Built St. Louis > > East St. Louis > >
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The one shining beacon in East St. Louis, literally and figuratively, is found at the riverfront in the form of the massive Casino Queen. After exiting the highway and skirting the edge of downtown, travellers encounter this surreal landscape, where banners encourage one to forget the poverty only a few hundred yards distant. The long transition lets visitors slip past the blight quickly, quietly, and without taking much notice.
But, detached though it may be from the city, the casino is perhaps the best thing to happen to East St. Louis in decades. It has provided a reliable tax income that has done wonders for the city's coffers, allowing renewal and expansion of basic services that the city was long unable to afford. If the city has begun a slow reversal of its decline, surely the opening of the Casino Queen is the turning point.
The Queen has got enough advertising without me adding to it, so let's move on to the rest of the riverfront. There's not much of it; mostly just a grain elevator and a few railroad tracks. The levee offers a great view of St. Louis across the river, if you're willing to skip across a couple of the tracks (technically illegal, but who's counting?)
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This desolate road runs north of the Queen for a ways. Branching off of it are crumbling roads lined with the barely-visible remains of old loading docks, factories, and who knows what else, now all silently returned to nature. Barely visible through concrete and weeds, a flash of metal tells of the railroads that were once prolific along the riverfront, even as recently as ten years prior. |
