Cop Fights, STL Hooker Watch, and North of Delmar?
Now I know that all of the craziness going on in St. Louis is not just in my cab. It turns out the even cops, in this case the current and former chief of the Wellston PD, are feeling the heat of the hot STL summer and are pulling pistols out on one another.
Another sign that things are getting bad locally is the increase in traffic amongst street hookers. There was a time when you would only see hookers on the ho strolls on Cherokee and Cass and your crack ho’s thoughout the city around dope sets. Over the past week or so I have noticed hos all over the city plying their trade. It has also occurred to me that Da Lou may not be able boast the claim of the nations ugliest hookers for much longer. I have called STL hookers the “Dollar store of hos” for a long time and have never seen anything remotely close to appealing on the street, until this week, so I am wondering? Has the bad economy and high gas prices led to an increase in the talent pool for hookers? Maybe it is Mayor Slay’s and the developers job creation solution after they get done putting a bar, nightclub, and overpriced restaurant on every corner.
There are plenty of cheap things to do in the city if you are broke. For example, last night there was an Urban Revenge of the Nerds Bike Ride aka/ Nude Bike Ride. This is what nerds do when they want to be cool when they are grown. Ride around in the city with no clothes after loading up on tofu at Whole Foods. Ever wonder why city-dwellers are not often fond of their new young white neighbors? Exhibit A…they don’t care if you wrote on essay on Martin Luther King, Jr. in high school that moved fellow students to tears if you are riding on a bike naked in front of their kids.
Eddie Hassan is a good man who has done what few could. May Allah make his ordeal easy on him insha’Allah.
And finally, my last trip was an extremely nice and smart young African-American man from LA who is out here in Da Lou rehabbing houses. He just worked on a building on the north side of the 4400 block of Delmar on the traditionally black side of the divide. I am going to watch with interest if this is a sign to come and the globos are gradually moving north. If so it could alter the political and social landscape of the city.
August 3, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Really? You should be fucking happy that “nerds” are around the city to pump tax dollars back to poor areas. Unless you want “crack ho’s” everywhere. Or on the flip side you could have a bunch of bigot racists like your self for neighbors. I mean what the fuck, why do you care?
August 3, 2008 at 4:01 pm
And yes hipsters bug me as much as the next person, I get that, but you have to admit that it is better than the alternatives of crime and boredom.
August 3, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Jason, I don’t know what I said that makes me a “bigot racist”; but considering the fact that the people I am talking about are overwhelmingly white and from privileged families and I come from multi-racial blue-collar family I don’t know what you are talking about. Maybe because I don’t speak ion PC. You are right through, that as annoying as they are you could have a whole lot worse; but some of those elements you describe don’t drive your rents up either, so you take the bad with the good.
August 8, 2008 at 8:24 pm
“Maybe it is Mayor Slay’s and the developers job creation solution after they get done putting a bar, nightclub, and overpriced restaurant on every corner.”
Unrelated to “ho’s”, but would you rather have large, previously beautiful, broken down and failing malls? Security everywhere? No food vendors on the street? No lunchtime crowd pumping excess dollars into the tax base?
I was away from STL for ten years doing radio around the country. From roughly ‘96 to ‘06. When I got back, one of the first things I noticed was that STL was actually looking like the downtown Chi-town I grew up in and around. People walking around during the day. Food and print vendors everywhere. In other words, our city looked like it was becoming my idea of what a downtown is supposed to look like again.
As I have begun seeing in report after report, the blight of the inner city is in full retreat in just about every major metro in the country (Detroit doesn’t count…ever…lol). What irks me was sentiment I began to hear out of the local activist set lamenting the displacement of “established communities” as renovation raised rents around downtown.
Really? “Established” communities? What about the “established” communities that were “displaced” when the inner city started to crumble 50 years ago? How about that? Residents of all stripes forced to flee the ever-increasing crime rate and the slow spread of projects and slums. Slums that used to be decent housing in those “established” communities. Let’s not forget that East St Louis was once the roost of the rich in this area. What about that “established” community?