books in this house I am not familiar with, even if I have not read them.

I’ve spent the better part of my career writing about industrial America from the inside out. As a youth, I worked a summer job once in Chattanooga, TN, loading and unloading tires from boxcars and rail cars into and out of temporary warehouses created from abandoned industrial structures. On my lunch breaks or waiting to be picked up, I’d rummage around the old machinery, occasionally the files and paperwork left behind, and the neighborhoods these manufacturing facilities inhabited. Before that, I remember being “volunteered” by my mother to work one of the first Earth Days in 1970 in, to be euphemistic, one of the less fortunate city neighborhoods, far far away, frankly, from the comfortable suburb my family lived in. We worked abandoned light industrial areas and inhabited residential areas.

Industrial America fascinates me.

If Americans know anything about East St. Louis, they know (1) the flat tire scene in the first Vacation movie, starring Chevy Chase and (2) that it is one of those cities adjacent to one of those much better off cities. I moved my family from Bucks County, PA, to St. Louis in 1997. East St. Louis, directly across the Mississippi River, was known for three things – crime, strip clubs, and decaying industrial sites. I was familiar with these kinds of cities. There are edge cities, prosperous suburban metropolitan cities adjacent to or near the cities everyone knows. Then there are fall off the edge of the cliff cities, decaying cities adjacent to the cities we know, usually (but not always) in the next state over.

When I lived in New York City, I got pretty familiar with Newark. I worked in a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ, adjacent to Newark. Back then (1970s and 1980s), lots of cities in NJ served in the role of fall off the edge of the cliff – Newark, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and others. To the north were the prosperous edge cities like Stamford, CT, and those in Westchester County, NY. When I lived in Bucks County, PA, commuting distance to both New York and Philadelphia, I got familiar with Camden. In my frequent travels to Chicago and environs, I became somewhat familiar with Gary, IN. Later I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and got to know Oakland.

East St. Louis: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town, by Dr. Andrew J. Theising, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, IL, explained to me why East St. Louis is the way it is. It exemplifies the power, in this case destructive, of initial conditions: The city was conceived to cater exclusively to its industrial interests and once those industrial interests decayed to nothingness, the city’s purpose, it’s reason for being, went with it. It has, for all intents and purposes, gone to ground. There is very little left. What institutions and “businesses” remain, or have emerged in recent years, are, according to Theising, public and non-profit and therefore not paying taxes.

Theising’s treatise, eminently readable, is based on scholarly research. The photographic history alone is worth the read. Even in 1918, the city was determined by census statistics to be the second-poorest in the country. Mind you, this was a mere fourteen years after St. Louis, across the river, hosted the World’s Fair when it was America’s fourth largest city. Although simplifications are dangerous, you could say that St. Louis’ money went west (Clayton, MO, is the prosperous edge city for the metro area) and St. Louis’ industrial dumping grounds went east. The government of East St. Louis catered to those industrial interests, at the great expense of its residents.

I was so captivated by Theising’s book that I told him so in an email and he graciously offered to give me a tour (he runs a place called the Institute for Urban Research). I had driven around the city before but it had been about ten years. Yes, I had even visited the strip clubs every so often with an out of town business client on generous expense account.

But I wasn’t prepared for what Dr. Theising showed me.

Fact is, the city has, indeed, gone to ground. So little of it is left. There is a main drag and I was surprised to learn that, while the storefronts were boarded up and there was little activity early on a Friday afternoon, on weekend evenings, you’d be hard pressed to find parking. As portrayed in Vacation, the city is something like 97% African American. In this day and age, that in itself is kind of mind-blowing.

Here are just a few anecdotes illustrating what happens when a city has gone to ground. We toured a new neighborhood. The homes were less than ten years old. In the parlance of the urban planners, it is an “infill” neighborhood. I can’t recall whether it was described as a law or a neighborhood ordinance, but the residents are not allowed to congregate in the front of their homes. Can you imagine? Okay, most outdoor grilling takes place in the back yard, but a law that prevents you from hanging with your family in front, waving to the neighbors walking by? That’s because so many killings take place in these areas from people shooting from cars as they drive by. Yet over ten years, this neighborhood has apparently sustained itself as a quality place to live.

East St. Louis has six police officers. Dr. Theising told me the number of 911 calls the city gets per day and I forget the number but I do remember doing the math in my head and it came out to approximately one every five minutes. The city only has about 27,000 residents. When I asked the obvious question, how do six officers respond to a situation every five minutes, Dr. Theising’s expression answered the question simply: They don’t. They can’t. I think the suburban town I grew up in had 200o residents and at least six police officers.

