I’m asking this to dispel my obvious ignorance, and hopefully also that of my friend who’s St Louis born-and-bred.
Just how bad is East St Louis?
East St. Louis isn’t in Missouri, it’s across the river in Illinois. It’s as bad as you can imagine.
Haj
That’s the description I’ve been given. I want more. Trust me, it can’t reach the depth of my imagination 
… and as a secondary question, if it is so bad why isn’t it completely a ghost town by now?
There was a throwaway gag on The Simpsons a few years ago, where their awful hometown of Springfield was voted “Second-Worst Town In America,” apparently no longer the worst town.
Homer said “Take THAT, East St. Louis!”
But then there’s another episode, where Homer goes to the AAA instead of AA.
Homer: “Hello, my name is Homer and I’m planning a trip to St. Louis.”
Clerk: “East St. Louis?”
Homer: “Is there any other St. Louis?”
-
-
- Depends on what you plan on doing. At one point it was featured on 20/20 (a US tv-news show) as being “the poorest city in the country”, with 85% of its citizens on at least one type of public aid. That was like the mid-1990’s, I guess. It is nearly-all black, so it’s a very-wrong town to hold a Klan rally in. In spite of my whitness, I used to wander around in the city going to different places when I had a junky rusting pickup truck, and when I was dressed in crappy clothes. The city used to have very little operating revenue and the elected offices were rife with mismanagement.
-
- Assorted stories: there are lots of grand stories of theft and mismanagement in the city offices. A few odd things happened before he got in and a couple afterwards, but most of these things occurred during the couple terms when Carl Officer was mayor. They appeared in the Belleville News-Democrat, mostly.
Some I remember right off–
…at one point there was only one old pumper fire truck as official city fire protection, they almost always had to call to other cities for assistance whenever there was a fire. The truck’s water pump did not work so it could not bring its own water, and during the summer people uncapped so many fire hydrants for their kids to play in that there was not enough pressure to use them as a water source either. So if the Est St Louis fire dept could not get assistance with any working fire-equipment, all they did when there was a fire was try to pull any people out of the building, and then keep onlookers at a distance while it burned.
…Also at one point city police offiers had no radios in their cars–they had to use pay phones, because the radios broke and the city could not afford to get them fixed. Later on, most of the police cars broke down, and the board of aldermen suggested officers using their own personal vehicles for daily use.
…At one point it came to light in the newspaper that the head of the department of streets and bridges was using city vehicles and equipment, and city employees on the city payroll, during regular business hours, to operate his own for-profit tree-removal and trash hauling business. So in other words–they were not maintaining streets at all.
…one of my favorite stories was when the city college was out of funds and turning away students because they could not afford to hire enough teachers–yet all the janitors were kept on-staff, and pulling full-time hours. A newspaper investigation found that ALL of the janitors were related to the school board members. For this and other similar reasons, for a few years the management of the city college was taken from the local school board and transferred to nearby Belleville Area College, with state panel oversight. The Est St Louis college board just recently got control of the school’s finances back a few months ago.
…during one point, the number of on-duty police officers was dropped very low for budgetary reasons. Around about the same time, then-mayor Carl Officer decided his life had been threatened, and he hired five round-the-clock Uzi-toting bodyguards–at city expense. He would sometimes go out at night cruising a couple of the local nearby strip clubs he liked, with his Uzi-brandishing bodyguards surrounding him. City money bought the Uzis, and paid the bodyguards.
…also at one point, the St Clair county police simply said they would begin regular patrols inside the city. The reason was because the city police officers called for backups so often, the county figured it would be easier and safer to just let some county cars run around in the city full-time. At that point I think there were only two East-St Louis police cars running. All the rest were broken down, and [it was claimed that] there was no money to repair them.
…By the by, Carl Officer was wealthy–his family had a legal residence in East St Louis, but he really lived in an expensive apartment across the river in St Louis proper. Carl Officer’s business–the source of the family wealth–was running funeral homes in East St Louis. Carl officer just recently got elected again after an abscence of several years, but things are not nearly as problematic as they were before.
