Could development north of the Central Corridor signal the beginning of the end for the Delmar Divide?

Stand near the western edge of the city of St. Louis. Say, at the corner of North Skinker and Delmar boulevards. Now look east down Delmar. Straight down the Delmar Divide.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in St. Louis, you know that on the left (north) side of Delmar are neighborhoods that for decades have been populated mainly by Black people. And on the right (south) side, are the neighborhoods that tend to be dominated by whites.

Delmar has been perceived as a barrier at least since the mid-20th century. Over time, the term has grown to occupy a place in the public consciousness of St. Louis that goes far beyond any mere strip of asphalt. It’s often used as shorthand to refer to continuing inequalities in areas such as education, health care, and job opportunities.

But now, early in the 21st century, is it possible that the era of the Delmar Divide is coming to a close?

Perhaps. In St. Louis, the Central Corridor—the strip including Forest Park, the Central West End, Grand Center, and the streets heading east to Downtown—has long enjoyed primacy as the economic and cultural lifeline of the city. More recently, gentrifying areas to the south—the Grove, Shaw, the Tower Grove neighborhoods, Benton Park, and others—have hogged attention as the city’s most compelling comeback stories. Largely left out of St. Louis’s civic conversation have been the neighborhoods immediately north of Delmar, like the West End, Academy/Sherman Park, Lewis Place, and Vandeventer.

Yet a closer look at these areas suggests that a quiet evolution is taking place.

Accelerating development, newly empowered groups of residents, and targeted assistance from major regional institutions are combining to produce a budding momentum running through a west-to-east axis of neighborhoods. It’s still early. Yet already, these areas may be emerging collectively as a corridor of their own.

Call it the “North Central Corridor.”

If such a thing does exist, it looks like this: a skinny, fragile strip of the city bounded most certainly on the south by Delmar, and more loosely on the north by either Page or Martin Luther King boulevards, running east to Grand Boulevard. Inside are streets with names like Enright, Cates, Cabanne, Maple, Finney, and Cook. (McPherson has also published a gallery of images from the area.)

“There’s a synergy, and this is not by accident,” said Pamela McLucas, vice president of Park Place Housing and Economic Development, a nonprofit community development corporation formed two years ago to give residents of Fountain Park and Lewis Place a clear voice in how their neighborhoods are changing.

“I’ve been saying for the last 10 years: North St. Louis is going to be the last of the last, but they’re not going to have a choice but to develop it,” said McLucas, who lives in the same home on Lewis Place her parents bought in 1985, shortly after she finished high school. (She inherited the house when her mother died a few years ago and moved back in with her three children.)

A slow drive (or better yet, a vigorous bike ride) on the back streets of the neighborhoods reveals dozens of projects either underway or about to launch. Some noteworthy examples:

• In the West End, just across Delmar from the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood, rehabs of historic apartment buildings and single-family houses are popping up on block after block, joining newer homes built in the past two decades.
• In Fountain Park, directly north of the Central West End, the first of several housing rehabs planned by developer Kevin Bryant recently hit the market.
• Near the campus of Ranken Technical College in the Vandeventer neighborhood, plans are taking shape to raise up to $30 million for the first building of the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center St. Louis (AMICSTL), a project backed by business leaders and development officials that could eventually span 100 acres. 
• Linking all these neighborhoods is a planned 3.5-mile greenway from Great Rivers Greenway that will follow the path of the old Hodiamont streetcar line from Skinker to Vandeventer. 

What does all this activity mean? Is it just a chain of happy coincidences? Or is something bigger at play?

City development officials are confident it’s the latter.

“It’s not just one thing; it’s a multitude of things that are happening right now,” said Otis Williams, executive director of St. Louis Development Corp., the city’s development arm. “It’s the fact that we are paying more attention to these neighborhoods; it’s the desire of these neighborhoods that want to see something happen; it is the developers who are willing to take a little more risk; it is the institutions like Washington University and (business-civic group) Greater St. Louis, Inc.”

Optimists and pessimists

McLucas said communities of color like hers are much better positioned now than when she was a child. She credits programs like the Neighborhood Leadership Academy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and groups like the Community Builders Network, which connects neighborhood leaders and helps them build the capacities of their organizations.

