The Northside of St. Louis, Missouri, is disappearing. That isn’t a figurative statement, nor is it simply waxing lyrical about the slow tragedy of urban decline. It’s literal: whole houses are being stolen, brick by brick, off of their foundations, by thieves who leave only stone facades and heaps of destroyed millwork behind. Buildings that, in virtually any other city—or even in another neighborhood of St. Louis itself—would be considered historic treasures to be carefully guarded by preservationists and fussed over by groundskeepers are being targeted by arsonists and vandals instead.



One of the most recent buildings to vanish is the James L. Clemens House, formerly one of the city’s most intact antebellum mansions and home to a relative of Mark Twain (yes, we’re talking about that Clemens family). In the early hours of the morning, flames engulfed the property, possibly ending decades of hope for the restoration of a city landmark in a single blaze. While no cause of this fire has yet been identified in local media, what we do know about how the Clemens House burned shines a light on some of the greatest challenges facing Northside St. Louis, and the uncomfortable realities of how we seek to revitalize so many of our cities and towns.

To understand the Clemens House tragedy, you first have to understand the landscape of north St. Louis. A combination of white flight, disproportionate government subsidies for central corridor development at the expense of Northside neighborhoods and other forms of systemic disinvestment (more on that later) has left the region deeply segregated, cash-strapped and crumbling. In all but a small handful of neighborhoods north of the city dividing line at Delmar Avenue, between 90 and 100% of residents are black, and median household incomes hover around $18,000 per year in the neighborhoods closest to the divide. Unsurprisingly, this stratification isn’t good news for the housing stock: median home value in that particular neighborhood is stuck at $73,000 (compared to $335,000 south of Delmar) and the majority of St. Louis’ 12,000-some tax delinquent and abandoned properties, many in dangerous disrepair, are located there.

The Clemens house, though, wasn’t tax delinquent, nor was it abandoned. It was dilapidated before the fire, but it did have an owner, and that owner had spoken publicly for years about his plans to restore this local landmark to its former glory.

The only problem? That restoration never materialized. And that same developer has been promising the restoration of literally hundreds of crumbling buildings on the Northside for over a decade.

The owner of the Clemens house is Paul McKee of Northside Regeneration, LLC. McKee is a Northside native and professional developer who’s become controversial for, some would say, not doing much development at all, and doing so for carefully guarded reasons that raise significant questions about how we revitalize our town’s most disinvested neighborhoods. Local architect, preservationist and writer Paul Hohmann recently gave an excellent summary of McKee’s contentious history in the region for his excellent Vanishing STL blog; I recommend that you read it in full, but here’s a thorough excerpt: