Save St. Stanislaus Kostka Church from the greedy Archbishop!

I am neither Polish or Catholic but I know the value of maintaining the rich history that is St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in North St. Louis. While the St. Louis Archdiocese has for decades closed city parishes the lay board governing St. Stanislaus has managed to maintain its own buildings, grounds and saved for a rainy day.

If anything, the St. Stanislaus lay board should run all the affairs of all the St. Louis parishes!

The parishioners of St. Stanislaus Kostka church have put together a very informative website which will get you past the rhetoric that diocesan spokesperson Jamie Allmman is spewing.

From the St. Stanislaus Kostka website:

Cha-ching!!! Archbishop Burke can’t be happy when a parish does well – who needs the church structure if parishes can make it on their own? As many of you know, the Archbishop is pressuring the lay board to turn over control of the church to the archdiocese. You can help them stay independent – go to the site, read what they have to say, sign up for their email list and call archdiocese and tell them what you think of their greedy tactics (the phone number is on the site).

Click here to Save St. Stanislaus Kostka Church

Click here to read my previous post on this subject from 12/8/04.

Thank you for helping Save St. Stanislaus Kostka Church!

– Steve

Proposed River Bridge to finish decimating Near North Side

Road happy Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT) and the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) have for ten years been designing a New River Bridge to cross the Mississippi at downtown. More correctly, the approach on the Missouri side will manage to destroy some great warehouses on North Broadway and sever any possible connection between Old North St. Louis and the downtown loft district. But why?

The Poplar Street Bridge, a focal point of interstate traffic movement through downtown St. Louis since the 1960’s, is severely over-burdened, and the forecast shows congestion on the entire core highway network will only get worse.

Of course, the forecasts predict traffic will get worse because state “transportation” (read: highway) agencies depend entirely upon traffic getting worse. How would it look if they predicted a drop in auto traffic? So, they continue promoting suburban sprawl by building highways through corn fields and then tell us we need to build yet more highways to handle the traffic. Self serving bastards.
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DO YOU THINK YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD IS SAFE?

Michael Allen & Claire Nowak-Boyd of the Ecology of Absence website are doing a piece on neighborhood safety and they need your feedback:

Please let them know what you think of your neighborhood and what you consider “safe.”

– Steve

And on that Note…

Today I was compiling my list of favorite songs of 2004 and even though it has nothing to do with urbanity or St. Louis I thought I’d share the list. Being the Apple geek that I am I’ve created an iMix with the full list on the iTunes Music Store
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East St. Louis Rated ‘Number One City In America’ By Poverty Magazine

EAST ST. LOUIS, IL—The December issue of Poverty magazine, featuring its annual “Top American Cities” poll, hit newsstands Monday, and for the second year in a row, East St. Louis topped the list. “East St. Louis dominated our poll yet again in 2004, topping such categories as unemployment, hubcap availability, and liquor-stores-per-capita,” Poverty editor Felicia Banks said. “The city’s educational system also rated high, boasting a student-gun ratio of 1:1.” Rounding out the top five, in descending order, were Flint, MI; Newark, NJ; Compton, CA; and Gary, IN.

The above ‘humor’ is courtesy of the twisted writers at The Onion. I must admit, I got a good laugh at their jab at East St. Louis.

The only time I go to East St. Louis is for late night (well, technically early morning) visits the infamous bar Faces. Otherwise, why would I go there? What I’ve seen of East St. Louis during the daylight hours certainly tells me it was a great city at one time – good scale and great buildings.

An aunt of time, now in her early 80s, lived there just after WWII – certainly a big and exciting place for a young woman from rural western Oklahoma and raised during the depression. In the last 60 years or so since then East St. Louis has certainly hit rock bottom.

Built St. Louis has a great look at East St. Louis as well as other hard hit areas of the east site – click here to view.

What to do to reverse for fortunes of East St. Louis and surrounding areas is a major challenge. So far the best hope is the Casino Queen. But, the casino can only offer cash to keep city hall in the black (so to speak). Like North St. Louis, the best bet is MetroLink.

Some other urban humor from The Onion includes: “HUD Allocates $260 Million For Low-Outcome Housing” (Issue 3302, 21 January 1998) and “Urban Planner Stuck In Traffic Of Own Design” (Issue 4010, 10 March 2004).

– Steve