Modelling the urban future: planning, slums and the seduction of growth in St Louis, 1940–1950

Abstract

This paper considers the attempts by planners during and after World War II to forecast population change for the purposes of long‐range planning. St Louis is used as a case study to examine the social, economic and political contexts within which decisions about how to map the city’s future were made. At the heart of the problem is the adoption by the city of a growth model to justify a large‐scale slum clearance agenda at the very moment when the city was poised for catastrophic population loss. It is argued that planners allowed themselves to be caught up in the momentary crisis of a wartime population spike, ultimately ignoring their own frequent warnings about underlying trends toward population decline. Within this post‐war crisis of temporary overcrowding, planners made the critical decision to move ahead with slum clearance projects of unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, by the time their projects were complete, the city for which they had been undertaken no longer existed.

Notes

1. City Plan Commission, St. Louis after World War II. City of St Louis, 1942.

2. City Plan Commission, St. Louis City Plan Commission Annual Report, 1942–1943. City of St Louis, 1944, p. 15. Hereafter these reports are abbreviated as PCAR.

3. City Plan Commission, op. cit. [1], pp. 13–14.

4. Harlin Loomer, Accuracy of the Ratio Method for Forecasting City Population: A Reply. Land Economics 28, 2 (May 1952) 182.

5. Ladislas Segoe, Local Planning Administration. Chicago: Institute for Training in Municipal Administration, 1941.

6. Robert Schmitt and Albert Crosetti, An Application of Multiple Correlation to Population Forecasting. Land Economics 30, 3 (August 1954) 277.

7. US Government, The Problems of a Changing Population. Washington, DC: National Resource Committee, 1938.

8. Irene Taeuber, Literature on Future Population, 1943–1948. Population Index (January 1949) 10.

9. Harold Dorn, Pitfalls in Population Forecasts and Projections. Journal of the American Statistical Association 251 (September 1950) 312–14, 325.

10. American Society of Planning Officials, Population Forecasting. Bulletin of the Planning Advisory Service, 1950.

11. Robert Schmitt and Albert Cosetti, Accuracy of the Ratio Method for Forecasting City Population. Land Economics 27, 4 (November 1951) 348.

12. Ibid., 346.

13. See Population Estimates, 1950–2000, Philadelphia–Camden Area. Philadelphia: Planning Commission, 1948.

14. H. Loomer, op. cit. [4] 181.

15. Harland Bartholomew, Problems of St. Louis. St Louis: Nixon‐Jones Co., 1917.

16. City Plan Commission, Urban Land Policy. City of St Louis, 1936.

17. Harland Bartholomew, Non‐Conforming Uses Destroy the Neighborhood. Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (February 1939) 96–7.

18. Harland Bartholomew, Effect of urban decentralization upon transit operation and policies. Paper for the annual meeting of the American Transit Operating Association, White Sulphur Springs, WV, 1940.

19. City Plan Commission, Urban Land Policy. St Louis: City Plan Commission, 1938.

20. H. Bartholomew, op. cit. [17] 97.

21. City Plan Commission, op. cit. [1], p. 13; PCAR 1942–1943, op. cit. [2], p. 12.

22. Minutes of a meeting of the City Planning and Housing Committee of the League of Women Voters, 2 April 1946, file 1337, Records of the St Louis Chapter of the League of Women Voters, Western History Manuscript Collection, Record Group 530. Hereafter abbreviated as LWV Records, WHMC 530.

23. Harland Bartholomew and Associates, A Preliminary Report Upon the Effect of the War Industries Upon Community Facilities: St. Louis County, Missouri. St Louis: The Associates, 1942, p. 1.

24. Betty Burnette, St. Louis at War: The Story of a City, 1941–1945. St Louis: Patrice Press, 1987, p. 21.

25. T. Michael Ruddy, Mobilizing for War: St. Louis and the Middle Mississippi during World War II. St Louis: US Army Corps of Engineers, 1983, pp. 4, 9–11.

26. William J. Shive, Navy Shipbuilding in St Louis During World War II, unpublished manuscript, 1996, Missouri Historical Society Collections.

