WebsterMark wrote on 07/22/13 at 08:05:06:



They needed a really dirty and dilapidated building so they came to ours!

Wow,, thats an emotionally confusing thing,,

Yee HAA! Theyre filming HERE!
Okay,, thats cool,


They needed a really dirty and dilapidated building..

OOOokay,, well,, uhh,, I work in a really shabby place,,
not near AS cool,,


What kinda work was being done there?

What kinda work was being done there?

if you had your picture taken at a Sears or K-Mart back in the late 70's early 80's, chances are they were developed at CPI on Washington Ave downtown St. Louis. I worked 2nd shift in the dark room. the negatives were on long 500' rolls like giant paper towel rolls. We installed the rolls in the dark on one side of the developing machine. The rolls wound through the rollers into the fluid and came out developed on the other side. The trick was 'cutting' in just before one roll ended. You had to feel the roll in the dark and when there was perhaps 20' left, you unrolled that, cut in the new roll with masking tape and rolled it  back up before it got pulled in. if you missed it, you'd have to wait for the end to come out and then re-rack a plastic sheet through the rollers and start over. It was actually a really cool job for a kid to have.

The  best part is I was riding a Yamaha XS400 Special at the time. I use to use a timer on my watch and 'race' myself home every night to see if I could beat my record time. I've had two near misses on a street bike and one of these was while I was racing home. Hit a curb on a long left hand sweeper because I was pushing to fast. somehow, I bounced over the curb, missed a pole, landed on sidewalk, jumped back into the street without missing a beat. Sh*t my pants probably.....

Nope, just raced home at night when the traffic wasn't a problem. Rode it 200 miles one way to college all the time. A few times, I left after last afternoon class, rode 3 1/2 hours home for dinner, turned around and rode back that night. No fairing and open faced helmet with sunglasses. I didn't know any better. Hell, people rode from Missouri to California and back on bikes that today that because of their CC's, we call suitable for only urban riding. Not sure how many miles I put on it, but like Rooster on Little Blackie in True Grit, I rode that horse until it died....

The Ravaging of St. Louis

Today you can walk around many of the streets in St. Louis and they're empty. Nobody's there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America's most devastated urban landscapes.
The devastation is so widespread that it's hard to grasp how much has been lost. You visit 1900 Montgomery today, and you see buildings, with spacious garbage filled lots between them. The vacant houses succumb to fire or wind or gravity or the bulldozer, one after another, and another, and another, and another, and another... thousands of anothers. This is St. Louis today. A study in urban decay.

Today you can walk around many of the streets in St. Louis and they're empty. Nobody's there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America's most devastated urban landscapes.
The devastation is so widespread that it's hard to grasp how much has been lost. You visit 1900 Montgomery today, and you see buildings, with spacious garbage filled lots between them. The vacant houses succumb to fire or wind or gravity or the bulldozer, one after another, and another, and another, and another, and another... thousands of anothers. This is St. Louis today.

Gee Webby, maybe you should raze SL and plant trees there before you worry about Detroit.  

Start by practicing on Memphis. Leave the "entertainment district" (Beale Street) as the core, keep the "arts district" (Midtown), let the suburbs go back to being their own cities. Raze the rest of the city. Nothing would miss it but the rats and roaches...

Surprised I did live through it. I don't often think about it, but I've had quite a time.

One of the more interesting things that happened to me is I got my a$$ kicked my Leon Spinks as a kid. I was the only white boy in 2nd and 3rd grade. It's a long story, but we lived in the slums for a while. It was 1968 and into part of 1970. If you remember your history, there was a lot of racial crap going on. Of course I didn't know that and neither did any other kid, but looking back on it now, the tension was palpable. My brothers were older, one in high school so he remembers it far better than I do. All I remember about Leon is he was in the 5th or 6th grade and he had hands as big as a man. it was a very short fight....actually, not really a fight at all. I couldn't have come up to much more than his waist. .My job at lunch was handing out milk cartons and something happened he didn't like! Hell, years later, other guys cashed checks for getting whipped.... I didn't!

For me as a kid, it was something of an adventure. We had no heat for long periods of time in the winter and sometimes no light. We had a wood burning stove in our room. The house was 4 stories, but the top 3 were pretty much uninhabitable. That is a great playground for a kid. I remember we did fix a room on the 2nd floor to use in the summer. The stuff I saw.....  I stepped outside once and saw two guys walking down the street with a gun. One of the guys turned and pointed at a group of men sitting on a curb and shot one guy though the neck. Hell of a lot of blood. Couldn't tell you if he lived or died. I have a weird memory of a cat licking the blood after the cops left. The old man in the building behind us died, but no one knew it until the smell got bad. My brothers told me his dog had been eating on him. Maybe they were pulling my leg on that part, not sure. Our neighbor was sneaking in from visiting his girlfriend when his wife smashed his head with a  big iron skillet. I have a memory of seeing some of his brains on the porch.

The reason many of our cities, including Detroit are struggling or falling? Globalization...It didn't just destroy the middle class, and drive down wages of all jobs, not just the remaining manufacturing jobs. It weakened Democracy in general, and it welcomed in our current Fascism.

Almost never mentioned is the levels of debt we have incurred, in our Cities, States, and the Federal Government. Those jobs used to pay taxes here in America. But not any longer. They aren't supporting any American "Dream" these days, they aren't paying sales, gas, state, federal, property, or any other tax.

I don't think we can blame Detroit, or workers for the quality of the cars, or the eventual failure of sales due to quality foreign vehicles flooding the US market. I have always wondered if Japan was literally 'given' the small car market while Detroit continued to churn out the big gas guzzlers.

These were decisions made at the top levels of the companies, to outsource jobs, ignoring trends, ignoring quality, and allowing Japan to take the lead on all of that.

Those were but a few top-down problems, that has all but destroyed the industry and the city, not workers "asking for too much." I'm sick of that BS meme. Even with what unions did ask for, it was still but a scarce living for a family. But at least it was a somewhat pleasant living...compared to now, anyway.

Industry and national trade gave rise to cities. Without industry, industrial plants and trade within America (not primarily with foreign countries), the great cities are doomed.                                                                                      

To convince people to "blame the unions" for dang near everything was a masterful achievement for the profit mongers.

To just blame 'blacks' for the demise of the great cities of America being less than honest.

You have no idea Jog!.....   I can honestly say I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I've done all kinds of things, been from one end of the planet to the other, gone hungry and have eaten in restaurants you would not believe, slept on the floor and in hotel rooms bigger than my house, went from no parents in the slums to having my brothers and I reunited to grow up in  a middle class neighborhood, raised by my two aunts. My aunt brought in 4 of us kids into her house after she was just getting ready to work part time and travel. both my aunts were recent widows.  In her own house, she gave up her bedroom so 3 boys could stay together. For the next 7 or 8 years until we began moving out, she slept on a pull out couch in the dining room. Simply amazing.....