“Spanish Lake”, a new documentary by Phillip Andrew Morton,
concerns a suburb of St. Louis, undermined by white flight, somewhat northeast
of Ferguson, site of the death of Michael Brown when shot by Darren Wilson in
an incident whose details are still not adequately explained in any manner that
adds up, at least in my reckoming. It seems most timely that it became
available on Amazon Instant Play, iTunes, and other online formats today.
It also came out on a day when this morning my regular
broadband Internet had been very slow because of technical problems and had
gradually improved during the day. At
first, I had to struggle to get it to play (buying it instead of renting helped
– it as only $1 more in SD). It’s lucky
that it’s only 78 minutes.
The film starts out with reminiscence by “The Lakers”,
former residents, one of whom had the zipcode (63138) outside his wrist. As a bedroom community after WWII, it would
gradually be undermined by redlining, poor zoning, opportunistic real estate
practices, and developments in nearby communities.
The director grew up in the community, and at the end of the
film, he shows his return and visit to the current resident in the home on
Maple where he grew up. He is shocked at
the deterioration of the area since he left for college and then a career in
Los Angeles.
During the early development of the area in the 50s, sales
people advertised asbestos walls in the homes, which would make them even more
undesirable now given the health risks. They
were also said they were in the foothills of the Ozarks. Well, that’s only if you count the “Illinois
Ozarks”. The real “mountains” are a
hundred miles away. The middle class was
heavily unionized and could afford the suburban lifestyle in those days.
The film covers the earlier attempts to address
desegregation and housing the poor, including projects like “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”
(March 16, 2012). Zoning policies,
though, tended to encourage resegregation, as with the activities of a town
called “Black Jack” west of Spanish Lake.
(The filmmaker makes a humorous reference to Clive Barker’s horror film “Candyman”,
set in Chicago’s Cabrini Green, resembling Pruitt-Igoe, whose demolition is
shown here. ) As Spanish Lake and other communities saw more
African-American residents, unscrupulous realtors would swarm and encourage
whites to sell.
The film also goes into the Section 8 program, which gets
blamed for many “problems”. The highrise
projects like Pruitt would be replaced by garden apartments like Countryside,
some of which would start attracting crime when they did not carefully screen
new residents because of government policies.
The film also mentions the family breakdowns, with single
mothers who work multiple minimum wage jobs and expect older children to raise
their siblings (“babies raising babies”). The film pertains to family values on another level, that people think that racism is a way to "take care of their own first" and that business will sometimes exploit that.
Here is the director’s Kickstarter trailer.
The film does name it supporters in the end credits.
The official Facebook site is
here (Amberdale).
There is a new DVD available.
I wanted to add that as a boy, I visited the more affluent suburb of Clayton sometimes, on summer trips, as my father had distant relatives and business connections there. I remember a visit on a family trip right after graduating from high school in 1961.
The "Show Me State" (Harry Truman) is not living up to its name these days.
First picture: from the Ferguson grand jury no-bill protest, Washington
DC. Nov. 25. Second is confluence of Mississippi and Missouri rivers, p.d., Wikipedia
link.
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