Former Mill Creek resident – ‘I want them to remember the truth’

Although Barbara Bracken Martin, chair of the Mill Creek Valley Commemoration Committee, reached out to the American for a story, she was hesitant to be interviewed.

“There’s a better person you really should be interviewing,” Bracken Martin insisted. “He’s in his early 80s but he knows places and boundaries and can name people who lived there.”

The person she was referencing was James N. Gallagher, who was born in the late 1930s at 3433 Pine Street in Mill Creek Valley.  

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“Leaders wanted to move forward and progress the city. They would later put Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood in the heart of the city, on the chopping block.”- Gwen Moore, former Mill Creek Valley resident and historian at the Missouri Historical Society.

According to the National Archives, approximately six million Black people moved from the South to Northern, Midwestern and Western states from the 1910s until the 1970s alone. Millcreek Valley was the section of town in segregated St. Louis where Blacks could live and do business.

There were around 20,000 Blacks and 40 churches in Mill Creek before it was demolished in the late 1950s. Additionally, there were more than 800 businesses including lawyers, doctors, the NAACP’s office, the People’s Finance Corporation, St. Louis American office and other enterprises. Today, parts of St. Louis University and its Chaifetz Arena, Harris Stowe State University, Wells Fargo Advisors, the new soccer stadium and Pear Tree Inn all sit in areas that used to be Mill Creek Valley.  

When Braken Martin explained how the Mill Creek Valley Commemoration Committee came together to assist Great River Greenway and the Brickline Greenway project with its “Pillars of the Valley ” exhibit located at CITYPARK’s southwest plaza on Market Street. The exhibit is the work of renowned East St. Louis native and artist Damon Davis. Theone-mile stretch of hour-glass-like pillars and plaques recognizes former residents, businesses, schools, churches and landmarks displaced from the once-thriving neighborhood in the name of “urban renewal.”

Braken Martin was correct in her assessment of Gallagher, who insisted he could rebuild Mill Creek from memory if asked. His parents migrated to the area from Louisiana and Alabama. They had eleven children. Gallagher is the third oldest. His mother was a seamstress and his father worked for the city’s refuse department. Gallagher recalls working as a child with his father on his side gig, delivering wood and coal to Mill Creek residents in his “’41 Ford pickup.” His family attended Washington Missionary Tabernacle which is still on the corners of Washington and Compton Street.

Some of Gallagher’s memories were replete with names such as “Dr. White and Dr. Bryan C. Payne” who he said had private offices in Mill Creek. Gallagher recalled at least two black-owned pharmacies; “Doulas Brothers and Owl Drug Store” on Shannon & Laclede. He said Black cops like “Officers Millbrook, Clarence Lee and Ben Massey” walked the beat and kept the peace at eclectic taverns known as the “Salad Bar,” the “Footlong” and the Glass Bar,” where he said, “Miles Davis and all the big jazz cats came to play.”

Gallagher said he joined the Mill Creek Valley committee out of obligation. He’s long been concerned about how the area has been depicted in the media and in history books as a “slum” area with no toilet systems in mostly impoverished homes that were destined for demolition.

“I hate to hear that word ‘slum’ come out of people’s mouths,” Gallagher said. “It’s not true. We had a toilet in our house and our neighborhood wasn’t deteriorated. It’s just not true.”

The Mill Creek Gallagher remembers is akin to a Black Mayberry, the fictional town from the 1960s Andy Griffith sitcom, Neighbors didn’t lock their doors because they knew and looked out for one another, he said. He recalls no major gang activity or gun violence because parents and police maintained the streets. There were quality elementary and high schools (Gallagher attended Waring Elementary and Vashon High School). He could even recall the streetcars he rode; the Forest Park line he caught on Laclede Ave., near his house and the Hodiamont line he rode to Wellston at the St. Louis city line.

Gallagher isn’t critical of Great River Greenway or Brickline Greenway’s efforts to honor Mill Creek or Davis’ exhibit. He likes the recreation of street maps, bronze markers and testimonials of former residents inscribed in stone along the mile-long pathway so far.

What is missing from the exhibit is what Gallagher calls “the truth.”

“It was a 20-to-30-year systematic removal plan,” he insisted.

Not to be dismissed as paranoia, some of his claims are backed by history.

In a 2023 localCBS News interview Gwen Moore, a former Mill Creek Valley resident and historian at the Missouri Historical Society shared some of her research on the doomed city.

“Leaders wanted to move forward and progress the city,” Moore said, adding: “They would later put Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood in the heart of the city, on the chopping block.”

Moore noted how in the late 1940s newspapers started defining Mill Creek as a “slum area” with “multiple Post-Dispatch and Globe-Democrat articles” intentionally garnering public support for “the destruction of the St. Louis Black neighborhood.”

In 1950, St. Louis received federal funds under the Housing Act of 1949 to finance 5,800 public housing units.A year later,Democratic Mayor Joseph Darst declared that new public housing projects would help the city through increased revenues, new parks, playgrounds and shopping space. Further research leans toward the idea that Darst and city leaders wanted to clear the Mill Creek area for more downtown development.

According to a Globe-Democrat article from the 1950s, 60% of Mill Creek’s residents were eligible for public housing. The Pruitt–Igoe public housing complex consisting of 33 eleven-story brick high rises was considered the perfect place to relocate Mill Creek Valley and other downtown residents.

A bond issue was passed in 1954 to redevelop downtown areas where 95% of the residents were Black. The NAACP at the time called the city’s plan a “Negro removal project.”

Pruitt–Igoe officially opened in 1954. Gallagher said his mother was among the first Mill Creek residents to move into the high rise on Cass near Jefferson. Four years later, in 1959, the demolition of Mill Creek began. In its wake, Laclede Town, Grand Towers, the Ozark Expressway (US 40), and a 22-acre extension of St. Louis University were all constructed.

“It was kind of a slow death,” Gallagher said recalling the years, months and days leading up to Mill Creek’s demise. “It was a systematic removal, and we (residents) were unaware of the neighborhood development going on. It was all undercover.”

Gallagher isn’t sure if “the truth” about Millcreek’s death will be explored through the exhibit. However, in a video titled, “Pillars of the Valley: A Tribute to Mill Creek Valley,” artist Damon Davis said he hopes the exhibit will lead to further exploration.

“They (the pillars) are an abstraction on the idea of an hourglass, a stop in time to take reverence around those histories that were covered up.”