“Now, we have skills that we didn’t necessarily have back then,” McLucas said. “We are part of boards and committees. We are in leadership roles and have decision-making capacities. More of us are sitting at the table now. There is strength in numbers.”

Audrey Ellermann, a resident of the Covenant Blu-Grand Center neighborhood who co-chairs a process to develop a comprehensive plan for her area and the adjacent Vandeventer neighborhood, said she hopes the plan will not only address immediate needs like cleaning up streets and alleys, but will also spur new infrastructure such as lighting and sidewalks, to attract developers.

“I’m just hoping the more we talk that we can sensitize businesses and some of the larger organizations in the neighborhood to be more involved with their environment. To feel like they have an investment in the community as a whole,” Ellermann said.

Progress in the North Central Corridor is slow; often one house at a time. The projects tend to be small compared to the developments taking place in the Central Corridor.

On many blocks north of Delmar, long stretches of vacant houses and empty lots dominate. Some buildings are in ruins. Banks hesitate to lend substantial amounts of money north of the line, sometimes within spitting distance of million-dollar houses in the Central West End, say frustrated neighborhood advocates. And the twin issues of crime and schools continue to drive residents out of the city, particularly Black families with children.

Not everyone will buy the idea that a new corridor is emerging at all. After all, false dawns are an unfortunate staple of the history of North St. Louis.

The most recent involved developer Paul McKee’s massive Northside Regeneration project. Over a decade ago, McKee promised (and is still promising) to bring thousands of new houses and gleaming offices to an area northwest of downtown. So far only a gas station, a modest grocery store, and a few houses have been completed. (The $1.7 billion Next NGA West project involving the construction of a new western headquarters for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is in Northside’s footprint, but some city officials say that project is unique and would have happened anyway, regardless of McKee’s involvement.)

By contrast, the neighborhoods of the North Central Corridor enjoy advantages conferred by simple geography. Their street grids, for example, provide direct links to the Central Corridor and its major employers that would be the envy of any South Side neighborhood.

Moreover, areas like the Academy neighborhood, tucked behind the emerging Delmar Maker District, have housing stock that is largely intact. And the blocks of Union Boulevard just north of Delmar, boasting structures including Clark School (now loft apartments) and the Cabanne Branch of the St. Louis Public Library (paid for by Andrew Carnegie), comprise one of the city’s finest groupings of architecture outside downtown.

Finally, momentum in these neighborhoods is coming from dozens of development firms and residents’ associations, as opposed to relying on one developer as Northside Regeneration has.

“I do think that if the strength of the Central Corridor wasn’t there, you wouldn’t see that movement north so readily, particularly what’s happening across Delmar and moving toward Page,” Williams said. “It’s time for that movement to occur.”

From Skinker to Union Boulevard

The area near Skinker and Delmar has been a high-profile hub of activity over the past two decades. During that time, new developments on the north side of Delmar have included the Pageant concert venue and Moonrise Hotel, the 11-story Everly student apartment building, and the Washington University North Campus. Each of these has helped to extend the vibrancy of the Loop further into the city.

Venture north on Hamilton Avenue from Delmar, and it’s clear this activity is slowly spreading north and east, into the heart of the West End neighborhood.

At the corner of Hamilton and Cabanne, developers Jeff Mugg and David Mastin of Delmar Properties are about to complete their latest renovation: 36 units in a 1920s building called Cabanne Apartments. Scheduled to fully open in May, the apartments are the biggest component of a $9.2 million project that includes significant improvements to three other Delmar Properties buildings nearby.

One block south, the firm is assisting another developer who plans to rehab a six-unit building on Cates Avenue.

Mugg estimates his company has worked on retail and residential projects totaling more than $34 million over the past couple of decades, including on Delmar and the streets to the north. Aside from multifamily, the firm has renovated about a dozen single-family houses in the West End.

The Delmar Divide, Mugg says, “is still a perceived barrier. But perception and reality are two different things. The neighborhood has changed and is changing.”

Almost a decade ago, the company completed its Gotham project. It includes apartments and ground-floor commercial space fronting Delmar, but the jewel is a rehabbed 1920s building with 84 units over seven floors facing Enright Avenue, the first street north of Delmar. It’s one of the largest buildings in the neighborhood.

