- I'm Jim Kirchherr, and Living St. Louis's showing of our "Decades" series this summer really shows how decisions made in one era have consequences good and bad down the road.

I think this really hits home in this next episode about what the city and the country did in the 1950s and why they did it.

(jazzy band music) This time on "Decades", St. Louis faces the second half of the 20th century with energy, a booming economy, growing suburbs, and the determination to save the city.

(rubble collapsing) (nostalgic piano music) - [Announcer] "Decades" was a co-production of the Missouri History Museum and the Nine Network of Public Media.

- So much of what comes to mind when we think about the 1950s has to do with pop culture and youth culture, the cars, the drive-ins, the music, things people like to remember.

But the 1950s gave us Dwight Eisenhower and Joseph McCarthy, ranch houses and public housing, backyard swing sets and backyard bomb shelters.

This is not the innocent, simple decade it is sometimes made out to be.

(car engine starts) (crowd applauding) (swift marching drums) President Harry Truman came to St. Louis in June of 1950 to attend the annual reunion of his World War I army division.

But local officials saw this as an opportunity to give a shot in the arm to their plans to build a giant arch as a national monument.

The riverfront had been cleared before the war but it was now just a parking lot.

And on this day the President dedicated the area as a national park.

- This is indeed a great occasion.

I'm happy to participate in the dedication of this historic site to the memory of Thomas Jefferson and the early pioneers and settlers of our westward expansion.

- [Jim] There was hope that if Congress would vote the money, the Arch could be completed by 1953, the Sesquicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.

It would be much longer than that, but the 1950s saw a city aggressively promoting itself and attacking its problems.

As the second half of the century began, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran a series of articles that examined a wide range of problems and issues facing the area.

It was called "Progress or Decay?

St. Louis Must Choose".

- And it really was a challenge to the city, almost throwing down a gauntlet, saying, "Can we prevent decay?

Can we have progress?"

Mayor Darst, who was mayor at the time, and then Mayor Tucker, who comes in in 1953, they took up that challenge.

- [Jim] Mayor Joseph Darst turned to the business community, hoping to form the kind of partnership that had once brought a World's Fair to St. Louis.

When Raymond Tucker took office in 1953, he brought even more business leaders into the new group which was named Civic Progress.

They were powerful men who were committed to downtown, who called the city home and who called the shots at their companies.

- If they made a decision, their company came along with them.

They didn't even have to go back to their board of directors in order to make the commitments, and so some of them just built buildings downtown.

- [Jim] And one business leader simply decided to buy a baseball team so that he could keep his hometown in the major leagues.

(crowd cheering) In the 1950s, baseball, like the rest of the country, was on the move.

The Browns were in trouble and looking around for a new home, but it was the Cardinals that almost got away first.

The team's owner was heading to prison for tax evasion in early 1953 and had to sell the team fast.

He nearly closed a deal that would have sent the Cardinals to Milwaukee.

That's when August Busch stepped in and had his brewery buy the team.

A year later, Boston's Braves were in Milwaukee, the Browns were in Baltimore, but the Cardinals were at home in Sportsman's Park, which had been spruced up and renamed Busch Stadium.

All the old billboards and advertisements were gone, except one.

In 1955, Civic Progress put its muscle behind a huge bond issue that would go into improving streets and highways, to slum clearance, to hospitals, and parks, and museums.

When the campaign was over, every one of the 23 ballot items was approved by the voters by a wide margin.

- And so these were the kinds of things that indicated the kind of confidence people had in the city of St. Louis, that you could bring it back if you had the right kind of people in charge and if you got the right kind of commitments, and here you had the commitments from the economic elite and you also had the commitments from the voters in voting this extraordinary approximately 100 million dollar bond issue to redo all kinds of things concerning the city.

(rubble falling) - [Jim] People were talking again about the new spirit of St. Louis.

There were new apartments being built downtown, streets were widened, and new expressways built for the growing number of commuters.

St. Louis received national attention for its commitment and its leadership.

And by 1959, work was finally underway preparing the riverfront for construction of the Gateway Arch.

But the decade would also bring the city something that would become a lasting symbol of misjudgment and failure, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project.

And yet it too was the product of the same confidence and spirit of progress.

- We were very proud of those buildings when we built them and when we saw people moving out of buildings that were rat infested, and those families were moving in to these new buildings, I was very, very happy for them.

