A PLACE IN THE SUN  by robert e. lipscomb

The gala floats of the annual Mardi Gras parade wind their way down Seventh Street, pass Busch Stadium, eventually into the Soulard neighborhood with tens of thousands of giddy revelers thronging the sidewalks and parking lots of area libation stations. On the riverside of South Seventh, a sprawling modern commercial-industrial labyrinth. On the Market side, the oldest, continuously viable neighborhood in the city of St. Louis, the venerable Soulard. But, unbeknownst to the parade-goers, bead-mongers and beer slingers, lurk scores of ghosts. They are the shadows of former boarding houses and rooming houses long closed and torn down. Always a working class community, the Soulard and immediate environs once played host to thousands of single persons living on the economic and social margins of this mid-west industrial burg. Temporary laborers, the unemployed or underemployed, wanderers and vagabonds all made heavy use of the only places in town that offered cheap and easily accessible accommodations.
 

At their peak of proliferation, it is estimated that nearly sixty rooming houses thrived in the area with hundreds scattered elsewhere throughout the city. Today, most rooming houses are located on the north side of the city, some operating on the sly under the radar view of licensing officials. Other large SRO’s (single room occupancy) buildings such as the Mark Twain Hotel downtown, the Lincoln Hotel in midtown and the Salvation Army’s restrictive Railton Residence on 18th Street represent the last of a once common housing option for the city’s poorer residents.
 

Never popular in the estimation of the common citizenry and socially-connected, rooming houses, boarding houses and SRO hotels have purposefully been driven out of business, out-zoned, bulldozed for “urban renewal” and otherwise hounded to virtual extinction. At the same time, the need for affordable accommodations has never been greater. Only during the 1920’s and the Great Depression has the demand been so pronounced.
 

The first barrier to this type of affordable housing takes the form of fear. These fears influence legislation regarding the language of zoning regulations and seemingly heartless decisions by public officials thereby creating barriers that prevent the establishment of boarding/rooming houses in large existing buildings or the construction of new ones. The physical layouts of large older houses and the surrounding infrastructure compound the problem. Nobody wants to mess with the inherent problems associated with “permanent transients”, being primarily upticks in local crime, drug and alcohol abuse and the perceived depreciation of real estate. However, none of these things have occurred near the flagship of SRO’s in St. Louis, the aforementioned Mark Twain Hotel. This facility is a standing argument for the increased existence of the SRO hotel for temporarily employed people. The nationally acclaimed Linderman Creek new build project also proves that when managed properly, SRO’s can blend into existing neighborhoods without depleting values.
 

Up to and throughout the 1920’s, many families took in boarders, with the “landlady” acting as surrogate parent or head of the household wielding supreme authority over social life, the guests and even curfews. To those lucky enough to land in such a home, life was considerably improved – at least for the duration of their stay. Boarding houses provide places of temporary refuge for often vulnerable human vessels. The alternative is the wholly unsatisfactory and perfunctory services provided by the limited “emergency” shelters whose lobbies and doorways may be just another hellgate to social unrest and personal violence. They exist primarily to micro-manage a seeming uber-abundance of vagabonds in a living theatre of slapstick tragedy. Such meager bunk space facilities are the very metaphoric epitome of the often-transitory nature of existence. Rather than helping the social fabric stay together, they represent its continuing fraying edges. Curiously, or not, the professional social service industry has grown as the rooming house option has disintegrated. Rather than serve as the only housing option for the homeless, a better mission purpose would be to catch those persons on their way to a better solution – such as the SRO hotel. Today, emergency shelters now deal with those broken souls still suffering the spasms of nostalgic pain slowly being massaged away by denial, isolation and, often, self-medication in the form of drug and alcohol abuse. They too have usually bought into the judgements of the society at-large who deem these classic outcasts who struggle with poverty and instability (both physical and mental/emotional) as the indicators and alert warnings of the existence of personal moral failure. In other words, stigmatizing and further degrading whatever self-esteem exists by equating poverty and homelessness with not just a financial situation – but a critical character flaw. This has changed so dramatically for the worse since the early part of the modern century when little old ladies rented rooms to wandering souls.
 

Today, modern hotel rooms like the downtown Days Inn offer unsupervised individual freedom, a cosmopolitan mixture of neighbors, diverse area services, mobility and the “liberation” from excessive personal possessions. However, this unfettered existence also creates cultural and social anxiety in the loosening of domestic connections often deemed essential for the maintaining of good “moral order”. Thus, in the economic and social limbo of the SRO, normal society views such facilities as the potential epicenter of moral depravity. Being poor isn’t the crime here, it’s that poverty serves as an indicator of personal shortcomings. Such attitudes are not helped by the marginalized who persist in delusional thinking and anti-social behavior or by seeking solace in drugs and alcohol in the vain attempt to gain relief from the cruel efficiencies of reality. All transients then must live in a pervasive gray cloud of suspicions both warranted and not, depending, of course, on the individual involved. Therein lies the rub.
 

Individual circumstances and character are almost never figured into the equation. Conventional wisdom professed that SROs and boarding houses uniformly attracted and housed the ”undesirable” persons of society and, therefore, must be located elsewhere, if allowed to exist at all. Remember the Soulard neighborhood we visited earlier in our tale? Over four-hundred residences where demolished to make way for a commercial-industrial zone along South Seventh. Within those neighborhoods stood many rooming houses providing single working persons dignified, basic accommodations. Nobody but the most bold would claim to this day that a large part of that “urban renewal” demolition was designed to eliminate once and for all the existence of temporary lodgings.
 

Carved into some of the moldings in the Lincoln Hotel are people’s initials, names and dates, presumably of former residents. No one has really attempted to remove them because, perhaps, these pitiful scratchings are someone’s claim to having ever existed at all, to have been incarnate someplace, a heartrending bid for some kind of acknowledgement of existence or immortality. The empty nest left by a long-gone sparrow as its lingering souvenir of mortal being.
 

Where once thousands of rooming houses and transients hotels sprouted all around the nation to house the unemployed and working poor, today barely exist at all. Yet, last year, a record number of people where laid-off from their jobs. Not all would lose their homes, but many, many have. The difference today being, of course, they have nowhere to go.
 

The transient nature of life is exemplified in a city like St. Louis, as the whole of the region seems to slope towards and converge on the fast-flowing, almighty Mississippi River. Things flow on, including people and their little lives. The river is a point along and towards which all major and idealized sites of this city converge. To look far downstream is to see to its visual vanishing point. Rooming houses and SRO’s of the city are the social vanishing points, to which the marginalized gaze, eventually flowing ever downstream, seemingly unstoppable, finally disappearing. Alas, like the waters of the great river, more wanderers flow in and pass us by on their life journeys, ever flowing on the human tide of a tragedy nearly triumphant.
 

robert lipscomb has been a senior writer for Whats Up Magazine since August 2002. He is working to finish his first novel about homelessness, Down Town.

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