Escaping History in the Gateway to the West

Abstract

Escaping History in the Gateway to the West reflects upon contemporary narratives around the decline and condition of St. Louis. A region defined nationally by its decline, but the reasons cited by both locals and outsiders for the decline are a combination of vague, categorically natural historical processes. The piece uses an analysis of modern jobs, housing, and demographic data post-Great Recession, a history of the region’s racial politics, and a quantitative mapping of white flight and the spatialization of race in the St. Louis region from the Great Depression to the modern era to offer an answer to the region’s contemporary decline. The author argues the entire region, not just the urban core, post-pandemic has begun to experience a historically significant decline because of the region’s racial politics based on analysis which shows every city, suburb, and exurb in the region is experiencing white flight from the region. The region’s racial politics came to the national stage in 2014 after the murder of Michael Brown for a reason, the city has a unique politics and social structure because of its position as a city which is neither north nor south, while being the gateway to the west.