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East St Louis wasn’t safe at night 5+ decades ago.

One can only imagine what it is like now.

Nope. We lived in the western St. Louis 'burbs in the mid and late 60s. Even as teens with new drivers licenses, we knew you didn't go to East St. Louis. There were big race riots there in 1917, 100 years ago.

There is one good thing about East St. Louis - it was the eastern terminous of the Eads Bridge built in the 1870s (OT):

Eads Bridge is a steel technology combined road and railway bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, connecting St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois. Opened in 1874, it was one of the earliest long bridges built across the Mississippi, the world' first all steel construction, and built high enough so steamboats could travel under.
The bridge is named for its designer and builder, James B. Eads. When completed in 1874, the Eads Bridge was the longest arch bridge in the world, with an overall length of 6,442 feet. The ribbed steel arch spans were considered daring, as was the use of steel as a primary structural material: it was the first such use of true steel in a major bridge project. Steel could be used for structural purposes only after the perfection of the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes in the 1850s and 60s. So the building material itself was quite new.
The Eads Bridge was also one of the first bridges to make use of pneumatic caissons. The Eads Bridge caissons, still among the deepest ever sunk, were responsible for one of the first major outbreaks of "caisson disease" (also known as "the bends" or decompression sickness). Fifteen workers died, two other workers were permanently disabled, and 77 were severely afflicted.
On June 14, 1874, John Robinson led a "test elephant" on a stroll across the new Eads Bridge to prove it was safe. A big crowd cheered as the elephant from a traveling circus lumbered towards Illinois. It was believed that elephants had instincts that would keep them from setting foot on unsafe structures. July 4, 1874 opened with a 100-gun salute (50 on each side of the river). Then, with 150,000 people looking on, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman drove the last spike, completing Eads Bridge. Eads sent 14 locomotives back and forth across the bridge at one time. The opening day a parade stretched 15 miles through the streets of St. Louis.

East St Louis wasn’t safe at night 5+ decades ago.

One can only imagine what it is like now.

...

This incident occurred at 10 in the morning, so maybe that gives an idea.

“East St Louis wasn’t safe at night 5+ decades ago.”OK, BUT-—longer than that ago it was called an ALL AMERICAN CITY by an administration run by some brothers named KENNEDY ...