- [Jim] Substandard housing, slums, they'd been considered a serious problem at the turn of the century and now, in the age of television and atomic power, there were people who were still using outhouses in the heart of St. Louis, living in buildings without central heat or hot running water.

St. Louis's first government housing projects opened during World War Two to replace rundown neighborhoods.

On the Near South Side for whites was Clinton-Peabody.

Carr Square Village was built on the Near North Side for blacks.

- Everyone that we talked to, a lot of the people that we talked to were some of the earliest residents.

They lived there in the 40s and the 50s when it first was constructed, and they felt that they were moving into a place that was a showplace of St. Louis.

Most of the families they described as working families, two parent families that didn't have the stigma, I think, that it has today.

- [Jim] In the 1950s, new public housing became a top priority.

The biggest project of all was Pruitt-Igoe on the North Side, 33 buildings, each 11 stories tall, segregated by race.

Architects praised their modern design, but others worried about concentrating so many poor families into one area.

When the buildings were integrated, most of the whites moved out, and many of the poor who were supposed to use this as just the first step out of poverty never got any further.

The maintenance, and management, and crime problems at Pruitt-Igoe would become so great that 20 years later, housing officials simply gave up.

(deep rumbling) - I was there when Pruitt-Igoe was still just had its foundations being poured.

I think I put it in one of my movies as, "This is the future for St. Louis.

Look what we're doing."

- [Narrator] No one could pretend that public housing would solve all the problems of people inside, but at least the buildings would not mock their poverty or corrupt their hopes.

In their own way, the American people built a revolution and expressed the determination that whatever its income, the next generation would not grow up in a slum.

(lighthearted orchestra music) (somber piano music) (marching band playing drums) - [Jim] After Harry Truman dedicated the site of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 1950, he got down to the real business of his speech, the Soviet Union's threat to world peace and America's resolve to stand up to that threat.

- Countries like the United States, which have responsibilities for maintaining peace and security outside the North Atlantic Treaty area will of course continue to maintain whatever defense forces are needed to meet those responsibilities.

- [Jim] Truman would have to back up his talk sooner than he thought.

Two weeks later, North Korea invaded South Korea, and America's days of a small peace time military were over.

It would go on a war footing and stay that way for a generation.

The economy of this decade combined 1940s wartime mobilization with 1920s consumerism.

There was now a market for swords and plowshares, or in St. Louis's case, for fighter planes and sports cars.

Unions were gaining strength, pay was going up.

These were the jobs that were sending workers into the middle class and would send their children off to college.

There was a time not too long before when boys and girls would go from 8th grade graduation straight into the factory.

Now it was more common for education to continue through high school and even beyond.

Adulthood was delayed.

There was a whole new stage of life.

This was the age of the teenager.

- After the war, the general prosperity for everybody rises, and what a lot of manufacturers of different goods realized is that teenagers, you know, high school kids, maybe college, have a big increase in their purchasing power.

And so, people who make clothing, for example, start coming out with junior lines of clothes for girls, or they come out with maybe a little bit different look for young men or for boys, makeup for young girls.

And so a lot of what is formed in the youth culture is very commercial.

It's like, "What products can we sell to this group of young people?"

- [Jim] They had their own music, their own clothes, and movie stars, radio stations, and TV shows like "St. Louis Hop".

Many had money to spend and the freedom of the automobile.

They may have gotten tired of hearing about it, but the children and the teenagers of the 1950s did have so many things and opportunities their parents had not had.

But this was also the first generation to grow up with the constant unseen threat that it could all end in the flash of a nuclear explosion.

(air raid siren wails) There was great hope for this generation, and it was the young people of the 1950s who would carry out the decade's great experiment in social change, the end of school segregation.

The Supreme Court in 1954 ruled that segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal was no longer legal.

And while some cities defied the ruling, St. Louis's school district began immediately to comply.

It combined its white and black teachers' colleges, Harris and Stowe, into one.

The high schools were integrated, and then the grade schools, but they remained mostly black or mostly white, depending on the neighborhood.

St. Louis would end up in court over the issue of desegregation in the 1970s, but in the 1950s it was praised for its willingness to follow the law, even though in other ways St. Louis continued to earn its reputation as a segregated city.

- Jackie Robinson, the baseball teams coming into the city of St. Louis, those black baseball players couldn't stay in the hotels.

They had to stay in homes of individual African-Americans.

So with that Supreme Court decision of 1954, there were still many, many areas in which we had to demonstrate, had to force persons to open the doors.

