- I'm Jim Kirchherr, and Living Saint Louis's "Summer of the 20th Century" now brings us to the 1960s.

When we first aired "Decades" 20 years ago, a lot of the memories and even many of the wounds were still pretty fresh.

This time on "Decades," Saint Louis remakes its image and its downtown in the 1960s.

And in the neighborhoods more changes.

For some, there's the problem of growth, for others, the threat of decline, and for another, the hope of creating something altogether new.

(upbeat jazz music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Decades was a co-production of the Missouri History Museum and the Nine Network of Public Media.

- The 1960s are often remembered for cultural, political, and social upheaval, for riots, assassinations, protests, but you can't talk about Sain Louis in the 1960s without also talking about baseball, about The Arch, about the remaking of downtown.

But that public face did, in fact, mask some pretty serious social issues.

(upbeat music) (machinery rumbles) Saint Louis entered the new decade, not just with big talk and big plans, but with a big construction site.

A hole was being dug on the riverfront 60 feet down, and the first concrete would be poured to support a massive monument, an arch, symbolic of the city's historic role as the Gateway to the West.

The project was a source of great pride for many even at this early stage, but others saw a pork barrel project that might not do much more than just sit there.

This was an aging industrial city with serious problems.

Business, shopping, jobs, factories, and middle class residents were leaving the city, and Saint Louis was building an arch.

- In fact, I think there were a lot of skeptics about the arch and a lot of critics about the fact that they had selected that solution for what was happening down there.

Now if the arch had not been such a singular success as a symbol and for everything, as you know and living here, it has meant, if it hadn't had been that singular success in that way, I still today, you would think of it one of the great mistakes Saint Louis ever made, because you tore down the history of the city, leveled it.

- [Jim] Saint Louis had first cleared the site back in the depression, tearing down block after block of old 19th century buildings left from the bygone era of steamboats.

The old riverfront seemed at the time to have no future in a modern city, and Eero Saarinen's arch design, selected in 1948, was a bold statement of modernism.

In 1960, the tallest buildings downtown were the civil courts and Southwestern Bell Buildings, constructed during the boom years of the 1920s away from the river on the Western edge of downtown.

The riverfront arch would dominate the new look of Saint Louis, and it would initiate a building boom that would last for many years.

- The building of the arch was an exciting time, and we were the bankers for the contractors.

And to see it go up was really exciting.

Well that was just a tremendous bonus for the city of Saint Louis.

And it brought a whole new momentum to our community that we hadn't had.

Downtown Saint Louis was kinda dead.

- [Jim] And The Arch really did bring it back to life.

Once the federal money had been approved and the work started, other ideas followed, and soon the new architects' models of the downtown began to show not just an arch but a stadium, parking garages, a new hotel, taking the place of a rundown and seedy part of downtown Saint Louis.

- Well we had the enthusiastic leadership of Gussie Busch who owned, had just bought the cardinals, wanted a new stadium, wanted to bring it downtown, and so they redeveloped that area and built the stadium.

The stadium was built by private money.

That's very unusual as you know today.

- [Jim] Other projects would follow in the '60s and '70s, new buildings and corporate skyscrapers, but the arch came first.

A monument to the city's past and a symbol of its future, it did not escape the realities of the present, the conflicts and the politics of the 1960s.

Civil rights activists were protesting while it was being built, calling for the construction companies to hire more black workers.

The civil rights movement had one important victory since World War II, and the issue now in Saint Louis was jobs, and the companies that would not hire blacks were anything but menial work, if that.

(crowd cheers) In August of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held his March on Washington.

He delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln memorial.

But many Saint Louis civil rights activists missed this historic moment.

They had stayed home to make their own history at Jefferson Bank.

(protesters clap and sing) - It was the first time that we had had a major confrontation between the power structure, the in group, the business community, and just the average African American.

- [Jim] CORE, the Committee of Racial Equality began to pick at the Jefferson Bank, because it would not meet the demand to hire four black employees.

Similar demands had been made of several banks and chain of clothing stores.

They said they were working with the mayor's Fair Employment Commission, and refused to meet CORE's demands.

But only the bank at Jefferson and Washington was targeted for demonstrations.

The management there was ready with an injunction prohibiting demonstrators from interfering with bank business.

And at first, they did just march outside, but late in the afternoon, some protesters entered the lobby and others followed.

- [Norman] It was not planned to be more disruptive.

It evolved into that.