“There are several 30-unit buildings sitting around this neighborhood that still need to be done,” Mugg says. “There seems to be some momentum. There are others that are starting to pay attention to what’s going on. Enough has been done now that projects make a little more sense financially. We’re excited about having other people join us to make a difference.”

Residents and others active in the area are working to make that happen by developing a comprehensive community plan. Funding for the effort, called the West End Plan, comes from InvestSTL, a regional initiative focused on building strong neighborhoods. Cornerstone Corp. is leading the plan’s development; organizers hope the city will eventually adopt it as the official plan for the West End and Visitation Park.

Shiron Hagens, a member of the steering committee overseeing the plan, says residents in the West End want the plan “to be the best version of ourselves that we know we can be.”

Beyond fixing chronic problems like the random dumping of trash, Hagens said she hopes the plan will also encourage people to move back to the area and preserve the neighborhood’s character. (Although the demographic mix is changing, Hagens said more than 90 percent of West End residents are Black.)

“How do we maintain this culture that we have? Even though we may have problems, there’s still a very strong, proud group of people who live here,” says Hagens, who bought her house on Julian Avenue 15 years ago. “How do we keep that and make it better?”

From Divide to Divine

Half a mile east, across the St. Vincent Greenway that bisects the West End, is the biggest construction site on Delmar: the Delmar DivINe. The brainchild of Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark, the $100 million-plus project will convert the former St. Luke’s Hospital complex into offices and shared resources for nonprofits, with a focus on health, education, and human service organizations.

The DivINe—which Clark emphasizes is on the north side of the street—will have a facility on the ground floor that neighborhood and community groups can use to stage events. The project also includes 150 apartments targeted at moderate-income residents.

Clark, who has been involved in the neighborhood for many years and helped open the KIPP Victory Academy charter school on Maple Avenue several blocks north, said she discovered the vacant hospital building one day in 2015 when she happened to drive by. “They were literally nailing the ‘For Sale’ sign on the building,” she remembers.

Tenants for the offices, where some space is still available, will begin moving in this fall. The apartments are scheduled to open next spring. Clark estimates she’ll eventually be adding 1,000 people to the 7,700 already living and working in the 63112 ZIP code.

“Our goal is not to gentrify the area. Our goal is to bring young people—teachers, nurses, social workers, people that make $35,000 to $55,000—together like they are at Cortex,” Clark says. “I hope that 10 percent of those people—at least 10 percent—want to buy a house in the neighborhood…or take a house and redo it, or build a house on an empty lot.”

Origin stories

St. Luke’s is just one name from this area of the city that present-day St. Louisans will recognize. (The hospital’s main campus is now in Chesterfield.) In fact, the neighborhoods bordering this stretch of Delmar are stuffed with the origin stories of institutions that long ago moved to the suburbs.

The Visitation Park neighborhood takes its name from Visitation Academy, housed here before it moved west to Town & Country. (The park where the school building once stood is now named for St. Louis civil rights activist Ivory Perry.)

Just to the east, the Soho Lofts apartment building was originally constructed in 1905 as a feeder school for Washington University called Smith Academy; the academy was a forerunner of today’s Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School (MICDS) in Ladue.

Near Soldan High School on Union is the building that used to house the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, once the center of the Jewish community in St. Louis. The organization moved to West County in the 1960s and is now the Jewish Community Center, or simply the J.

Several blocks north, around the corner on Page Boulevard, a few remaining buildings mark the former campus of Principia, a Christian Science college that moved to Elsah, Illinois, in the 1930s. 

The Delmar DivINe is part of the Delmar Collaborative, an informal group that Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corp. (WUMCRC) recently helped establish.

“We convened this table to introduce the community and economic development folks to everyone working up and down the corridor, with the hope they would find some common cause,” says Brian Phillips, assistant vice chancellor and executive director of WUMCRC.

WUMCRC and its partner, Park Central Development, are best known for their earlier work to stabilize the Central West End and Grove neighborhoods adjacent to Wash. U.’s medical campus.

Recently, the organizations have focused more attention on the neighborhoods in the North Central Corridor, expanding assistance for residents in areas including Academy, Fountain Park, and Lewis Place. To help residents stay in place amid early signs of gentrification, Park Central recently created the Delmar Equity Fund, using a $25,000 private gift as seed money. The fund will help residents pay property taxes and finance home repairs.

