In 2017, the foundation partnered with a for-profit company to purchase and develop the abandoned hospital and, after spending about $90 million in total investment (roughly a fifth from the couple), helped build it into what it is becoming today. She and her husband, Bob Fox, run a private foundation focused on economic opportunity and criminal justice reform. Named Delmar Divine, it is the brainchild of Maxine Clark, a former executive at the May Company and the founder of the Build-a-Bear Workshop. The refurbished hospital, which was originally built in 1904, has been reinvented as a hub of activity for groups like Fisher’s. There was hardly any furniture yet, save for the computer workstations that the men her group tries to help - most of them Black - will be able to use. When we met, Fisher was putting the final touches on a new office for her nonprofit organization, the SoulFisher Ministries, housed in a once-derelict former city hospital that now smells of fresh paint. A math whiz who initially trained as an accountant, she collected a fistful of degrees and became an activist who connects former inmates with job training and opportunities. “I just got sick of myself,” she reflected. Louis is Shawntelle Fisher, who spent 15 years in and out of prison before deciding that she needed to change. One of the people working on fixing North St. One thing all can agree on: There simply isn’t enough public and private money attacking the problem. With all that have come tensions over just whom, exactly, all this activity is for: Is it the Black residents whose incomes have been halved, in real terms, since the 1980s? Or is it the mainly white hipsters who have begun tiptoeing back into the neighborhood? Louis, and the area around Delmar Boulevard in particular, is at once a familiar zone of urban inequality and an utterly unfamiliar laboratory for innovation. That exodus has, paradoxically, led to an explosion of activism on housing, criminal justice and racial equity. The city’s Black population has declined by nearly 17,000 people since 2010, while the white population ticked up by nearly 1,000. Louis, unlike many postindustrial American cities, a key problem now is not gentrification so much as Black flight: Black residents are leaving for more spacious homes, lower crime, jobs and better services in the middle-class suburbs. Louis has shrunk from 857,000 at its peak in 1950 to about a third of that today.īut for St. The population within the urban boundaries of St. Louis Post-Dispatch, calls “Uncle Ray”: the indelible legacy of race and racism. The rise of this left-leaning governing coalition has led to grumbling within the mainly white old guard of the local Democratic Party establishment, who see the newcomers as interlopers who don’t understand what the city needs to thrive economically.īut it has also injected fresh momentum into efforts to address the legacy of what Sylvester Brown Jr., who was a longtime columnist for The St. Jones has allied herself with a new progressive majority on the board of aldermen and with Cori Bush, who represents the city in Congress and is close to the so-called Squad in Washington. Louis is also undergoing political and social change: Tishaura Jones, the first Black woman to be elected mayor, took office in April 2021. Mark McCloskey later made a failed run for Missouri’s open Senate seat. (After pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges over the confrontation, they were pardoned by Missouri’s governor.)Īn image of the McCloskeys became a symbol of the conservative backlash to the protests for racial justice. It was just off Delmar Boulevard, in a gated neighborhood within Central West End, that one of the most revealing episodes of the 2020 protest movement for racial justice took place.Īt the height of the nationwide anger over George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer, Black Lives Matter supporters streamed past the Renaissance palazzo-style home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white couple who brandished firearms at the demonstrators. In wealthier, mostly white areas just south of Delmar, stately Gilded Age mansions listed in the millions of dollars line privately managed, manicured streets that contrast sharply with the dilapidated rowhouses mere blocks away. In some especially troubled areas, repossessed homes can be picked up for as little as $1. Louis its reputation as one of the perennial murder capitals of America, alongside more diverse, middle-class outposts like University City that have produced Black celebrities including the rapper Nelly and the basketball stars Jayson Tatum and Bradley Beal. North of Delmar Boulevard lies an expanse of low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods whose struggles with violence have given St. LOUIS - It’s called the Delmar Divide, named for the once-grand boulevard that bisects this city into enclaves that have long been more starkly segregated than almost anywhere else in America.
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