- [Jim] Norman Seay had been just a teenager when he helped form the local chapter of CORE, the Committee of Racial Equality, right after World War Two.

They spent many years trying to get local movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants in St. Louis to serve black customers.

African-Americans were welcome to shop downtown, but there were few places that would let them come in, sit down and eat lunch.

CORE's tactic was the peaceful sit-in.

Their efforts received little news coverage and brought only very slow progress.

- We would just walk up, go into the cafeteria area, and take a seat.

I remember three or four different places.

We went to Stix, Baer and Fuller.

We stayed at that department store for approximately 18 months, trying to get served.

We were never served, there was nothing to force the restaurant owner to serve us.

- [Jim] St. Louis's Board of Aldermen finally passed a public accommodations bill outlawing such discrimination in 1961 after most businesses had already complied.

By then, civil rights activists had moved on to other issues like employment discrimination, and now these kinds of local demonstrations were seen as part of a national civil rights movement, in large part because it was getting the kind of national television coverage that 10 years before, even the President of the United States couldn't get.

(crowd applauding) Harry Truman's 1950 speech in St. Louis was broadcast nationwide on radio.

Television could not do that yet.

There was still only one television station in town, and most programs were local.

But the following year, Americans saw the future, the very first live coast-to-coast television broadcast of the Japanese Peace Conference in San Francisco.

It was a technical achievement so amazing it was captured on home movies in a living room in Granite City.

In the mid-1950s, there would be more TV stations and more national programming on the networks, and television began to take its central place in the American home.

Those who used it effectively realized the power of the television image.

Politicians knew it, civil rights leaders knew it, and so did appliance salesmen.

- I wanna show you, I'll light it up, and it's something, look at that.

It's all porcelain and it's showing you that this porcelain, it'll last.

Detergent or anything won't eat through it.

Isn't that something, getting too big there.

(man shouting) Put it out, wait a minute, all right.

Look at that, lead the way.

(somber piano music) (gentle piano music) - [Jim] At the time of the 1904 World's Fair, confident St. Louis boosters set their sights on becoming a city with a population of one million.

By 1950, it has reached 850 000, its highest ever, but it was clear that it would be downhill soon after.

The head of the U.S. Census in 1950 said that if older cities were going to continue to grow, they would have to get physically larger by annexing suburban areas, and that was something St. Louis could not do.

- Those people, those ancestors of St. Louisans who separated the city from the county drew that border around the city to enclose 61 1/2 square miles, thinking that's all we're ever gonna need to be the Paris of the new world, you know, we can do it.

But what they didn't foresee is that by the end of World War Two, St. Louis was largely filled in.

There wasn't much room within the city of St. Louis to develop.

- [Jim] Twice in the 1950s, there were efforts to reunify city and county.

They didn't come close to passing, and most of the area's growth was now beyond the city limits and out of reach.

This was the age of the automobile, wider roads, expressways, and in 1956, the beginning of the national interstate highway system.

It would all make it easier for home buyers and factory builders to spread out, and the city couldn't stop it.

- We saw it coming and we participated in it.

We didn't cause it but we participated in it by building the roads, by buying the land.

We owned lots of ground in St. Louis County.

People were now talking about three, four or five hundred thousand square foot buildings and three, four times that amount of ground for parking.

There was no way that that could be in the city.

- [Jim] St. Louis city officials didn't give up.

They used a new legal tactic to take control of large chunks of land and they brought in the bulldozers to create an area big enough to meet the developer's need for space.

It was called urban renewal.

(rubble falling) One of the largest urban renewal projects in the whole country was in Mill Creek Valley, a predominantly black, and poor, and working class neighborhood that stretched west of Union Station to Grand.

It had a rich and colorful history and had some of St. Louis's worst slums.

The city moved everybody out, and Mill Creek was leveled.

- Well, for me it was sad because I liked my neighborhood.

I didn't know anything different.

In a way, you're sort of excited 'cause you're gonna get to move, and my mother was saying we're moving to this nice house, but at the same time, this is where I grew up.

This is where my friends were, and I could see them moving one by one by one, and I didn't know where they were going, I lost touch with all my friends.

- [Jim] In a 1960 article, the St. Louis Post Dispatch showed the two-flat her family had owned in Mill Creek and their new nicer home in a better neighborhood on the north side.

So many did not understand the anger and the resentment in the African-American community about what had happened to Mill Creek.

- For a long time, you couldn't live anywhere but there.