- And we ask you, as officers and employees of this bank, to please leave our premises forthwith.

♪ We shall not be, we shall not be moved ♪ ♪ We shall not be, we shall not be moved ♪ ♪ Just like a tree that's planted by the water ♪ ♪ We shall not be moved - [Jim] There was disagreement among civil rights activists about the use of such confrontational tactics, but broad support came after the protest was over and everyone went home.

That night and into the weekend, protest organizers were arrested and charged with violating the injunction.

It was then that Jefferson Bank became a cause.

- The Jefferson Bank was a fascinating example of cohesion among black lawyers, because that case mobilized all of us.

And on that first day in Judge Michael Scott's court room, the walls were lined with black lawyers.

(laughs) - [Jim] There were more demonstrations outside city jail in support of the defendants, including Norman Seay and city alderman and future congressman, William Clay.

And for months, protesters continued their pickets outside the bank until they began to see real change.

- The demonstrations ended, because the banking industry and other companies began employing African Americans.

In fact, while we were in jail, companies were going out to the Urban League, the NACP, to various social organizations, political organization, and employing African Americans.

And so that's how it ended.

- [Jim] Early the following year, Mayor Tucker's Employment Commission announced that since the previous summer local banks had hired 84 Negroes into office, clerical, and training positions.

And throughout the city, more than 1,000 blacks had been hired or put in training programs by all kinds of companies.

13 of them had never ever before hired a black employee.

(cars whoosh) It was 1964.

Saint Louis would mark the 200th anniversary of its founding, and a lot of the old things were making way for the new.

(crowd cheers) The Cardinals won the pennant that year in the old ball park on North Grant.

Within a few years, it would be gone.

(engine rumbles) There were still street car lots in 1964 that hadn't been replaced by buses, but they too were a part of the old Saint Louis and would soon disappear.

And downtown, everyone could see now that the great monument was going to be more than just a dream.

President Lyndon Johnson visited that year to help kick off the city's bicentennial.

- [President Johnson] You faced a hard choice, and you made it.

The people of Saint Louis chose progress, not decay.

A new spirit of Saint Louis was born.

And today, you look to the future with new pride and renewed confidence.

(wind blows) (gentle music) (rocket roars) - [Jim] There was more to Saint Louis's image as a city on the move than its new riverfront monument.

Saint Louis now had a big part in the great adventure of the 1960s, and it was helping the country to catch up to the Soviet Union in the space race.

(rocket rumbles) McDonald Aircraft had won the contract in 1959 to build the mercury capsules that carried the first Americans into space.

And President John F Kennedy had set the goal of reaching the moon by the end of the decade.

(crowd cheers) The president, himself, came to the plant in 1962 as the space program entered the next phase, the two man voyages of the Gemini capsules.

(people chatter) - And I can imagine no action, no adventure, which is more essential and more exciting than to be involved in the most important and significant adventure that any man has been able to participate in in the history of the world, and it's going to take place in this decade.

And I congratulate you on what you have done, and I congratulate you on being part of this adventure.

Thank you.

(crowd cheers) - [Jim] Kennedy was given a tour of the plant by James McDonald who had started his company in 1939 with just one employee.

It had built aircraft for World War II, Korea, The Cold War, and now for space travel, and it had grown into one of Saint Louis's largest employers.

Its location, by Lambert Field, had helped make North County a booming suburban area.

(people clap) Before the war, Florissant had been a little town with just a few thousand people, old old homes, corner groceries, and neighborhood taverns.

Between 1950 and 1960, it grew from 3,800 to 38,000 people.

- Well I came to Florissant in 1958, and I had been living in University City.

Well I tell you until my husband's family moved down to Florissant, I didn't have any idea where it was, much less how to get out here.

It might as well had been Kansas City.

- [Jim] There were growing pains as this small town grew into a giant suburb.

Newcomers versus old timers on issues like historic preservation, and there was heated debate over a new city charter, which passed, and the old mayor was voted out.

And even though the post-war housing shortage was over, the growth continued.

By 1970, Florissant had a population of 65,000 people.

Much of the county's gain had been the city's loss.

- I think with the civil rights movement, many people who were living, especially in North Saint Louis, were fearful of what was going to happen.

They were fearful that their property values were going to be dropping.

They didn't want to be the last white family in the neighborhood.

And so they were looking for an escape route.

And Florissant was a logical, natural place for them to come, and they did.

