For two weeks, I'd watched from Michigan as Ferguson, Missouri erupted in violence. Cable news tickertape says it's a war zone. My Midwestern sensibilities tell me it's always okay to come home, so I aimed R&T's long-term C7 Corvette Stingray towards North St. Louis County.

The 520-mile overnight trek from Ann Arbor slips past in two chunks, punctuated only by single-attendant gas stations in Battle Creek and Alton, Illinois. There's not much to see in between, but plenty of time to think. An embossed placard above the Stingray's shifter reads: "Built in Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA."

Law enforcement is represented in every conceivable variety.

St. Louis is a difficult place to explain. During its heyday as a boomtown for industrial migration, mixed-race factory workforces weren't uncommon, but all-white housing covenants were stringently enforced. The Shelley v. Kraemer US Supreme Court case, which effectively disallowed explicitly racist housing codes in 1948, originated from a disputed two-story masonry at 4600 Labadie Avenue. Housing covenants fell away in the 1950s. By and large, St. Louisans' were too quaint for defiance. Instead, they left.

White flight from downtown accelerated around the time of the Shelley verdict. A de facto race line replaced legal segregation, driving a stake between St. Louis City and St. Louis County, with resources falling towards the latter in staggering disproportion. Inadequate public transportation, gerrymandered districting, and circumspect zoning policies all insured wealth discrepancy between the areas became an incredible, and insurmountable, plateau. Separate tax structures. Separate police forces. Separate schools. A fragmented St. Louis of Haves and Have-nots, often synonymous with white and black as a consequence of geographical composition, swelled westward.

Even so, a handful of communities straddling the northern edge of this fault line—among them Hazelwood, Florissant, and Ferguson—proved unique. They had nearby factories and infrastructure and manpower, an expansive socioeconomic palate anchored by thousands of blue-collar heads of household. Things here were okay, and this is where the Stingray was born.

Humid midnight eases into a summer dawn as the C7 rumbles by 3809 Union Boulevard. I lived in St. Louis for two decades without ever coming here. This place was once a General Motors epicenter, sprawled over 175 acres, responsible for producing the Impala wagon, Caprice and America's sports car, touting a union payroll of over 12,000.

Except that there's no 3809 Union Boulevard anymore.

Glass crunches beneath the Stingray's massive rolling footprint as I slow down and idle in front of the nearest posted address, 3901, an offensively nondescript business park. I cruise the dozen or so adjacent fenced industrial lots. Some offer knee-high weeds and piles of brick, others crumbling concrete structures, but there's absolutely no recognition that 695,214 Corvettes sprang from this tract between 1954 and 1981.

It's easiest to blame the local politicians. When Kentucky pitched GM an outstanding tax package to steal away Corvette production, St. Louis auto workers marched down to City Hall and plead for a counterproposal until the eleventh hour. They were ignored. Those 1200 or so workers were supposed to simply migrate to a new plant in nearby suburban Wentzville, but when that facility's opening was delayed, a horde of UAW members stunned everyone by exercising their union relocation clause. In the summer of 1981, nearly 1000 St. Louis auto workers left for Kentucky.

It wasn't as much the sheer volume as it was the abruptness. These people voted. They owned homes. They were skilled, organized and most importantly, hired from within the community. They had pull.

The Corvette's departure is a chronological marker, if not a turning point, for numerous North County communities that have since witnessed an exodus of hope. More manufacturing jobs disappeared soon after. Carter Carburetor closed its doors on 3000 employees. Ford's factory closure axed 2500 workers. And, for many, the promise of social mobility evaporated. Turnouts at local elections fell off. Real estate values dropped. The area's racial composition, once broad, became skewed. And tense. Revenue from local businesses dwindled as they were shuttered and replaced by exploitive conglomerate outposts. The subprime mortgage crisis ravaged this area worse than a night's petty looting ever could.

When you're at Goody Goody Diner, you have to order 'The Wilbur.' It's a local delicacy—a grotesque, heaping pile of hot food—consisting of an omelet filled with potatoes, onions peppers and tomatoes, all drowning in chili cheese. At sunrise on Saturday, I drive the Stingray toward 5900 Natural Bridge, where Goody's has stood since it opened in 1948, just a few blocks from the Union Boulevard GM plant. Autoworkers ate here a lot, and helped make The Wilbur famous.

It's delicious.

I sleep through the day at my parents' house, smack dab on the city-county border, then make for Ferguson around 10 pm. Most of the rioting, including that shown in the oft-looped QuikTrip cameraphone video, took place along a single drag of West Florissant Avenue. Actually, it's shocking how small the affected area is. Blocks turn into miles during a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Widespread looting is sexy. A dozen shameless smash-and-grabs aren't. That story feels incredibly peripheral once you see everything else that's happening here.

A shopping center at the street's northbound entrance is spotlit and sectioned off—satellite news vans in one area, state marshals in another, a camouflaged army patrol with assault rifles and Humvees towards the back.

Typically, rolling a $65,000 sports car down West Florissant at bicyclist's pace would make you the center of attention, but there's a greater spectacle on the sidewalks. Demonstrators here are a heterogeneous lot. Calm. Angry. Erstwhile hippies. Church groups. Journalists. Vultures. Some march with signs, others sit in lawn chairs, chatting. Still, their presence pales in comparison to that of law enforcement, which is represented in every conceivable variety.

Things here were okay, and this is where the Stingray was born.

There isn't a single parking lot or strip mall in sight that doesn't have a cluster of St. Louis City or County cops laying in wait, while State Trooper patrol cars pace the strip. Hip-badged plainclothes officers mill about while officers in riot gear smoke cigarettes behind the McDonald's where The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery was arrested. I get pulled over by a university campus patrol car and asked not to cruise so slowly. Law enforcement may not actually outnumber civilians by a ratio of 100:1, but it certainly feels that way—unrest spurred by either actual or perceived police brutality, quelled by an overwhelming show of force.

Through the windshield of the Corvette, it's hard to spot the anarchic ghetto villains that need to be put down. Instead, the view holds too many payday loan kiosks to count. This is a desperate community. A third of its residents live in poverty. Nearly 50 percent of its homeowners are drowning under their mortgages. Two public schools lost accreditation in the last year. The momentary furor on TV is an irrational reaction to irrational circumstances. The deeper problems here are long-festering.

Nobody's sure if an unarmed 18-year-old was killed in an act of self-defense or simply gunned down unnecessarily on August 9th, but I know that human beings don't exist in a vacuum: He graduated from Normandy High, 3.6 miles from Labadie Avenue, and was shot to death 5.8 miles from where St. Louis used to make Chevrolet Corvettes.

On I-55 returning to Ann Arbor, the placard on the Stingray's console catches my eye again. I can't help but wonder what Michael Brown's life might have been like if he'd been born 288 miles away in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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