ST.LOUIS – Gwen Moore was 10 years old when she noticed her friends in her neighborhood were starting to disappear. Brick by brick, their homes were slowly disappearing, too.
“All of a sudden, all my friends were gone and I didn’t know where they were,” she recalls.
Moore’s family were among the nearly 20,000 residents– mostly Black – forced out of their houses in a neighborhood called Mill Creek Valley, where Black people had at that point been living for decades. Her family tried to stick it out as long as they could, but after a year or two, they’d move, too.
The first wrecking ball smashed into the neighborhood in 1959. Two years prior, the Little Rock Nine bravely integrated Little Rock Central High School. Two years before that, Emmett Till was brutally lynched in Mississippi. It was still the height of Jim Crow, marked by violence, sometimes at the hands of local, state and federal governments. Uprooting happened across the country, whether it was because a city wanted to build new developments or expand the highway. In Mill Creek, both, unfortunately, were true. By the late 1960s, the once bustling community was unidentifiable. Some 5,600 housing units, 800 businesses and 40 churches were destroyed, spanning 54 city blocks.
This year, more than 60 years after demolition started, St. Louis officials and community stakeholders are recognizing the destructive consequences of the government’s demolition of the neighborhood, a history former residents have spent years preserving.
Eight granite and limestone structures, each standing 15 feet tall — was unveiled to the public in February on the same grounds where Moore’s home and others once stood, on the campus of the city’s new MLS stadium. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
A memorial, Pillars of the Valley, honors the residents who lived in Mill Creek, in the same neighborhood where Moore’s home and others once stood. The first installment — eight granite and limestone structures, each standing 15 feet tall — was unveiled to the public in February on the same grounds of the city’s new MLS stadium.
“To be clear, this was an act of intentional racial injustice — Mill Creek Valley was a Black neighborhood,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said during the unveiling. “It’s these types of projects that connect our past to our present, memorializing what we’ve lost while reminding us to do better for our own children.”
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The installation, which was supported by a number of community partners, including the city, Great Rivers Greenway and the St. Louis CITY Soccer Club , will eventually be a mile-long memorial, stretching from the soccer stadium west to Harris-Stowe State University, the city’s only historically Black university. Each pillar includes two granite slabs that hold a limestone cornerstone. Outlines on the ground represent where actual homes once stood, their addresses marked with bronze numbers.
Artist Damon Davis stands with his family at the unveiling of the Pillars of the Valley installation in February 2023. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
There’s dual meaning behind the empty chamber at the center of each pillar, said Damon Davis, an East St. Louis native whose design was selected for the project. It “is not only an empty chamber from us stopping time in an hourglass, but it’s also a portal or doorway into someone’s home.”
The installation includes the names, ages and occupations of the people who lived on the block. Quotes from some of them are etched throughout the stone. Visitors can explore a map of the neighborhood and a topographical model, all things the artist said were necessary to amend a history that left out many people who helped build St. Louis. “Art can’t really rewrite history, but it can illuminate and excavate histories that have been forgotten,” Davis said.
Forcing people from their homes
A map shows Mill Creek Valley, a once-bustling community which was unidentifiable by the late 1960s. Some 5,600 housing units, 800 businesses and 40 churches were destroyed, spanning 54 city blocks. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
Like many Black neighborhoods and other communities of color across in both the United States and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, Mill Creek Valley became a victim of urban renewal policies that cleared entire neighborhoods in the name of economic and commercial development, forcing families out of their homes. This could be a new highway in place of a neighborhood, or new residences or public spaces built in the name of “slum clearance.” Sometimes, both.
In St. Louis, $10 million in bonds were set aside to raze Mill Creek Valley, which its 1958 redevelopment plan labeled as a “slum clearance.”
This included the People’s Finance Corporation Building, which was home to one of few banks willing to issue loans to Black homeowners, local NAACP offices, the practices of Black doctors and lawyers, and more.
“We were upstanding, hard working people struggling to get ahead … there were many children …. who grew up there, who became leaders here in St. Louis, around the country and around the world,” said Malaika Horne-Wells, a retired higher education administrator and Moore’s older sister.
