Being scared of “the East Side”

by Angela Poletti

The East St. Louis riverfront (STLToday.com)

The East Side. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The grass-fed yuppies from the County, the swaggering City people, and the country-fried outstate rural folk can all agree on one thing, if only one thing: do not underestimate the power of the East Side. Nine times out of 10, simply mentioning the East Side to a seasoned St. Louisan elicits a strong visceral response: maybe wide eyes, maybe a knowing smirk, and probably an interesting anecdote or two.

The East Side is the Golgotha of the Midwest, with which St. Louis is stuck in a violently abusive love-hate relationship. It is a no-man’s land where it’s always high noon at the O.K. Corral and the dueling pistols are semi-automatics scrounged off the black market. St. Louisans need only see the headlines in the local paper or hear the top stories on the local news to feel the rage emanating from the  streets that criss-cross East St. Louis like a spiderweb waiting for another victim. Bloodthirsty gangs, crooked politicians, grotesque industrial contamination  — you name it. The East Side is more Gotham City than Gotham City itself.

Though its modern face is made ugly with the scars of urban decay, East St. Louis was once a beautiful and successful boom town, with a rich history and countless talents that either came from or landed there at some point (Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, and Ike and Tina just to name a few). Its population topped out in the ’50s with just over 82,000 citizens. It was a heavily industrialized city whose economy was initially strengthened but ultimately weakened by world war. This in turn helps to explain exactly how a city can go from Pleasantville to nut-stompingly blighted in just a few short decades. Deindustrialization and unreconciled racial tensions marked the beginning of the end for East St. Louis, and the subsequent failures of the government officials elected to help fix the city were just nails in the coffin as the city became buried in crime, pollution, and corruption.

Nowadays, the East Side is a barren wasteland of vice, though it’s not totally isolated from the greater metro area; many St. Louisans drop into East St. Louis for the strip clubs and 24-hour bars, which are in the less-dangerous areas — they are the Limbo to the Inferno that is the East Side. For those brave souls balls-out enough to make the trek there, they are greeted by a veritable cornucopia of strung-out, gat-wielding warrioresses of the night and around-the-clock libations, all against the illustrious backdrop of a dying urbania. It is St. Louis’s dark secret, and our thriving metropolis would not be complete without it.

Angela Poletti is an administrative assistant for the Riverfront Times and a native of St. Louis. She lives on the city side of Richmond Heights, and is a committed vegan and organic lifestyle advocate. Of course she’s scared of the East Side.