Massachusetts vs Missouri (live, state, better, crime)
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I think some of you may recall that I said I "grew up integrated" — I lived east of Troost and went to school west of it from the time I was old enough to attend school.
The north-south thoroughfare 11 blocks east of Main Street is also a sharp racial divide. Something I've noticed about Midwestern cities in general (Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee included here) is that racial segregation in those cities takes a much different form than it does in the Northeast. In Northeastern cities (Boston included here), it's more of a patchwork quilt: you will find sections where everyone's Black, or Puerto Rican, or Caribbean, interspersed with sections where everyone's white, or Chinese, or Korean, and none of these make up entire vast swaths of the city. And, of course, the city I now call home has at least one neighborhood in it that has long prided itself on its racially integrated population (Mt. Airy now is about 2/3 Black and 1/3 white, but the white population isn't declining), and one can find non-trivial numbers of Blacks in several other middle-class neighborhoods where they do not dominate. My home neighborhood of Germantown is about 80% Black and generally low- to moderate income (neighborhood-wide MHI is ~$30k/year), but whites account for just about all of the 20% as well as just about all of its most affluent residents (five percent of Germantown households have incomes >$135k/year).
But in the Midwest? Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee all have sharp divides between their north and south sides (Chicago's South Side is almost all Black, save for the island around the University of Chicago campus; in St. Louis, it's the North Side that holds that distinction; I forget which side of Milwaukee is the Black one). Because pre-WWII Kansas City grew southward from its original settlement, the division is East Side/West Side, with the Blacks living on the East Side and Troost Avenue the divider. And the Black neighborhoods have by and large lost their better-off residents, though in some places, that development is beginning to reverse. (Kansas City's Santa Fe Place neighborhood is something of an exception as well.)
Prior to the 1950s, there was also a southern boundary of the Black Pale of Settlement in Kansas City: 31st Street. But because houses in the heavily Jewish neighborhoods to 31st Street's south did not have racially restrictive covenants (which often forbade sales to Jews as well as Blacks) attached to them, Black families began to buy in neighborhoods like Ivanhoe and Oak Park, where my parents bought the house I grew up in in 1954, four years before they brought me into this world.
The house they bought sat on Bellefontaine* Avenue, one block west of Benton Boulevard. I was astonished when I last laid eyes on that street in 2018: For the better by the restoration of the tree canopy that fell to Dutch elm disease in the 1960s, making the street a green cathedral again; for the worse by the increasingly ramshackle houses I saw lining it, including one that had been the home of a good friend of mine who also attended Pembroke-Country Day in the grade behind me.
I think that the East Side has hit bottom economically and has no place to go but up from here. When and to what extent that will happen is anyone's guess, however.
*Pronounced "BELL-fountain." It's a Missouri thing, I guess; there's a small town in the Ozarks' upper reaches called Versailles ("ver-SALES").
Since someone brought this thread back from the dead, a post I should have followed up on:
I think that the East Side has hit bottom economically and has no place to go but up from here. When and to what extent that will happen is anyone's guess, however.
*Pronounced "BELL-fountain." It's a Missouri thing, I guess; there's a small town in the Ozarks' upper reaches called Versailles ("ver-SALES").
I got interested in Kansas City through the Strong Towns group who have a critique of the kind of suburban expansion Kansas City has practiced and advise making strategic investments in the core areas. Replanting the urban forest on Benton Boulevard could be one such but not enough on its own. Mr. D. Herbert Lipson's Philadelphia is fortunate to have you on the staff all these years with such knowledge and interest in cities. The city magazine is one journalistic innovation of the '60s that has survived pretty much intact while the Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, and the others are gone or nearly gone. I believe New York started out as the Sunday rotogravure section of the New York Herald Tribune and Clay Felker carried it out of the sinking ship when the Trib and one or two other NYC papers went out in the middle '60s.
Sure, Americanization of French place names is pretty commonplace, e.g., Calais (callous) Maine. At least in Kansas City the use of "boulevard" signifies something special, as it does in France, and not just another thing to call an ordinary street, as you find in Queens and Brooklyn.
I got interested in Kansas City through the Strong Towns group who have a critique of the kind of suburban expansion Kansas City has practiced and advise making strategic investments in the core areas. Replanting the urban forest on Benton Boulevard could be one such but not enough on its own. Mr. D. Herbert Lipson's Philadelphia is fortunate to have you on the staff all these years with such knowledge and interest in cities. The city magazine is one journalistic innovation of the '60s that has survived pretty much intact while the Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, and the others are gone or nearly gone. I believe New York started out as the Sunday rotogravure section of the New York Herald Tribune and Clay Felker carried it out of the sinking ship when the Trib and one or two other NYC papers went out in the middle '60s.
Sure, Americanization of French place names is pretty commonplace, e.g., Calais (callous) Maine. At least in Kansas City the use of "boulevard" signifies something special, as it does in France, and not just another thing to call an ordinary street, as you find in Queens and Brooklyn.
Thanks! And maybe that's another reason why my hometown has been called "the Paris of the Plains" by a few observers. (Streets designated "boulevard" in Kansas City are legally part of the city's park system and are so marked. With one exception — Independence Boulevard, the only one that's almost totally commercial — they are closed to trucks. There is one exception to this rule, however: Southwest Boulevard, which parallels the former Katy/now BNSF tracks heading southwest from Kansas City Union Station; it too is largely commercial/light industrial, and it's not part of the park system at all.)
And since we're talking Massachusetts here too, my first encounter with one of Lipson's mags was the copy of Boston I picked up when I arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1976.
Lipson turned the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce's promotional rag into the granddaddy of the city magazines in 1965, two years before Clay Felker spun New York off from the Herald Tribune.
I also briefly contributed columns to what was then called 435 magazine and is now (thank God) called Kansas City. (Interstate 435 is the beltway around the two Kansas Cities and their suburbs.)
I've read that Strong Towns report and agree with its main points. However, I don't consider the annexation spree a total mistake, for had it not taken place, Kansas City would probably be in the same shape St. Louis is now. (Boston doesn't really have any parallels to the emptied-out parts of either city, though parts of Somerville and Everett did empty out when they deindustrialized. The Assembly Square development in the former, however, did a good job of recycling the site of a long-gone Ford Motor Company plant.)
As for restoring the urban forest, as I think I mentioned in another thread, trees are not a prerequisite for making a street or place "magic," but they add to the magical effect. It's easy to overlook the decay that lines Benton Boulevard now thanks to the grandeur of the trees.
Massachusetts is so small and congested I think would feel claustrophobic most of the time, especially in the cold and dark wintertime.
It appears you haven’t been to areas of Massachusetts west of 495. It’s mostly all residential houses, woods, hills, and plenty of rural towns, especially west of Worcester.
It appears you haven’t been to areas of Massachusetts west of 495. It’s mostly all residential houses, woods, hills, and plenty of rural towns, especially west of Worcester.
I agree. Worcester is underrated and picturesque this time of year. There are plenty of open spaces and rolling hill areas.
If it wasn't for cost of living weather and distance from family, I would be living in Boston Massachusetts.
Missouri has become more backwards by the minute. I am not a liberal or conservative but the legislation doesn't make sense. I do love my life in Saint Louis though. (if that makes any sense)
My vote goes to Massachusetts for both living and visiting.
I was raised in MA, and a few relatives still live there.
I have a daughter who lives in MO, but didn’t raise her children there.
Massachusetts is beautiful, but too expensive to live, and unless you have enough money money to live in the choice places, the drug issue is rampant.
MO, or anywhere in the Midwest is more affordable and a more wholesome place to raise a family.
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