Clark said one factor in the Delmar corridor’s accelerating momentum is the fact that different groups of developers, lenders, and philanthropists have split the boulevard into bite-sized chunks. Each group is working on a different section between Skinker and Grand Center.

A good example is the Maker District now emerging on Delmar between Union and Kingshighway. Jim McKelvey, founder of payments company Square and a partner with Doug Auer at Third Degree Glass Factory, has played a key role in getting the district up and running. The nonprofit arts center Craft Alliance moved from the Delmar Loop in University City to the Maker District last year.

Clark explains the lessons she’s applying from her business career like this: “I didn’t open up 400 Build-A-Bear stores at once. I opened up one at a time.”

Eastward to Fountain Park

Just east of Kingshighway, Kevin Bryant, president of Kingsway Development, is set to make a splash on Delmar with an $84 million plan that includes a 200-unit apartment building called The Bridge and a rehabbed building with 25,000 square feet of shared office space called Elevation.

Those would join existing projects like the Lofts@Euclid, an 87-unit historic rehab that opened in 2016 at the southwest corner of Delmar and Euclid. The building houses a Fields Foods grocery on the ground floor.

At Elevation, Bryant has lined up three retail franchises for the shopfronts on Delmar: the UPS Store, Jamba Juice, and the Original Hot Dog Factory. Next door, he has plans for a performing arts theater called The Circuit.

Directly west is LaunchCode, a nonprofit founded by McKelvey that provides free training for students in areas such as software development and places them in apprenticeships. LaunchCode is renovating and expanding its own education center.

Kingsway’s big plans for Delmar have grabbed most of the attention. But for residents of the Fountain Park and Lewis Place neighborhoods, the most important changes in the area could end up being the smaller-scale residential projects that Bryant and his partners are pursuing on the streets just north of Delmar.

On the north side of Fountain Park itself—an oval-shaped green whose namesake water feature and mature trees make it one of city’s most beguiling public spaces—Bryant is wrapping up Kingsway’s first home renovation. The house, which Bryant bought from the city’s land bank for $1,000, is now on the market with an asking price of $225,000.

Other rehabs will follow soon, as Bryant tries to draw the prosperity of the Central West End northward, across Delmar.

“What it’s forced me to do is a minimum of four houses at a time out of the gate, so that those appraisal values can pull from each other,” Bryant says, explaining how he hopes to jump-start Fountain Park’s struggling housing market. He’s beginning with properties surrounding the park and then plans to move around the corner, to the 700 block of Aubert Street.

Bryant says he’s spending about $235,000 on the first rehab. He’s able to sell it for a bit less than that due to state tax credits, which help keep asking prices realistic for the neighborhood.

The city has designated Bryant as the master developer of a rectangle bounded by Delmar on the south, Page on the north, Kingshighway on the west, and Taylor on the east. This lets him control who gets tax abatement in the area. His plan is essentially a decade-long vision to try and bring a variety of development to the area.

“I organized a plan that revolved not so much around me redeveloping every parcel, but organizing and attracting more experienced developers. I’m more of a traffic cop,” Bryant says. “I create opportunities for a small guy that might just want to rehab one house, and I have organized larger projects.”

One encouraging sign: An investor wants to redevelop a 12-unit apartment building around the corner from the park, Bryant said. And not far away, the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis recently completed the first phase of a $20 million renovation that will consolidate the league’s operations in the former Sears department store building on North Kingshighway.

Bryant added that it’s important to constantly win the trust of neighborhood residents. They want stabilization, which means reducing crime. They also want new development that won’t push them out, he says.

“Ultimately, it boils down to gentrification without displacement,” Bryant said. He explained that this means focusing on buying and renovating vacant properties, instead of buying houses and apartments where a rehab could force out existing residents.

“We don’t have a lot of areas where we’re going to do whole blocks at a time,” Bryant said. “We have a lot of infill, which is different. There’s no need to displace anyone.”

Bryant spearheaded the founding of Park Place Housing and Economic Development, the organization Pamela McLucas helps lead, in 2019. Park Place works to ensure residents in Fountain Park and Lewis Place can help guide redevelopment and keep a mix of incomes in the area.

