Maybe some other FReeprs out there can comment on when E. St. Louis turned into hellhole central. It’s pretty sad it has been that way for so long.
I grew up outside of East St. Louis. The place has always had something of a gritty reputation. In its earlier days it was a typical river town. A hundred years ago, Eisenhower went to Jefferson Barracks to take his exams for West Point. He and a couple of other guys decided to skip out one night, took a street car to St. Louis, and wound up in East St. Louis. Asking for assistance to get back, they found themselves with a revolver barrel in their faces. In 1918 there was a major race riot there. The Shelton Gang had a presence there during Prohibition and beyond, and the outfit of Buster Worthman did until the 1970's. It has always had its share of poverty.
I would have to say, though, that the place was at least liveable -- not anywhere near the basket case it is now -- until the late 1970's. My mother shopped in downtown ESL in the '50's and '60's. The downtown evidently had been pretty impressive at one time. We would go through ESL all the time to get to places like Collinsville or Fairmont City, often at night. My father bought a '68 Delmont 88 from Bundy Olds in downtown ESL, and the whole transaction, from test drive to delivery, was done in the evening. I worked retail in ESL when I was in high school without really a second thought and without incident. There were always areas in ESL that you knew not to go to, but never, in those days, did we consider the whole city off limits.
In the '60's and 70's, I think, ESL started its steepest decline. Practically all industry moved out. There was major white flight, but the overall population itself began to drop as well. The downtown failed. A series of utterly corrupt city governments bled the place dry. The schools were so ineptly and corruptly managed that they were eventully taken over by the state. (Ain't that ironic?) City service like police, fire, garbage pickup, were severely reduced. Property values plummeted. All put together, you have the ruin that ESL is today.
A shame, really. There is an ESL history online that shows what a viable city it once was. But government corruption, economic failure, and all the pathologies that go with the welfare state, did it in.