courtesy Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

Be careful, it'll kill you!

​Psychiatry buffs rejoice and praise Xenu! The "state-of-the-art international touring exhibit" Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, sponsored by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights is returning to Missouri for the first time since its appearance at the Jamestown Mall three years ago! You can catch it this Monday and Tuesday (February 6 and 7) in the rotunda of the state capitol in Jefferson City (?!) before it moves to the Griot Museum of Black History and Culture in the St. Louis Place neighborhood in north city.

Should you choose to accept this mission, what will you learn? Well, since the Citizens Commission on Human Rights was co-founded by the Church of Scientology (along with, curiously, Thomas Szasz, described in press materials as Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus from the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse), you can bet it's nothing good.

And you'd be right.

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"Leaving the South," by Jack Delano, blackhistorymuseum.org

​The Manhattan Institute, a conservative research foundation, released a large study this week claiming that the nation's all-black "ghettos" are dissolving and that American neighborhoods have never been so racially integrated since 1910.

Using census data, the authors of the report, titled "The End of the Segregated Century," found that only 20 percent of blacks now live in neighborhoods where 80 percent of the population or more is black, compared with nearly 50 percent who lived in similar neighborhoods a half-century ago.

"Ghetto neighborhoods persist, but most are in decline," write the authors, Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke. "For every diversifying ghetto neighborhood, many more house a dwindling population of black residents."

But the authors' own tables suggest that St. Louis, as anyone living north of Delmar Boulevard could tell you, hasn't exactly followed this trend.

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Albert Samaha

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The tornado ripped through Lambert Airport's concourse C on April 22, 2011. By the time the one year anniversary comes along, airport officials hope that it will be ready for use.

On Thursday, airport director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge gave a pool of reporters a tour of the steadily improving concourse. Construction workers, caution tape and stacks of equipment decorated the wide corridor. Plywood panels remain boarded along overhangs by the Terminal 1 parking lot, but throughout concourse C all the windows have been fixed. Hamm-Niebruegge estimated that the cost of the tornado damage-- including clean-up, cancelled fights and construction-- totaled upwards $60 million.

"Basically everything in this concourse is being replaced," she said. "Everything was ripped out, from tile to carpeting to gate area, when the tornado came through."

Here are some pictures of the concourse's current state:

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Photo via www.cityarchriver.org

An artist's rendition of the proposed new entry for the Museum of Westward Expansion.

​These are exciting times for the Gateway Arch. Our local icon is four years away from its 50th anniversary, and it's scheduled to have an entirely new look by the time that date rolls around. The City+The Arch+The River international design competition sought plans to complete architect Eero Saarinen's original design for the Arch grounds, and also to better integrate the site into downtown St. Louis and involve the Illinois side of the river as well. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates took the prize in that competition in 2010. The entire project is slated for completion on October 28, 2015. With just more less than four years to go, what's the state of the project so far?

You can find out this Wednesday night.

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Jay Swoboda, founder and prime mover for Whats Up St. Louis.

​Jay Swoboda became a social activist on a whim. The economics major spotted a woman on Washington University's campus who was "really cute." Swoboda wanted to get to know her so he decided to volunteer alongside her at STONE Soup, a student organization that provides food and aid to the homeless, and he discovered he liked the work.

"I grew up on a farm, so I was more familiar with homeless animals than homeless people. Meeting these people was a real wake-up for me," he recalls. While on a trip to Boston with AmeriCorp, Swoboda saw an issue of Whats Up, Boston's social justice newspaper that was distributed by a network of paid homeless and formerly homeless vendors, and thought St. Louis could benefit from a similar publication.

That was ten years ago, an anniversary Whats Up St. Louis will mark on February 1. The date may also sound the death knell for the publication.
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Norm White

Willis was a dedicated volunteer at Better Family Life.

​The morning before he was murdered, Conyea Borroum Willis was at 6017 Natural Bridge Road, listening to James Clark speak. He'd been a loyal soldier, one of the many "boots on the ground" since the early days of Clark's Neighborhood Alliance model, which RFT wrote about in the September feature story You Say You Want a Revolution.

Clark's earliest memory of Willis occurred soon after he started volunteering for Better Family Life, following a weekly "Put Down the Pistol" meeting. It was a scorching hot day and Clark had just finished picking up the volunteers from their posts around the city, where they'd been passing out flyers, and dropping them off at the Natural Bridge headquarters. Then as he drove away from the office, Clark saw a man standing on a street corner, a solitary figure still working with a slim pack of leaflets in his hand. He pulled up beside the man.

"Sorry brother," Clark said. "We never want to leave a man behind. Wanna come back to the office? Probably still some pizza left."

"No thanks, brother James," replied Willis. "I'm gonna finish this stack first."

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Below: The ending to the speech Martin Luther King Jr. made in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. King was in Tennessee to support striking sanitation workers and talked during the speech about the possibility of his early death. 


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facebook.com/MoDOT-St-Louis

Note to MoDOT: You may not want to post photos like this one on your Facebook page during the next snow dusting.

​You've heard the news. Chances are you even experienced it firsthand. Yesterday's one-inch snowstorm caught the Missouri Department of Transportation completely unprepared.

The agency failed to pre-treat interstates with salt brine despite weather reports that the region would pick up snow. Instead, MoDOT began spreading salt when the storm hit around 3 a.m. But that plan backfired when MoDOT's trucks soon became entangled in morning traffic, leaving roads icy and slick.

Yesterday MoDOT's director Kevin Keith, admitted his crew failed. "We didn't do a very good job and my reaction to that is I'm disappointed," he said.

MoDOT's Facebook friends had even harsher criticism of the department yesterday. Here are some of the highlights we found:
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Kholood Eid

Back in 1912, it cost $1.5 million to build a marble library. Even allowing for inflation, that's still equivalent to less than half the cost of the current renovation. What a bargain!

​One hundred years ago last Friday, the Central Library downtown opened its doors for the first time. They closed them again a year and a half ago for a massive $70 million renovation project that would bring the library into the twenty-first century.

The project is still only two-thirds done, but since the library's centennial could not go unmarked, Mayor Francis Slay (or, rather, mayoral staffer Josh Wiese on behalf of his boss since Slay had a prior commitment) issued a proclamation in a brief ceremony inside Christ Cathedral Church across the street. (There would be further festivities on Saturday at various library branches, including the construction of a model of the Central Library from Legos.) Then the library's director, Waller McGuire, led a brief tour through the construction site.

It was the second such tour led by McGuire -- Daily RFT was there for the 2011 edition -- and the director was proud to point out all the progress that had been made in the past 365 days. The library will reopen to the public by the end of the year; a gala reception is scheduled for November 17.

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Crestwood Court is returning to its original function: A space to shop.

​They all knew it was coming -- but now it's finally official. Tenants at ArtSpace at Crestwood Court mall have received notice that their leases will be up at the end of February and that they'll have to leave to make way for the mall's renovations.

Tony Stephens, the general manager of Crestwood Court, tells Daily RFT that about 40 of the 60 ArtSpace tenants were notified on December 2 that they would have to leave the mall. The remaining tenants will receive their notice as soon as the mall finalizes the construction schedule.

"We gave them 90 days notice," Stephens says. "The vast majority of the tenants understand and are thankful for the opportunity to have been part of ArtSpace. We didn't promise them anything beyond a year, and it's now been two-and-a-half, almost three, years."

Stephens adds that once the renovations are complete, there will be 50,000 square feet allotted for a continuation of ArtSpace. The entire mall is approximately one million square feet.

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