- It's important to remember this is a world before 401Ks and estate planning.

The only thing of any significance that most people own, if they can even do that, is their homes.

And that's a very important thing to keep in mind when you try understand why people were so afraid, why people were made so panicky by the prospect of losing all the equity.

They didn't have any other cushion.

- [Jim] And what they saw happening in the old neighborhood was real that when blacks began to move into a formerly all white neighborhood, the houses began selling for lower prices.

It wasn't just the white home owners who made that happen.

Real estate agents, black and white, took advantage of and sometimes created instability, and banks, even federal government policies, considered white suburban neighborhoods to be good investments, older, racially-changing neighborhoods, bad investments.

- So all of a sudden, you've got a team of people helping make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nobody believed in the '60s that there was ever going to be stable integration that neighborhoods would reach some sort of rough proportions, and then stay that way for a while.

Neighborhoods were perceived as being either on the way up, or on the way down.

And most urban neighborhoods were seen as on the way down.

(street car jingles) - [Jim] There was a time even into the '50s when the only part of the county many Saint Louisans knew was what they saw on the long street car ride to Creve Coeur Lake, a popular day trip.

A car or bus trip over the Missouri River Bridge into Saint Charles was a real adventure, but then the new Interstate 70 bridge opening in 1958.

And two years later, the Sunday paper's map of display homes showed one in Saint Charles and one already in Saint Peters.

There were dozens more in what had once been rural Saint Louis County, and almost none in the city of Saint Louis or its older suburbs.

University City had been the Florissant of the street car era, and it had continued to grow after the war, but by 1960, many of its buildings and much of its population was aging, and the Old Loop shopping district was fading.

And then in 1962, the word spread the first black family had moved in.

- There was this moment when everyone panicked, and said, "Oh, what happened in Saint Louis "is gonna happen here.

"Who's gonna be next?"

And the signs began going up, and there really was a sense of powerlessness that forces bigger than we were might destroy this community that we all loved.

- [Jim] Over the next few years, University City was a community in change.

And while city officials and commissions tried to prevent the panic, for sale signs kept going up.

Some real estate agents went door to door looking for business, warning the white home owners that now was the time to get out.

- My very first city council meeting in '67, I mean, there were mobs of people saying, "You're either gonna do something, or we're leaving."

And so we passed a whole series of laws.

Now I look back and we passed a no solicitation, no real estate signs could be posted.

That lasted a couple years before the courts threw it out.

But you know what?

They gave us breathing room.

And since the fear was that we would have overcrowding, and we would have deterioration of property, was there something we could do?

Was there a law we could pass?

Was there something we could put in effect that would prevent the deterioration and prevent overcrowding?

And that was the occupancy permit.

- [Jim] The problem with blight in urban neighborhoods wasn't so much the lack of laws and codes, but the difficulty of enforcement and eviction.

By requiring and occupancy permit, U City could make sure the laws were followed before property changed hands and before people moved in.

Some civil right activists called it the negro occupancy permit law.

But black hoe owners already living in University City had been among the first demanding the council do something.

- We took the heat from the real estate industry, and the lawyers, and the civil rights community, and all the other people who thought there had to be something wrong with this.

(upbeat music) - [Jim] Many whites did move out, and many blacks moved in.

Housing prices declined before they went back up.

And the pattern of racial change, abandonment, and blight had been stopped.

Even a full block by block integration had not been achieved.

There were those in the '60s who believed a fully integrated community might exist if it could be built from the ground up.

In the empty spaces of the Mill Creek Urban Renewal Area, nicknamed Hiroshima Flats by the critics, low rent housing was being built by private developers backed by the federal government.

This was to be a new kind of housing project.

- I wanted to keep people in the city, and I wanted to be integrated, frankly.

And all the projects rebuilt were either white or they were black.

They were not.

So, that's the reason we decided that we would undertake to build Laclede Town.

So we did it, and it was successful from the very beginning.

We had a waiting list, three and 400 people.

- And the people who came to live in Laclede Town came from everywhere and anywhere, socioeconomically, ethnically, racially.

It was just really wonderful to see how we worked it.

We had our differences.

People there were like, "Well, "we're supposed to have differences."

(upbeat music) - [Jim] But that integration and diversity, the students, the artists, teachers, activists, it didn't happen naturally.

Laclede Town was run by a man named Jerome Berger, and he was the social engineer.