We drove through an intersection well to the east of downtown and Theising pointed out the two grocery stores across the street from each other. Of course, the irony is that the rest of the city is a food desert. You could probably guess that the two stores are competing to see which one goes belly-up first. But here’s the kicker: One of the stores actually pays for a car service to pick up and return customers. Now, I do know that most grocery stores operate on the thinnest of margins. It’s impossible to imagine how a store remains solvent adding car service fare to its expenses.

If you wanted to develop some constructive ventures in East St. Louis, apparently you’d be hard-pressed to even figure out who owns the land. Many residents have had the land passed to them from relatives but never had the records officially revised at City Hall.

Towns surrounding East St. Louis are often incorporated as separate cities essentially owned by the companies who operate the industrial facilities, or once did. Thus, there is no hope of annexing or incorporating adjacent areas.

Truckers which just charged residents of St. Louis like me so much per ton to transport our bulk waste to a landfill or a recycling center routinely dump their cargo in some abandoned lot across the river. You know an urban dystopia has emerged when it is a good thing you see tires sticking up from the ground or a sidewalk. Why, you ask? Because that means someone had the decency to mark where a sewer lid had been stolen so no hapless soul descends to their doom into a sewer line from which the likelihood that someone would hear you scream is next to zero.

But here is the Disney Matterhorn of the tour. Dr. Theising took us to an overlook sandwiched between a functioning agricultural industrial facility and an expansive abandoned property along the river banks. It’s an urban park (Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park) with an amphitheater cut into the ground and a lookout point so handicap friendly that the poor bastard who pushes the wheelchair up the five inclined stair-stepped walkways probably needs an iron lung when he/she reaches the top. One of those bronze sculptures of a famous person (I guess it’s Malcolm Martin), so real you’re happy it isn’t dark out, greets you. You gaze across the river. Damned if you aren’t equidistant from the ends of the Gateway to the West, the St. Louis Arch. I mean, this lookout point bisects the arch perfectly. It’s almost as if the designers were poking their figurative thumb in the eye of the “prosperous” city across the way. The experience was even richer knowing that, at the top of the Arch, visitors were looking down at us.

I’m looking at you…looking at me. You’re looking at a ghost city. I’m looking at your majestic skyline, unobstructed views, a photographer’s paradise, free parking!

I brought a friend with me for the tour whose knowledge of the arcane of St. Louis (he’s the kind of guy who stops and makes you read historical highway markers) is second to none. I at least consider myself an educated and informed citizen of the region I live in. Neither of us had even heard of this “park” though it was completed in 2009. Yet a family who drove up with Ohio plates somehow knew about it (and evidently were not familiar with the scene from Vacation).

Yet, for all the desolation, the gone to ground appearance, I couldn’t shirk the feeling of hope. East St. Louis was a clean slate, on the surface anyway. I began to envision a 50-year development plan that learned from  the lessons of the original “initial conditions.” I remember a movie, an awful movie, and I think Chevy Chase was in this one, too, with John Candy, where one of them looks out across the wilderness from the deck of some country home, and says, “I see condos…I see shopping malls.” Well, I saw a completely different energy infrastructure, one based on renewable and clean distributed small scale electric power and microgrids, a bicycling community, urban farms, a small scale farm to market where residents walked to the “farmer’s market.” I saw an urban area that rid itself of its “initial conditions.” Converting the rails to trails. Deploying the Internet as the “highway system.” I saw a place where someone like my daughter, soon to graduate with a degree in environmental studies (urban planning, social justice and lots of other things thrown in), and others like her, could start from scratch and begin to build a model community for the twenty second century.

But that was after I stopped reflecting on the geometry, the irony, accompanied by my friend and an expert on East St. Louis, and the silent perennial sentinel, the bronze statue, , all four of us standing (well, for accuracy’s sake, the statue guy is sitting) virtually under the majestic Arch, in homage to the city which no longer ranks in the top fifty by population in the United States.

If America ever had the guts to embrace central planning again, East St. Louis would be a pretty fine place to start. Maybe the city across the way learns a thing or two as well, because maybe it’s on the same path (not that anyone would want to admit that ). Because the alternative, corporate and industrial control, resulted in this ghost of a city.

Thank you, Dr. Theising.