After the Michael Brown grand jury verdict on November 25, two main areas of violence broke out in Greater St. Louis. The worst and most reported occurred in Ferguson itself, in St. Louis County. Less noticed, a separate outbreak of violence damaged 21 storefront windows in the South Grand/Tower Grove neighborhood, in the City of St. Louis. The story of how the neighborhood reacted to the violence is very personal. The Tower Grove East neighborhood will become our new home next year, after we complete a sustainable preservation and rehab of an historic residence we are currently buying there, just a few blocks from the violence on South Grand.
The next morning, residents from the neighborhoods spontaneously appeared up and down the street with brooms and pans and bags, etc. Plywood went up everywhere in place of broken glass on the historic storefronts, and to protect the glass that was left from further outbreaks. Though boarded up, businesses, stores and restaurants opened and started trying to persevere. Yet, even swept clean and back in business, a beautiful historic commercial street had become bruised and ugly overnight.
But, as Forrest Gump might say, ugly is as ugly does. The neighborhood association used social media to call for St. Louis artists to use the space on the plywood boards. Many artists responded with murals both on South Grand and in Ferguson. On South Grand, the murals, elegantly, beautifully, movingly express the mind and heart of an extraordinarily diverse, inclusive, multicultural, peace loving, tolerant and altogether congenial neighborhood.
Some images of the art can be seen in the results of this Yahoo image search. But anyone with adequate bandwidth to watch a YouTube, should view the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's montage of these remarkable works.
This is the sixth post in a series detailing a quest in which the Left's have been looking for and planning the sustainable rehabilitation of a home needing conservation in an historical preservation district in St. Louis, where we intend to spend our retirement years. The previous post in the series Sustainable Building #5: Echoes of Ruthless Capitalism, contains links other, earlier posts.