It didn't matter what federal rules said about fairness and non-discrimination, he decided who got in and who didn't and into which apartment in which building.

- His role was clearly to make sure that this was, if not utopian, an ideal community made up of a whole bunch of different kinds of people that were going to make this new concept work and integration in all its form.

- [Jim] Planners and officials from other cities came to Saint Louis to see what made Laclede Town work, and it maintained its reputation well into the 1970s.

But then the pattern of urban decline began.

- I know we stayed 'til '77, and she had stayed on there for a while after that, but it got rough and it got tough, and it was not fun to live there, and then began to question where it was going, and it wasn't going where it needed to and had promised in we wished it had.

And you could say it's the idealism of the '60s and such, that kind of thinking, but there were loads of people who wanted that to stay on, and we worked at it.

(gentle music) (helicopter whirls) - [Jim] The Gateway Arch was topped off on the morning of October 28th, 1965.

National Geographic featured Saint Louis in its November issue saying, "A new spirit soared "in mid America's proud old city."

Raymond Tucker was quoted as saying, "The era "of the wrecking ball was just about over, "that Saint Louis had made the room "and now it could grow again."

But by then, Tucker was out of office.

The man who had overseen the building of the arch was defeated by an alderman who would now take over the marketing plan.

The new mayor was a colorful man with a colorful name of Alfonso J Cervantes.

He had the energy to lead what he and just about everyone else was talking about.

- The rebirth of Saint Louis.

- I found Al Cervantes to be an absolutely fascinating man dedicated to what he was doing.

Tucker and he didn't get on.

Civic Progress and he didn't get on.

He started his own group, but considerable notch down from Civic Progress, The Ambassadors, because he wasn't Civic Progress's kinda guy.

- Cervantes was a (fist pounds) do-it-my-way kinda guy, and that didn't always fly with some of our strong personalities.

Still doesn't today.

(people chatter) (people clap) - [Jim] When Cervantes took office, Saint Louis was on a roll.

The new baseball and football stadium opened in 1966, and the city hosted the All Star game that summer.

And in the following two season, the Cardinals would be in the World Series beating the Red Socks in '67, and losing in seven games to the Tigers in '68.

(puck slaps) At the arena, a collection of hockey players was being turned into the new expansion team, the Saint Louis Blues, offsetting the loss of the basketball team when the Hawks moved to Atlanta.

In the '60s, Saint Louis would win some and lose some, and nobody knew that better than AJ Cervantes.

The mayor is remembered for helping to bring a replica of Columbus's ship, the Santa Maria, to the riverfront as a new tourist attraction, and then it broke free in a storm and sank in the river.

It was repaired and brought back, but it just didn't make it.

It was taken away to Florida where it was destroyed in a fire.

- He was always out there trying to get something done, but that marketing enthusiasm can sometimes get you in trouble.

- [Jim] An even bigger and more expensive fiasco was the Spanish Pavilion, said to be the most beautiful building at the New York World's Fair.

After its closing, the Pavilion was free to anyone who wanted to take it apart, move it, and put it back together.

Cervantes was convinced it belonged in downtown Saint Louis.

- I knew it was just be great as a tourist attraction, and that people from all over the world would then come to see the Spanish International Pavilion.

- [Jim] Private funds were raised for the project, which became far more expensive than anyone imagined, and then when it was all done, it just didn't seem clear what the Spanish Pavilion was supposed to do or be.

It quickly ran into financial problems, and eventually was sold and became the base of a new downtown hotel.

But Mayor Cervantes would leave his mark.

He pushed hard for a bond issue that built a brand new downtown convention center, a key to the city's new business of tourism.

But one of the most important pieces of the new downtown was one of the least glamorous.

The Poplar Street Bridge opened in 1967, an eight lane, toll-free bride at which more than 100 miles of local interstate highways would converge.

They would help to bring the visitors to the arch, the stadium, and the convention center, but every day the highways would also be packed with cars heading out of the city, passing the aging neighborhoods and stores, and going out to the new suburban subdivisions and shopping centers.

- If we cannot get, know all the answers, we need to know.

We can and do know that for the problems of urbanization, this is the decade of decision.

(helicopter whirls) (gentle music) - The Gateway Arch was a grand achievement, the result of many ideas that had evolved over decades even generations, a great symbol of confidence and pride, but it was completed at a time when this and many other cities with a glorious past were facing a very uncertain future.

For "Decades," I'm Jim Kirchherr.

(rocket roars)