Working with partners like Park Central Development, the organization monitors private investors in the area and implements crime reduction efforts via a neighborhood ownership model. Park Place also teamed recently with the St. Louis chapter of national volunteer organization Rebuilding Together to help four residents with home repairs. The repairs cost $25,000 for each house.

McLucas, the Park Place vice president, said she’s seeing keen interest from homebuyers on Lewis Place where she lives and on other nearby streets.

“It’s as though there is an awakening—not just investors, but people who are looking to be owner-occupiers, who appreciate and see the potential for the housing stock,” says McLucas, who is a licensed real estate agent. “This is the same housing stock that’s in Tower Grove and Holly Hills, or any other place that’s south of I-44.”

McLucas calls longtime residents the “staying glue” in the area. That’s vital in an area where 94 percent of the residents are African American, 48 percent of houses are vacant, and less than 30 percent of residents own their homes, according to Park Central’s most recent annual report. McLucas would like to see more residents have the opportunity to become owners.

“They chose to stay when there was white flight, Black flight, vacancy, and everything,” she says. “I’d like to see rewards for the people who have stayed, and make sure they get equitable treatment during redevelopment, so there isn’t displacement, and they aren’t taxed out, and they aren’t beat up by building and code enforcement.”

Manufacturing a boom

The massive east gate of Lewis Place overlooks one of the major anchors of the North Central Corridor: Ranken Technical College.

In recent years, Ranken has established branch campuses in Wentzville in St. Charles County and in Perryville, about 80 miles south of St. Louis. But ever since its board decided in the 1970s against moving out of the city, the college has been committed to its main campus along North Newstead Avenue, said Ranken CEO Stan Shoun.

“It’s been the anchor, and it’s going to continue to be the anchor,” Shoun says, noting that the campus includes about 1 million square feet of facilities spread across 23 acres.

Ranken offers training and apprenticeships to prepare students for careers in sectors including the automotive, construction, IT, biotech, and manufacturing industries. The college graduates around 900 students each year across all its campuses; about 80 percent of those are associate’s degrees, with the rest bachelor’s degrees.

Now, Ranken is a key player in a project that could transform this section of the North Central Corridor: the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center. A recently-formed nonprofit created to develop the project, called AMICSTL, is in the early stages of raising up to $30 million to construct the first building adjacent to Ranken’s campus. The board is chaired by former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.

Beyond its goal of making St. Louis into a hub for advanced manufacturing, AMICSTL aims to help Ranken’s students learn skills in fields like robotics, artificial intelligence, and the production of advanced composite materials.

Shoun, also a board member, said that over the long term, the AMIC campus could grow to include multiple buildings on 100 acres. AMICSTL’s backers say the Vandeventer neighborhood is the ideal location, as it sits in a triangle formed by Ranken, the Cortex innovation district in the Central West End, and the Next NGA West project about two miles east. NGA West is scheduled to open in 2025. (McPherson’s separate story on AMICSTL is available here.)

Ranken has its own community development arm that has partnered with builders including Efficacy Consulting & Development, a firm run by former Missouri state legislator Yaphett El-Amin, on affordable housing developments such as Finney Place directly east of Ranken’s campus.

Shoun said Ranken students have built over 80 houses in the area, representing a $12 million investment.

“Our job since 1907 has been, and always will be, to build the next-generation workforce,” Shoun said. “We build houses to give our students the skills necessary to work in the construction business.”

“Guiding light”

Further east, there has been substantial progress in the Vandeventer and Covenant Blu-Grand Center neighborhoods during the past decade.

In 2018, the Deaconess Foundation opened its Center for Child Well-Being on North Vandeventer Avenue. Now Deaconess, along with the United Church of Christ Church Building and Loan Fund, is assisting community members as they finalize a comprehensive development plan covering both neighborhoods. It’s dubbed the North Central Plan.

Vandeventer resident Barbara Murphy, who co-chairs the North Central Plan steering committee with Audrey Ellermann, said she hopes the plan increases accountability on the part of private investors: “I want someone to hold developers’ feet to the fire, so they meet certain standards.”

