The other day I was reading a post by my friend Rick Bonash over on his blog STL Rising. The post was then called, “Busch Stadium Should Have Not Been Built” Here is an excerpt:
Busch Stadium should not have been built because it replaced a thriving Chinatown in downtown St. Louis referred to as “Hop Alley”. People don’t often think of St. Louis as a destination for Asian immigrants, but it did at one time have it’s own Chinatown.
Hop Alley was tiny compared to the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco. I wasn’t around at the time, but from what I’ve read, it was real, and it was located at the site of the former Busch Stadium. When the stadium was built, a number of former uses were removed, to make way for the new ballpark.
Had Busch Stadium remained in North City at Grand and Dodier, Hop Alley in downtown St. Louis would have been preserved, and St. Louis today would be more urban and ethnically diverse. True fact? Maybe so? We really don’t know and we can’t say. That’s not our history, so basing arguments on the premise really can’t be proven either way.
As much as St. Louisans loath change, our history is one of steady changes. Today, we have a thriving Asian district along Olive Boulevard. It’s much larger than the old Hop Alley, running nearly from the city limits on the east to west of 170 in Creve Coeur and Olivette.
Busch II, our first downtown baseball stadium, was part of a wave of downtown redevelopment which included the Arch and many of the office towers downtown. From an academic perspective, one might ask, what would have happened if instead of downtown, the Cardinals chose to move to the western suburbs? That didn’t happen either, but it’s fun to think of the possibile outcomes. Some might suggest the Cardinals leaving St. Louis proper would have been good for the city.
They might argue that city leaders would then have been forced to consider a future without major league sports. Older buildings would have been preserved, so there would have been more rehab opportunities. Remember though, this was the 1960s, and historic preservation had not reached the economic leveraging potential we see today. So perhaps, the buildings demolished for Busch Stadium and other new construction would have been lost anyway. We don’t know.
After posting a comment that I agreed with him he lets me down with his response:
Sorry Steve,
The headline must have worked because it was intended to work as a misdirection. Personally, I’m very happy Busch II was built, and Busch III.
Last night, I didn’t have tickets to the ballgame, but stopped into one of the downtown restaurants (newly updated) for a beer after work. The place was packed with baseball fans.
The real point I was trying to make with the post was that as a community we need to move forward together rather than beat ourselves up over years’ old decisions.
Imagine if you were sitting at a table in the restaurant I was in last night, surrounded by baseball fans, and someone proclaimed, “they never should have built Busch Stadium downtown.” It would sound like crazy talk.
Think how the self-doubt discussions about St. Louis sound to newcomers. Not very good.
So after more than 30 years since we took homes and businesses from people we have a restaurant full of baseball fans as evidence of the success of the decision. The Chinese area along Olive appears larger because it is sprawled along the road in typical American suburban fashion.
I too had heard that the old Busch Stadium had replaced our Chinatown but now I was curious to know more so I turned to the Journal of Urban History and a paper titled “‘Hop Alley’: Myth and Reality of the St. Louis Chinatown, 1860s-1930s” by Huping Ling. In this well researched and detailed account of the place and how it came to be:
In the late nineteenth century, the booming city of St. Louis, Missouri, attracted many from different parts of the world.It is during this time that Chnese started to arrive in St.Louis. The first recorded Chinese immigrant was a tea merchant named Alla Lee, who is reported to have arrived in 1857 from San Francisco. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese community in St. Louis had grown to about three hundred. This community was physically centered in “Hop Alley,†a seemingly mysterious place that inspired tall tales to he contemporaries and is little known to the present St. Louisans. Along Seventh, Eighth, Market, and Walnut Streets, Chinese hand laundries, merchandise stores, grocery stores, restaurants, and tea shops were lined up to serve Chinese residents and the ethnically diverse larger community of St.Louis, the fourth largest city in the United States at the time.
Tall tales indeed. Accounts indicated a national anti-Chinese bias with many thinking that while they were exotic they were inferior to the white man. This paper talks about the racial discrimination Chinese persons faced and how places were raided at the slightest hint of interracial relationships.
So when the white men in charge of St Louis’ urban renewal program had finished decimating many poor black, Polish and Irish neighborhoods the next group would be the Chinese. In 1960 they blighted Hop Alley as part of the Civic Center/Stadium Redevelopment Area. Nearly 50 years ago.