By the 1960s, 78 percent of families displaced by urban renewal in St. Louis were of color, according to the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab database, which details urban renewal displacements between 1950 and 1966 . In that time period alone, hundreds of thousands of people were being uprooted across the nation.
Local papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch referred to what was happening in Mill Creek as the “Mill Creek Valley slum clearance project.”
“They were calling you a slum dweller, calling your parents slum dwellers and your friends and your neighbors,” Moore said. “This is just robbing people of their humanity.”
Former civic-leader and bond chairman Sidney Maestre and former St. Louis Mayor Raymond Tucker on rooftop overlooking area of Mill Creek Valley slated for demolition after the city put millions toward unfairly tearing apart the historically Black neighborhood. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
Mill Creek Valley was a large, vibrant and bustling community, but it was also born from restrictive housing covenants, racist policies and intentional under resourcing, Moore notes. More than half of the homes in Mill Creek Valley didn’t have running water.
“I try to be very honest about Mill Creek and acknowledge there were problems,” she told the NewsHour.
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Decades before the demolition of Mill Creek, in 1916, the city of St. Louis voted on a ballot initiative restricting neighborhood occupancy by race. The law would later be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court a year later, but efforts to keep Black people out from certain neighborhoods continued — including restrictive racial covenants in a deed that would preclude an owner from selling to somebody, said Robert Nelson, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.
In this case, these covenants would allow white residents in certain neighborhoods in St. Louis to refuse to sell their homes to Black people. Though the Supreme Court struck down the enforcement of these covenants in 1948, a decision affirmed 20 years later by the Fair Housing Act. Yet as recently as 2021, nearly 30,000 properties still had racially restrictive covenants, unbeknownst to many of the people who lived in those homes, according to an analysis of city deeds from St. Louis Public Radio. The state of Missouri didn’t formally ban discriminatory language in existing deeds until June 2022.
At the time, this made places like Mill Creek one of the only places many Black people could secure housing. When Mill Creek was destroyed, they had even fewer places to go.
Remember, Nelson said: “This is Jim Crow America. So if you wipe out a bunch of housing for the African American population … there are limited places where they can make a move to, where they can rent, where they can buy because of rigid segregation.”
Keeping the story alive
Vivian Gibson, her father, and brother Ferman stand together in 1952. Photo courtesy of Vivian Gibson
Vivian Gibson recalls being a little girl in Mill Creek Valley, too. She’d even go on to write a book about it called “The Last Children of Mill Creek,” which she published in 2020.
“I can’t tell you how often when I’m speaking, someone says to me, I never heard of it. Where was it?,” Gibson recalled. “20,000 people. That’s incredible. That’s a lot of people you haven’t heard of in a city where you live,” she added.
It’s a gap she wanted to help fill, to restore and highlight “the people, the humanity of that community.”
Her earliest memory of Mill Creek Valley was when she was right around 4 years old. It was the early morning and her older siblings were getting ready to head out to school.
“Suddenly the door would close and it was quiet, and I have very vivid memories of the sun shining in the house — and the quiet after they left,” Gibson told the NewsHour.
Her family lived on the bottom floor of a two-story home her grandmother bought in 1950.
Her grandmother was what they called a “live-in servant,” coming home every other weekend to go to church. Owning a home was her “lifelong dream.”
Gibson was the second youngest of eight children. Sometimes, there were nine of them, when a family friend would come to town. Her memories aren’t linear, but they are snapshots of how she felt, what she was eating or how much fun she was having.
“We played outside all day, so I think playing and just joy is what I remember,” Gibson noted.
Vivian’s siblings Frances Ross, LaVerne (18 months old), baby Randle, and Randle H. Ross in 1941 sit together on Christmas in 1951. Photo courtesy of Vivian Gibson
When the wrecking balls came, Gibson said their parents didn’t discuss what was happening with them. She and her siblings continued to attend church and school until the day they stepped foot in a new house.
“It was so much bigger, so much better. There was actually hot water coming out of the faucet, we didn’t have to boil water. So I think probably my first memory was when we actually did move and it was so very, very different,” she said.
In the same neighborhood, Horne-Wells was going through a transition, too. Her family attended the same church as Gibson, something they’d realize years later. Her parents, like Gibson’s grandmother, owned their home.
