This large swath of St. Louis was still mixed race up until the 1970's when White Flight was in full swing.

Per a three-part series on MLK Drive by St. Louis Public Radio back in January, 2016, hard times were evident by 1972 when Franklin and Easton were renamed for MLK:

"It was important to have a street named for an activist, absolutely," Todd said (Jesse Todd, long-time civil rights activist and then treasurer of the Democratic Central Committee). But he acknowledged by 1972 the Franklin and Easton were already showing signs of falling on hard times. They became in short order one of the hundreds of streets named for King surrounded by decay and crime and disinvestment."

It got worse the farther you traveled west from Downtown.

"But after MLK Drive passes west through Grand Boulevard, one can see an increasingly powerful state of disuse, wearing away the streetscape, spreading its destructive poison on once proud storefronts where small businesses once thrived, and mocking the empty warehouses and industrial buildings, so many of them not only vacant but also crumbling."

"Valiant, underfunded efforts reveal the futility of efforts to keep ahead of urban blight and decay, so even an ally such as optimism runs down the fronts and sides of buildings and puddles in pools of neglect and decay on the broad avenue called — originally in earnest tribute — Dr. Martin Luther King Drive."

In 2009, the Riverfront Times ran sensationalist piece deeming 14th Street and MLK one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country:

"In a survey of the nation's most crime-ridden neighborhoods by Dr. Andrew Schiller of the website NeighborhoodScout.com, St. Louis' very own downtown, specifically the intersection of 14th Street and Martin Luther King Drive, ranked fourteenth."

Throughout the years, UrbanReviewSTL has documented MLK Drive, from a February, 2017 post assessing the lack of business:

"As residents fled to North County retailers followed them. New shopping areas like Northland (1955), River Roads (1962), Northwest Plaza (1965), and Jamestown Mall (1973) opened to serve the new suburban middle class. Franklin & Easton Avenues would have declined even it not renamed.

Can this corridor be revived? To the point of being the honor it was intended? I have my doubts. Perhaps we should do something different to causally honor Dr. King’s legacy and return the street name to Easton & Franklin Avenues?"

Another UrbanReviewSTL post from January, 2006 documented MLK from the time.

"I can’t think of a more significant street in the African-American community in 1972 than Easton Avenue. Natural Bridge never had the nice pedestrian scale of Easton Avenue and Delmar was significantly residential. Even today you can tell that Easton Avenue was the street in North St. Louis."

"Experiencing the street today and seeing how vibrant it once was has proven depressing to me. The surrounding area, while it does have some positive signs, is largely stuck in deep poverty. So many forces have led to where we are today: government lending policies that encouraged suburban growth while discouraging renovation of existing properties, white flight followed by middle class black flight, closure of the streetcar line and failed policies of “urban renewal” projects."

So there you have a fairly thorough document of MLK leading up to current times.

Now l'll simply share some photos to capture where we're at today. I'll keep the commentary to a minimum and let the pictures do the talking.

To make this photo cache easier to follow and break the story up a bit, I'll take this in three separate legs.

First the eastern terminus extending west through downtown to Leffingwell Avenue: