We got lost through there coming back from picking peaches about 6 years ago, we lived in a western suburb of St. Louis.
If that was cleaned up it scared the living daylights out of my husband who had all of our children duck down the whole way through the place.
BTW we got lost once in a bad part of town in Detroit once and it was not as scary as East St. Louis...LOL!
ALl the way back in the early sixties my parents would have my brother and me lay down when we would go through there on the way to visit mom's family. The last two Christmases when I went home to visit I've ridden the Metrolink, which is 3.00 for a 60 mile ride from the airport to Belleville. I've told the family that my mother would be having kittens if she were alive and knew some of the neighborhoods I'd been riding the train through. So maybe I'm just trying to whistle past the graveyard.