As a child, Murphy lived in the neighborhood on Enright Avenue. As an adult, she sold her condo in the Central West End in 2004 so she could move back to a historic house on West Belle Place. When she first saw the property, it had no floors. The fireplaces and bathroom fixtures had all been ripped out.

“I fell in love with the place,” says Murphy, who embarked shortly thereafter on a complete gut rehab. She still lives in the house.

Despite recent signs of progress, Murphy describes efforts to hold the neighborhood together as “a running battle,” citing closures of several businesses and schools as examples. She hopes the North Central Plan, once adopted by city planning officials, will put the area on a sustained path toward success.

“With power there’s responsibility—and money,” Murphy says. “The city is not going to relinquish power just because we’re standing here voicing complaints. This is a long-term situation; we’re taking this plan to the city and we hope they’ll adopt it. I’m hopeful that if not for me, if not for my family, there will be some generational success that can be had by this plan.”

In 2017 development firm McCormack Baron Salazar completed a retail and residential project, including 300 mixed-income apartments, in the Vandeventer neighborhood along North Sarah Street.

Emily Bernstein, vice president of McCormack, said the company used an earlier iteration of the North Central plan as its “guiding light” when it developed North Sarah in three phases between 2010 and 2017. (Some of North Sarah’s residents came from the nearby Blumeyer public housing complex; the last of Blumeyer’s high-rises was razed in 2015.)

“There was an obvious opportunity to knit back together this community that had at one time been thriving, and had all of these historic ties,” Bernstein said. “It had these anchors nearby: the Central West End, Gaslight Square, St. Louis University. But there was a dearth of high-quality, affordable rental housing.”

In addition to a new city park named for educator and diplomat James Milton Turner, the development houses the North Sarah Food Hub, a commercial kitchen space originally intended for culinary education. (The Food Hub, which was preparing to open when COVID-19 hit, quickly refocused its kitchen to help prepare and distribute food for students in St. Louis Public Schools.)

Who gets a loan?

One challenge that developers and residents face in many North Central Corridor neighborhoods is a familiar one: money. Financing packages rely heavily on government assistance programs such as block grants and HUD-insured loans, and many projects are only viable because of tax credits for historic preservation and low-income housing. (The entire corridor is within the St. Louis Promise Zone; most of the areas east of Kingshighway are within an Opportunity Zone as well.)

McCormack’s Bernstein, referring to the North Sarah project, says, “It’s hard at any time to put together financing for a large-scale redevelopment, and that’s why they don’t occur that frequently.”

For the Kingsway development on Delmar, Bryant needed city aldermen to approve tax increment financing. The $6.6 million TIF will help pay for public improvements along Delmar and is also helping to finance the apartment component of the project, he says.

At the Delmar DivINe, which is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Maxine Clark has been working on the project for over five years. She ticked off the financing components she needed to pull together: a bank loan, a mortgage, a HUD loan for the apartments, New Markets tax credits, historic tax credits, and private donations.

“It was a significant ask for a project north of Delmar to the donating public of St. Louis,” she says. “It wasn’t that people don’t give money. We have the park; we have all these incredible things that people have built. But most of them are south of Delmar, including the Grand Center area.”

As for individual homeowners, is there still redlining north of Delmar?

“Definitely,” Pamela McLucas says, though she added that it’s more covert than in the past. Now, she says, lenders will often blame a potential borrower’s debt to income ratio or source of income. And oftentimes a house on the North Side will be appraised at less than the amount of the mortgage.

In the West End, Shiron Hagens knows this firsthand. She bought her house in 2006 for $189,000, at the top of the housing bubble. (At the time, the house appraised for over $200,000.) But a few years later, the appraised value had fallen by more than half, to around $85,000. Weak appraisals, despite the West End’s proximity to the Delmar Loop and Washington University, continue to hurt residents who want to refinance to take advantage of ultra-low mortgage rates, she added.

Another hurdle, according to McLucas: Higher insurance premiums that make it harder to close on financing. “There’s the misconception that there’s no money in these communities, and that is far from the truth,” she says.

Wash. U. is helping with this, one loan at a time. Under its Live Near Your Work program, WUMCRC provides forgivable loans for workers at the university’s main campus and its medical center who buy houses in selected city areas. For the neighborhoods immediately north of Delmar, the loans are $8,500, said Phillips of WUMCRC. During fiscal year 2020, the program issued loans in Academy and Lewis Place for the first time.

