Posted on 09/28/2015 3:14:30 PM PDT by TroutStalker
ST. LOUIS • For 17 years, Karen Bryant has watched her beloved neighborhood along Martin Luther King Drive deteriorate.
Bryant, who does alterations from a storefront along King, can recite a long list of flourishing businesses that used to line the street. They all left. Now she’s left sandwiched between two vacant buildings.
Despite her location on a desolate and run-down area of Martin Luther King, she’s determined to stay. She and her husband even moved in above her shop to ward off thieves who have stolen her air conditioning unit and removed copper pipes from her store, which is full of clothes needing alterations.
A similar story has unraveled across the country along streets named for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., according to Melvin White, of St. Louis nonprofit Beloved Streets of America. Now a team of Harvard graduate students is working with White to turn St. Louis into a template on how to revitalize streets honoring the civil rights champion.
White began the nonprofit Beloved Streets of America to find ways to redevelop America’s Martin Luther King Drives, starting with St. Louis.
“I want it to be a beautiful and vibrant place,” White said of the neighborhood. In its current states, “it’s kind of a slap in the face” to King, he added.
On Saturday afternoon, a group of Harvard graduate students studying urban planning and architectural design arrived in St. Louis ready to interview community members and gather input on redevelopment ideas. Later this week, the group will travel to Washington, D.C., to examine the issues there. At the end of the 15-week course, the students will present to White ideas on ways the street can be improved.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Just say police! Safety is the answer.
I see lots of SWP (stupid white people)
MLK Drive is in the worst neighborhood in EVERY city of the country. I think that speaks volumes about MLK in general.
High Street in Newark was renamed to MLK... the fabulous mansions of Brewer’s Row were mostly abandoned and wrecked... The best thing that happened on MLK was tearing down the hi-rise projects.
Hey dumbasses! You think changing one block of one street in a city that has been a craphole for almost a century is going to change anything?
Who is going to buy into this? The black nitwits who made it this way and continue to maintain the third world status of St Louis?
It should be ideal for those chalk outlines of the mugged patrons frequenting the Beauty Salon/Restaurant/Sports Bar...
This will be the most valuable education of their life.
Does *that* tell you anything?
Are there any Gentle Giant Blvds yet?
Why don’[t these harvard pinhead students live there? Fools.
Can always try gentrification. It seems to work wonders everywhere else
The entire purpose of naming a street Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard is to enable out-of-towners to know when they are getting near the dangerous part of town.
Street Without Joy
Say one thing about our tyrant rulers, they don’t fence white people in just yet.
True. West Oakland near the Post Office was a ghetto in the past and is a yuppie neighborhood in the future. I saw it move from ghetto to yuppie in the mid 1990’s. It is amazing how a few wealthy and smart married couples from SF can move in, pay off the local gang leaders to watch their stuff, rebuild and make West Oakland safer. Capitalism can change any neighborhood in theory.
Stupid Harvard students.
If they looked at thr locations of the MLK streets-—and then looked around at the residents maybe they would get a clue.
They are wasting their time.
.
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