27. B. Burnett, op. cit. [24], pp. 66–73.

28. US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Impact of the War on the St. Louis Area. Washington, DC: US GPO, Industrial Area Study No. 27, December 1944, p. 12.

29. Ibid., pp. 13–15.

30. Strike closes Alton smelter, Globe‐Democrat (March 18, 1942); Union row halts tool plant work, Globe‐Democrat (May 6, 1942); U.S. Steel agrees to closed shop, Globe‐Democrat (May 9, 1942).

31. Deborah Henry, Structures of Exclusion: Black Labor and the Building Trades in St. Louis, 1917–1966. University of Minnesota, PhD Dissertation, 2002.

32. City Plan Commission, PCAR, 1944–1945. City of St Louis, 1946, p. 16.

33. Study reported in the Post‐Dispatch (April 27, 1945) and reproduced in Cummings, pp. 56–7.

34. Katherine T. Corbett and Mary E. Seematter, No Crystal Stair. Gateway Heritage VIII, 2, 9.

35. PCAR, 1942–1943, op. cit. [2], p. 19.

36. Letter from Mrs George Roudebush, LWV President, to Mr Richard Nichols, Public Safety Committee Chair, 3 March 1942; Letter from Mrs Aaron Fischer, LWV President, to Miss Mary Lou Rogers, AF of L, 5 August 1945; Letter from Mrs Aaron Fischer, LWV President, to the Hon. John J. Sullivan, Congressional Representative, 14 December 1945, file 1337, LWV Records, WHMC 530.

37. This figure includes the entire St Louis Industrial Area, an official wartime designation roughly analogous to today’s metropolitan region. The Missouri side of the area had 1639 permanent units, while the Illinois side of the area had 1176 units. The city of St Louis alone had nearly half of the total number of public housing units for the entire region. See US Dept of Labor, op. cit. [28], Appendix Table Q, p. 49.

38. Harland Bartholomew and Associates, op. cit. [23], p. 17.

39. City Plan Commission, PCAR, 1945–1946. City of St Louis, 1947, p. 19.

40. US Dept of Labor, op. cit. [28], pp. 22–4.

41. City Plan Commission, op. cit. [1], pp. 19–20.

42. Ibid., pp. 21, 23.

43. Ibid., pp. 22–3.

44. Ibid., pp. 26–31.

45. For an example of the support lent Bartholomew by civic organizations, see correspondence between League of Women Voter members and local officials, as well as meeting minutes, in files 1336–1338, LWV Records, WHMC 530.

46. City Plan Commission, op. cit. [1], p. 30.

47. PCAR 1942–1943, op. cit. [2], p. 12; City Plan Commission, PCAR 1943–1944. City of St Louis, 1945, p. 14.

48. City Plan Commission, PCAR 1946–1947. City of St Louis, 1948, p. 33.

49. City Plan Commission, Comprehensive City Plan. City of St Louis?, 1947, pp. 70–2.

50. Ibid., pp. 28–35.

51. See letters in the Housing Shortage Complaints File, Series One, Box 24, Records of the Mayoral Administrations of St Louis, Raymond T. Tucker Papers, Washington University Special Collections: Letter from Mary Routledge to Mayor Raymond Tucker, 16 July 1953; Letter from Kathy Guillies to Mayor Raymond Tucker, 27 Nov. 1953; Letter from Mrs B. L. Huxley to Mayor Raymond Tucker, 13 July 1953; Letter from Mrs F. Finklang to Mayor Raymond Tucker, 10 April 1953.

52. Progress or Decay: St Louis Must Choose. St. Louis Post‐Dispatch (March 1950).

53. On the shift in the centre of gravity of planning from commissions to municipal corporations, see J. Heathcott, The City Remade: Race, Public Housing, and the Urban Landscape in St. Louis, 1900–1960. Indiana University, PhD thesis, 2002, chapter four.

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Notes on contributors

Joseph Heathcott

* Joseph Heathcott is an Assistant Professor and Graduate Faculty member in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University. He is co‐editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Cornell University Press, 2003). He currently holds a fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies to complete his book on the social and design history of the Pruitt‐Igoe public housing project.