While her mother was on top of current events and news about urban renewal, she said, nothing could prepare them for having their lives uprooted.
“When people say show me where you used to live … I say I can’t, because of the highway,” said Horne-Wells, who published a book, “Mother Wit: Exalting Motherhood while Honoring a Great Mother,” in 2018 about her experiences in Mill Creek Valley and her mother.
Their family would go on to a new house and a new school on the north side of St. Louis, a predominantly white community.
“The kids were mean and the teachers were indifferent. So I saw nobody who cared for me. Nobody. Good thing we had a warm, loving home,” she told the NewsHour.
Her sister remembers it that way, too.
The names, ages and occupations of the residents who lived on the block where the new memorial sits are etched into stone — including the names of children. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
“The principal of the school … came around to every classroom and said that the neighborhood was deteriorating and the reason it was deteriorating was because black people were moving in,” Moore said.
The welcome the family got to the mostly white neighborhood was “hostile.” Moore and her siblings missed their old house — their old neighborhood.
“People knew that we were coming from Mill Creek, and there was that immediate prejudice about ‘Oh, you’re from that rundown slum that I’ve been reading about?’” she said.
The wording used in those papers would continue, even in the years after the neighborhood was gone. A St. Louis City Plan Commission report released in the early 1970s referred to the areasome 20,000 people called home as “100 blocks of hopeless, rat-infested, residential slums.”
Moore, who is now the curator of urban landscape and community identity at the Missouri Historical Society, remembers reading newspaper clippings later in life, detailing how the events leading up to her family’s move unfolded. It was then she realized: They weren’t telling the whole story. She is now working on an exhibit, scheduled to open in 2025, that will fill in the gaps and shed light on what happened to the families and the children of Mill Creek and why.
“When people look back and I think the studies also show this, it was a failed policy and what I’m hoping is that they never do this again,” Moore’s sister Horne-Wells said.
‘A rallying point for displaced people all over the world’
Today, the former Mill Creek Valley neighborhood is sports fields, stadiums, university buildings and more. Its memory lives on through the now-grown children who played there and those who came after, vowing to not let anyone forget.
“It’s really about daylighting information but provoking conversation and helping people to understand the past so that we can begin to change how we view and think about our planning of cities in the future,” said Susan Trautman, CEO of Great Rivers Greenway, which is seeking to build a network of greenways connecting different parts of the city. The Pillars of the Valley’s installation is a part of the group’s Brickline Greenway project, which could include up to 20 miles of pathways linking 17 different neighborhoods.
Trautman told the NewsHour it was through the design competition the group held in planning for the greenway and conversations with the community that they understood how important the story and the history was to the community. Davis would end up winning that competition.
A rendering of the Pillars of the Valley installation shows the memorial’s placement on the grounds of the new MLS stadium in Downtown St. Louis. Photo courtesy of Great Rivers Greenway
He’s hoping the memorial is a catalyst for a broader, more honest conversation about the way history is told – or not told at all.
“The first message is to get through to my people — and hopefully that we make something that amends primarily to the people of Mill Creek and what they have been through — the greater superstructure of what Black people have been through in this country,” Davis said. “Hopefully it becomes a beacon of light or a rallying point for displaced people all over the world.” Davis said.
Before Mill Creek Valley was demolished it was a community. Woven into its fabric were homes and businesses, and people lived, worked, played and died there– together.
“I’m just so happy to be able to at least plant that seed, tell that story so that future generations can then research and find out even more,” former resident and author Vivian Gibson said.
When she was originally approached about the project, she remembers saying, ‘Please don’t ask me what I think we should do, because that’s not for me to say. That’s for your industry to talk about and what you are going to do to try to rectify this, to try to make up some of that ground.”
In the end, Gibson said what Davis ended up creating was impactful, and goes beyond simply saying “these Black people lived here.”
“It is a beginning,” Gibson said. “What do you do when you’ve disrupted an entire culture and community? You start with saying, We were here. This is where it started. I’m hoping again that young people will start asking questions about why and when and how did this happen? And, how could we not repeat this.”
Moore and Horne-Wells never saw any of their friends from Mill Creek Valley again.
But they still remember the joy. That’s what they are hoping others remember, too.
