Samples
A Better Place to Grow Up (Chapter 12-13)
CHAPTER 12
Losing a friend
Marlene Hodges picks at her salad, looking like she had lost her best friend. Hodges is a community coordinator for COVAM, an organization established to give tenants in the Carr Square Village, O'Fallon Place and Murphy Park areas near downtown a say in what happens throughout their neighborhoods.
Actually, Hodges isn't losing her best friend. Lisa Angstreich is moving to Baltimore, but not until next year. Maybe by then Hodges will learn everything Angstreich has to teach her about community organizing. Maybe by then Hodges will learn how to write a grant proposal. Maybe by then the neighborhood will come together in the way it should. Maybe by then Hodges' career will be blossoming if not in full flower.
Though Angstreich is 15 years younger, Hodges looks up to her like a big sister. "She's had this good education," Hodges says. "She's smart. She went to college and got a degree. I went to college and didn't get a degree."
Angstreich has a master's degree in social work from Washington Universi ty. And by anyone's measure she's precocious. She started with McCormack Baron in 1997 and was recently named vice president for community development.
Angstreich grew up in the suburbs with all the advantages that Hodges missed. But Hodges doesn't hold it against her. Angstreich was the first to recognize what Hodges had to offer when she noticed her volunteering for neighborhood functions and speaking up at meetings. She lobbied to get Hodges a paid position as a community organizer.
Hodges says she's learned a lot by watching how Angstreich handles a meeting; how she can be direct with people without angering them, how she can get people headed in the direction she wants them to go.
Hodges doesn't even harbor a notion that she could step up and take Angstreich's place. "I'm not a politician," she says. "I hate to speak in public." She just wants to inch her career forward for her daughter, Te'Aura; for her mom; for herself.
She would like to have her own car instead of having to share one with her mother. She would like to toss out a pair of ratty panty hose without a pang of remorse. She would like to start saving for Te'Aura's college education.
Now, she would like to rally this neighborhood. Get people to start working together on keeping it safe and secure. The other day a resident called Hodges saying she was getting fed up with her noisy neighbors, with the drug dealing she sees outside her door.
The woman said she had a few friends who felt the same way. Wasn't there a block watch program or something they could get started?
CHAPTER 13
No big deal
Richard Baron sits at his desk. He looks unworried, unflustered, as if what happened several days earlier had been no big deal.
Word was that he had really been ticked. But that's over now. Nobody can turn the page quicker than Baron.
In mid-March, Baron's grand plan for new housing on the old Pruitt-Igoe site collapsed. Schnucks called and said it wanted out. When Harry Morley, the home builder, learned of this, he got cold feet, too.
What happened? It turned out Baron had everyone he needed on board except Alderman April Ford Griffin, D-5th Ward.
Griffin's ward includes Murphy Park, O'Fallon Place and the site of the old Pruitt-Igoe housing complex on Jefferson Avenue. It's not that Griffin opposed what Baron was trying to do. It's just that she has her own ideas about how to revitalize her ward.
Last year, she got the city to spend $250,000 to create a master plan. The city hired Schwetye Architects to do the work, and in March the firm rolled out a draft plan that, among other things, called for a par-3, nine-hole golf course on the Pruitt-Igoe site and adjoining property. The single-family housing that Baron suggested for the site would go elsewhere; so would the grocery.
When Baron got wind of the proposal, he tried to call Griffin. He said she didn't get back to him. If she had, he might have told Griffin that Schnucks wouldn't want to put its store where the plan called for. He might have also told her that he had one of St. Louis County's premier home builders ready and willing to build 121 homes on the site and that Bank of America was prepared to commit financing.
Baron says he doesn't know why his relationship with Griffin is so cool. Baron backed Loretta Hall in the 5th Ward race in 1997. Hall, who was then the resident manager of Carr Square Village, had worked with Baron for more than 30 years on tenant rights issues.
Griffin says she wants single-family housing in the area, too - the golf course could be a centerpiece and attraction for such development. Baron, she points out, isn't the only builder with a proposal to redevelop Pruitt-Igoe. She wants to consider them all.
When the golf course plan surfaced in the Post-Dispatch with Griffin's name attached to it, Baron's office got the call from Schnucks. He didn't even call back to argue. Schnucks had gone through a protracted battle with Alderman Sharon Tyus, D-20th Ward, to put a store at Union Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue just a few years ago. The company didn't want another fight, and Baron couldn't blame Schnucks.
And he couldn't blame Morley, either. It's so much easier to build homes in St. Louis County, where the system is greased for development. Who needs the red tape and the hassle?
So, Baron called the Housing Authority and withdrew his proposal to turn Pruitt-Igoe into a Shangri-La called CityView.
But did that mean he was throwing in the towel? Never. He would simply turn his attention to another project. Baron has a mantra that his staff has heard hundreds of times.
"Nobody said it would be easy restoring urban America."
Marlene Hodges, the community activist, looks out at a sea of faces and thinks it just can't get any better than this. Here it is a cold, blustery March night -- a Friday no less -- and 30 people have shown up for her neighborhood block watch meeting.
She had sent them all a letter, imploring them to come. "Come on, be concerned," she wrote. "Take some pride in your neighborhood and get involved. Don't leave it up to a few to do the job we all should be involved in. You live here, too."
And Hodges is ready for them. She set a table with cold cuts, potato salad, coleslaw and dessert. Another table holds brochures on everything from breast self-examination to adult classes to anti-gang activities. Now she has butterflies in her stomach because she will have to get up and speak.
She starts by presenting a fruit basket to Sherolynne Waller, the first to arrive. "This is just us," she says. "You can say anything you want. Let's be open, honest and frank with each other."
Then she presents the star of her show, Patrolman Donnell Moore.
Moore, looking snappy in his blue uniform, keeps his audience rapt and chuckling with stories about how he, a cop, had been ripped off by thieves in his own neighborhood. Moore has been a police officer only four years and acknowledges that he has a lot to learn.
"I know what it feels like to lose my TV," Moore says. "I know what it's like to come out of my house and find my license plates stolen. Every time it heightens my awareness. One thing I never had was the help of my neighbors. You have the chance here to meet each other and put a neighborhood watch program together."
"Sign me up," booms Willie Jackson, a longtime resident at O'Fallon Place.
Hodges ends the meeting by asking residents to call her and tell her about any unusual activity in the neighborhood or just to ask for help.
Usually, no one calls. Hodges has to call residents and ask them what they thought of the meeting, asking what more she could do.
But this time it's different. In the weeks that followed the meeting, Hodges says, she has received 60 calls from residents with reports about what is going on in their block. Some just want help with landlord-tenant issues; others want to report problems with noise or report on suspicious happenings.
"They're beginning to feel that if they report something, maybe something will get done," Hodges says as she leafs through her log of phone calls and follow-up memos.
"It's coming together. Slowly but surely, it's coming together."