(chuckles) You made a decision that we would live here, now you're making a decision that we will no longer live here.

And like you said, it's a matter of choice.

Can I make the decision where I live?

- [Jim] The milk crate project never really met its expectations for residential and commercial development but it did have a lasting impact that wasn't planned, because even as city officials were trying to stabilize the neighborhoods, they were uprooting thousands of people.

And on top of that, a lot of poor blacks and whites continued to come to the city from the south, and they all had to live somewhere.

When the new people moved in, others moved out.

It happened in the white neighborhoods and the black neighborhoods, like the Ville.

- It's almost like we moved in waves.

There's this sort of stable middle class neighborhood, it opens up, more working class people, lower working class people start moving in, middle class people start seeking what they consider to be a better neighborhood, and I think that does happen.

I think class is a factor for sometimes middle class black people moving out of a neighborhood, just like race is a factor when sometimes white people move out of a neighborhood when black people move in.

- [Jim] There had always been waves of movement, and change, and growth.

Very few old St. Louis families or businesses, churches, or synagogues had stayed in one place.

Salem Methodist Church was typical of that.

It had been started near downtown in 1841 by German immigrants and had been moving every 20 or 30 years ever since.

In 1903, when the neighborhood around 15th and Cole was changing, they sold their building to Jewish immigrants and built a new church at Page and Pendleton, which they sold to a black congregation in 1925.

Now in the 1950s, the church was at Kingshighway and Cote Brilliante, and the neighborhood was changing again.

But this time, many of the old church members had moved out of the city altogether and they weren't coming back on Sunday anymore.

- Well, your members are constantly moving west, and we lost that core of German people that was in the city.

Now where they all went to, I don't know, but they scattered and they didn't all come to us anymore.

- [Jim] And so, the church building was sold again, and Salem Methodist Church moved to its sixth location, not just a little further west as some wanted, but far west to the intersection of Highway 40 and Lindbergh Boulevard, in 1956, the very edge of suburban development.

By the end of the century, it would be in the middle of things.

The move here saved the old Salem church, but really in name only.

As it grew again, few members would have any connection to the old city church, or even an awareness of its ethnic roots.

Earlier in the century, church, ethnicity and neighborhood were often all tied together.

But over the years and generations, that would change.

The old languages and accents wouldn't be heard as much, people inter-married, and they moved around.

(polka accordion music) In the 1950s, while blacks and Jews were still excluded from many areas, it seemed that just about everybody else was integrating.

Few suburban developments had any specific ethnic or religious identity.

What defined these new neighborhoods was the price range of the homes.

- These ethnic groups, if you were a fairly recent second or third generation immigrant, becomes less important than if you can afford to buy this house and you're white, that's how we're gonna look at you, and even less than occupation, so that if you look in a lot of the housing developments that were going up in the county, sort of say middle middle class areas in Crestwood, or Florissant, or Creve Coeur, you might have very highly paid union workers from McDonnell Douglas living next to accountants and lawyers.

- [Jim] St. Louis city would continue to try to stabilize, to slow or halt the drain of people, businesses and jobs to the county, but it all just kept leaving.

Even in safe, stable, convenient city neighborhoods, people were looking west and feeling the pull.

- I mean it seemed like that was the thing to do, and boy, there were times when I wished to heck I had never done it because I didn't have a car.

I rode a bus from Kirkwood downtown to 12th and Washington every day and I wanna tell you something, I missed that bus more often than I caught it.

(chuckles) I almost got fired over that.

But, no, I was looking forward to the move out because I thought that's where our future lies, suburbs.

The city just wasn't what it should have been anymore.

- [Announcer] Benefits that give them the pleasure and the comfort of living in well-planned, well-constructed, well-organized homes that are built to be homes for the average American family.

Your boys and girls and my boys and girls, growing up into healthy and vital manhood and womanhood as the citizens of tomorrow.

(somber piano music) - It's impossible to overstate the impact of television.

It had a huge impact on how we saw the world, how we saw our community, how we saw ourselves.

But keep in mind that TV was a business, and for a lot of reasons, a lot of things were kept out of the picture.

Sometimes when people talk about the 1950s, they're really talking about how the decade appeared on TV.

For "Decades", I'm Jim Kirchherr.

- [Harry] The people of the world look to the United States of America as the strong force of freedom.

To them, to the people of the world, we pledge that we shall work side by side with other free nations in order that the men the world over may live in freedom and peace.

(applauding)