Getting a grip on crime

Crime also holds progress back in the North Central Corridor, as it does across the entire city.

In Fountain Park and Lewis Place, Bryant said violent crime and drug trafficking appear to have fallen over the past few years, though he noted that some pockets recently are “revving up a little bit.” He’s helped install security cameras on some streets, and has organized residents to call police when they see suspicious activity.

Statistics from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department show overall crime in Fountain Park is at roughly the same level as five years ago, after a moderate spike in 2017-18. Personal crimes (including murder, rape, and aggravated assault) were down slightly in 2020 compared to 2019, while the level of property crime remained steady.

“With crime, you have to constantly be on the move,” Bryant said. The criminals, he says, “have to constantly see that this area is changing, and that there are consequences to selling drugs around this area; or that residents are looking now, so they can’t be so quick to break into houses.”

Pamela McLucas described crime this way: “It’s not good, but it’s not nearly as bad as it has been. In the ’90s, there would be bodies popping up everywhere. It was nothing to find a body in the backyard.”

Now, says McLucas, neighbors call 911 straight away if they see or hear signs of trouble.

“People talk about how they don’t see police in their streets? We don’t have that problem,” she says. “We always see cars patrolling. If I call the police, they’re there.” 

Unity and division

Progress is uneven, but Delmar Boulevard is slowly on its way toward becoming an attractive, less-broken façade for the neighborhoods north of it. Bryant, discussing the Delmar DivINe and the Maker District, radiates optimism about the street’s future. But he quickly adds that the side streets off Delmar are just as important.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘With the success that’s going on down Delmar, the Delmar Divide will cease to exist, and it’ll be the Page Divide.’ So as long as we can continue to push north, we can keep erasing those divides,” he says.

In the West End, Hagens says she hopes the new plan will drive a new level of engagement by community residents, especially Black residents.

“I’d love for us to have something extremely unique, where we are centering the voices of the Black people in our community,” Hagens says. “I hope we see tangible things geared toward improving the lives of Black people: improving their economic position; improving their safety; improving their economic mobility and generational wealth. I hope all of that comes out of this plan.”

As for McLucas, her optimism is grounded in the sensibility of someone who was born in the North Central Corridor and has lived there off and on throughout her life. She has heard big promises before.

“Plans have been made for years and years and years. I’ve been hearing since I was a little girl that they’re gonna redo the city,” she says. “But that kind of stuff is happening now. The people that have been the staying glue haven’t left. You can’t make any money on the South Side anymore, so now everything north is what’s hot and popping.”

With her three children under her roof—two of them grown and the youngest still in high school—McLucas is now head of the household in the home her parents bought on Lewis Place back in 1985.

“It’s an exciting time; it’s still a challenging time. We’re learning how to raise funds; and learning how to write grant proposals; how to raise money; how to organize volunteers. There has been a level of education and interest from within this community,” McLucas says.

She added: “We’re no longer looking for that knight on a white horse to come save us. We know that we can save ourselves.”

It’s easy to see how McLucas’ enthusiasm for Lewis Place, for Fountain Park—for the entire city— could become infectious. Would that be enough to stabilize the North Central Corridor, put it on a firm upward trajectory, and turn it into the kind of place where new arrivals learn how to coexist with the “staying glue” of longtime residents?

Nobody knows.

A hopeful sign would be a scenario like this: One day in the near future, St. Louisans from just about anywhere in the metro area find themselves doing the same thing older generations did countless times before: standing on the edge of the Central Corridor, at a corner on the south side of Delmar, looking at the opposite side.

Then these future St. Louisans will do something their parents and grandparents might scarcely have dreamed of. They’ll look both ways, cross Delmar, and perhaps wonder briefly, as their foot reaches the curb, what all those old people had been so worried about in the first place.

Then they’ll keep going, because they have somewhere to be, two or three blocks up ahead. Straight north.  

Jack Grone is editor of McPherson, an independent journalism website in St. Louis. He is a former reporter and editor for Dow Jones Newswires whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter at @McPherSTL.

An earlier version of this story appeared on McPherson. More stories from McPherson on the North Central Corridor:

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