–One or two of these stories would be funny–but for all of them to occur in the same small city was simply amazing. Brazen, tactless theft at every turn. It seemed as though if anyone got a city job that had any sort of a budget, they would try to spend as much money as they possibly could, while doing the least work involving their actual job duties. The stories were simply non-stop–before one could really get old, another one would surface. For a few years it seemed like every few weeks another major scandal would break.
- It’s not so bad anymore–when the casino moved in they brought the city 30K or 40K per month in revenue, and a LOT of that got spent on beefing up the police and fire departments. RIGHT AWAY. It was obviously a casino priority, and one I would not argue with. Carl Officer is mayor again, but I have not heard of any major scandals like in the old days, really. I do not have a subscription to the Belleville newspaper any more, however:
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/ - I used to know where the major shooting-gallery housing projects were in the city, mostly hearing about them from hearing stories from police and ambulance workers. I don’t know anymore. Some years ago the two worst housing complexes (apartment buildings) were levelled and replaced with new duplex housing. You can see some of these if you drive interstate 64 through East st-louis, just east of where the Metrolink line goes over 64, you can see some of the new duplexes. Mapquest’s map of the city is out of date; some of the rail lines it shows are removed, and the Metrolink (light [commuter] rail) is not even shown. The exits that run off the major highways to the casino very often have city police officers sitting in their cars along corners.
~
DougC has it pretty well nailed. Mayor Carl has been pretty well behaved compared to his prior terms in office, but I think it is only a matter of time before he triggers something bizzare.
As a former St. Louis resident, and a whitey of the first degree, I can tell you firsthand that East St. Louis is not a place you want to enter without knowing the risks involved.
As DougC elaborated, the city is the poorest in the nation, and because it’s predominantly African-American, the blame most frequently seems to rest on The White Man.
A close friend of mine was responsible, through his company, for replacing several miles worth of fiber-optic cabling in East St. Louis. As a result, he spent a week working solely after midnight, replacing these lines of fiber-optics in rough, depressed neighborhoods. Darryl is not the type to mince words: He told me that out of seven nights working, six were punctuated with the sound of at least two rounds of gunfire. On two occasions, he and his team were visited by police, who advised him (in no uncertain terms) that they should pack up and leave immediately. When Darryl asked them if they would be willing to swing by once an hour to check on them, the policeman laughed and drove away.
One night, he and his co-workers were visited by a group of black youths, several of which had visible firearms tucked into their jeans. Upon learning that the workers were there fixing the fiber-optic lines, and that Darryl and his guys didn’t possess anything they would want, they left them alone, but Darryl was referred to as “that f*ckin’ cracker” several times. He said he felt lucky that the rest of his crew was black.
I have nothing in the way of proof to this story, other than to assure you that my friend is a calls-it-as-he-sees-it kind of guy, and he’s never told a story just for dramatic effect. In fact, it was pretty chilling to hear him tell the story at all. He said he’ll quit before he returns for another job there.
At one point the State of Illinois took over police patrols in the city. When I was at Fort Leonard Wood we would drive a couple hundred miles to cross into Illinois to go to the only strip-club industrial park I have ever seen.
Nice clubs, all housed in some sort of huge abandoned industrial building. Guards in the parking lots. It was sort of like America’s own little Bangkok.
In my youth, on more than one occasion, I found myself in a car full of other white folks, lost, on the way to find PT’s. Those were very scary times.
If you’re a tourist and you truly want to know, I suggest driving across the bridge to the Casino Queen, a gambling roverboat that actually leaves the dock and goes up and down the river. The owners of that riverboat have taken no chances - it is a complete and utter impossibility to get lost trying to find it - there’s enormouse signs leading you there about every 50 feet. Once you get there, you will find - I am not joking - patrol towers spaced throughout the parking lot with machine-gun holding armed guards inside them. A friend of mine who used to be a dealer there said they were prepared to defend a full-scale assault against their casino.