When they say “near St. Louis” my mind reaches back to the one time I was ever in East St. Louis, IL, in 1984. Here it was, nearly 2 decades after the urban riots of the 1960’s - and there were still burned up, boarded up and abandoned buildings from those riots (wrapped in a lovely perimeter of rusty chain link fence. I’m sure that Detroit is giving it a run for its money today - but this was one of the worst and most blighted places I had ever seen.
East STL hasn’t changed one bit.