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An Urban Humanities Initiative

Visualizing Urban History

 

Margaret Garb, Eric Mumford, and Jody Sowell

“Visualizing Urban History” tells the story of the development and destruction of the Mill Creek Valley, a center for the African American community in St. Louis in the early twentieth century. The neighborhood, just west of 20th and south of Olive streets, was built just after the Civil War when wealthy white businessmen, their families and servants moved into its brick townhouses. By the turn of the twentieth century, many of the houses had been subdivided; residents were increasingly European working-class immigrants, many from Italy and Germany.

As the Great Migration began in the 1910s, African Americans from the southern states moved into the neighborhood. In the 1920s, the Mill Creek Valley area was a center for working-class African American culture and community. Three decades later, city officials used federal urban renewal funds to demolish the neighborhood in 1959 and to relocate some 20,000 residents.

In the early 1960s, another Federal Housing Authority program financed the construction of LaClede Town on the northwest section of what had been the Mill Creek Valley. The new low-rise, townhouse complex, designed by Cloethiel Woodard Smith (1910-92) a 1933, woman graduate of the Washington University School of Architecture, was racially integrated, and a home to artists and musicians associated with the city’s Black Arts Movement. After several successful decades, it too was demolished in the 1990s. Today, much of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood is vacant land, along with some new buildings associated with adjacent campuses and corporate offices. 

The museum exhibit produced through this project is now on display in the Missouri History Museum. The exhibit, printed on seven large moveable banners and featuring an interactive, digital map, moves in several directions. It documents the history of a neighborhood that has been erased from the landscape, explores the process of researching a long-vanished community and highlights the sources used to reconstruct Mill Creek Valley’s history.

Margaret Garb is professor of urban history and co-director of the Prison Education Project at Washington University.

Eric Mumford is an architectural and urban design historian and a licensed architect.

Jody Sowell is the Director of Exhibitions and Research at the Missouri History Museum.