The area included the homes and businesses of a large percentage of our Chinese population. Of course that also meant that 8th & Market had residential & commercial uses. We spent tons of taxpayer money to take property from people and then millions more to find ways to get people living downtown. Today the area around the former Busch stadium is about as lifeless as it could be — Bank of America, the vacant old American General HQ building, parking garages and the hotel that replaced the failed 1968 experiment with the Spanish Pavilion from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Think about how dead the sidewalks are along Market, Walnut and 8th — we have urban renewal to thank for that. This redevelopment plan was so successful we had to blight the area again for the latest Busch stadium and the promised Ballpark Village.
What if Busch stadium had stayed on North Grand rather than wiping out an ethnic enclave? Hard to say, with so many other forces at play the northside still would have been hard hit by massive white & black flight. Other cities enjoy stadiums that are part of dense neighborhoods — that could have been the case here too. I just wonder what could have become of Hop Alley and all of downtown had urban renewal not taken out large swaths of land — taking with it homes and businesses. People move and so do businesses but when you wipe clean all history of multiple blocks at a time and then take a few years to build back a few single use buildings then you must accept that you’ve lost something along the way that no mirrored building can ever replace.
No matter how much we love seeing the Cardinals play we need to realize the cataclysmic change of urban renewal was a mistake. Displacing thousands of residents and business owners was wrong. I believe downtown would be better off today with this and other areas (Arch Grounds, Gateway Mall, Convention Center, etc) still intact. Without 50 years of big government intervention downtown could have naturally & incrementally evolved as it had done since St Louis’ founding.
Of course St Louis was not alone in this process — every city big and small were convinced by Architects & Planners that the only way to save cities was to rip then apart and rebuild. Cities were willing to toss aside major areas in order to get their share of federal urban renewal dollars. What we don’t have is a city that didn’t go for highways and urban renewal so we can see if the predictions of gloom came true. At the time St Louis began its urban renewal madness we our population had peaked at around 850K and they were projecting over a million in the coming decades. We are at 350K instead.
We do know that the Soulard neighborhood was targeted as a neighborhood to be completely razed and replaced with cul-de-sac streets and ranch houses. The housing stock & street grid was said to be obsolete. Today Soulard is very pricey and in demand. Those obsolete structures have been updated with modern mechanical systems rather than being leveled.
As we label large areas for redevelopment today (such as Cortex) it is important to remember that all the prior clear-cut redevelopment areas have been uniform failures that often end up being blighted repeatedly in the hopes of finally getting it right.  All the housing projects have been razed and rebuilt save for the Pruitt-Igoe site which has sat vacant for 35 years now — longer than the buildings were standing! Mill Creek Valley was a failure too. Each of these projects did achieve one goal — forcing the poor to relocate elsewhere. Government set lending policies that basically guaranteed to mortgage money in the core of regions. The only money that could be had was for the raze and start over experiment known as urban renewal.
Without urban renewal to clear land the Cardinals would have been forced to stay on North Grand or flee to the new suburbs. Either way they would have likely remained in the region. And in either case a major section of our downtown would have escaped the wrecking ball. Without urban renewal money, in fact, much more of our old downtown would still be in place today, most likely including Hop Alley.
It is not self doubt to recognize that half a century ago the entire country was fooled into thinking urban renewal programs that leveled 20+ blocks at a time was a good thing. Even if we like some small piece of the result we still need to recognize the folly of the logic lest we continue to repeat past mistakes.
In the 1960s St Louis actually bucked a major trend. Instead of locating the symphony in a new modern facility we renovated an old theater on Grand — The Powell where they perform to this day. At the time the vogue thing to do was located all cultural & sporting venues in new modern facilities in downtowns. The logic being that if you cram enough stuff into the downtown everyone will be forced to drive there eventually.   So the urban renewal programs moved out existing residents and their businesses on the unproven hope that enough cultural/sporting venues would do the trick. This was all unproven at the time but city after city did the same thing hoping the Architects & Planners were right. They were wrong, oh so wrong.
Rick is right that we have what we have today and we must move forward. In moving forward we must recall these past mistakes and not repeat them.
