new Major League Soccer stadium on Market Street. The Great Rivers Greenway team worked with St. Louis CITY SC ( stlcitysc.com/community ) to create a space that will prominently honor the former Mill Creek neighborhood. Through a public-private partnership, a set of sculptures developed by East St. Louis artist Damon Davis ( heartacheandpaint.com ) will feature quotes by former Mill Creek residents, including Gibson. Eight will be displayed just outside the stadium. “Mill Creek Valley was a thriving Black community, with businesses and nightlife, arts community and a range of socioeconomic classes,” Davis said in a state - ment last year. “The narrative of it being a blighted com - munity—it was neglected for a reason, slum-ified so that the excuse could be used to pave over it. I’m designing a series of pedestals and portals to represent hourglasses that hold time (represented by soil) still, displayed at the top. Just like the soil, we can excavate the stories of these people and put them on literal pedestals for the whole world to see, acknowledge and start a conversa - tion about their stories.” Gibson joined a group of Brickline Greenway project partners that includes Davis, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, Great Rivers Greenway CEO Susan Trautman and others because she wants people who use the mile-long path that will run on Market Street to remem - ber the community where she grew up, one that is no longer there. The high school, a Presbyterian church (one of about 40 houses of worship that dotted the neighborhood), a flour factory and an ornate laundry building that catered to white customers are the only four buildings from a 450-acres-plus neighborhood that were not razed. “White people were living there, but they knew that when one or two Black families moved in there would be white flight,” Gibson said. “That’s exactly what happened [around the turn of the century]. So it opened up and allowed the Mill Creek people to move into these gor -
geous houses, and they couldn’t even take care of them because they were too big and too expensive to heat, and within 10 years the neighborhood was floundering.” Gibson’s father, Randle Ross, moved with his family up from Arkansas during the Great Migration [which took place from about 1910 to 1970] so he could continue his education at Vashon High School. Options for Black students in his hometown stopped after the eighth grade. Gibson said her father lived in about six houses in a four-block area, “just moving from one to another to get a little bit better, a little bit better.” Redlin - ing devastated the neighborhood, and segregation limited residents’ opportunities to improve it, Gibson said. Over half the homes did not have running water at the time the wrecking balls started swinging in 1959. “My grandmother owned her house, but she got it five years before the whole place was torn down,” Gibson said. “And you can’t help but think that the white man who owned it who was her landlord knew what was coming down the pike, and he sold this house to this woman who was a domestic worker, saving her pennies for her dream to own a home. And five years later, the whole community was destroyed.” Gibson’s family moved, but she bused back to Vashon to attend middle school in its basement. She recalled walking out of the school doors at the end of those days and looking out into the community where she grew up and instead seeing what people then deemed “Hiro - shima Flats.” "A bombed-out nothing,” she recalled. “And I’m think - ing, Vashon High School? Weren’t there some houses here? What happened? I was like maybe 11. And it was just very, very confusing." Her novel looks at it from that vantage point of a child. With the Brickline Greenway Market Street segment, she wants trail users to look at Mill Creek, period. “I don’t know about the other perspectives, but for Black people, for me, it’s a chance to shine the camera
PHOTOS: (Left to right) Lower Meramec Park along
the Meramec Greenway; St. Louis Riverfront Trail; Gravois Greenway: Grant's Trail; Route 66 State Park along the Meramec Greenway
“Just like the soil, we can excavate the
stories of these people and put them on literal pedestals for the whole world to see.” St. Louis Artist Damon Davis
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RAILS TO TRAILS FALL 2022
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