East St. Louis, Illinois

By Lee Griggs

In the seamy Mississippi River city of East St. Louis, Ill., the grim local joke is that the crime rate is finally starting to level off because there's not much left to steal. Block after city block is boarded up or burned out. Many buildings have been reduced to rubble as thieves cart away everything of value: bricks, aluminum siding, copper wire, even heavy cast-iron manhole covers from the potholed streets to be sold for scrap. The housing authority complains that aluminum downspouts are swiped from its buildings within hours of installation. Trash-strewn vacant lots along the river stand in stark contrast to the gleaming Gateway Arch of St. Louis, in plain sight less than a mile away across the river.

Time was when East St. Louis enjoyed a modicum of blue-collar prosperity. In the '40s and early '50s it ranked second only to Chicago as a national rail and stockyard center. But almost all its industry has left, driven out by high crime rates and property taxes. Thousands of jobs have gone with the factories, leaving the city a pocket of nearly hopeless poverty in the generally economically well-off St. Louis metropolitan area, and quite possibly the worst-off urban center in America.

The biggest employer left is the local school district, which pays no taxes, is $11 million in debt and plans to lay off a quarter of its teachers for the next academic year. The tax base has eroded from $175 million in 1965 to less than $50 million. Property values are so low that the town's tallest structure, the vacant twelve-story Spivey Building, was sold for $25,000. The number of retail businesses is less than 200 and steadily declining. The population, once 80,000, has shrunk to 55,000, 97% black and two-thirds on welfare.

There has not been a municipal audit since 1985, but estimates of current debt run as high as $40 million. The city's mercurial third-term mayor, Carl Officer, 37, has gone so far as to propose selling city hall and six fire stations to raise cash, assuming anybody would buy them. City employees routinely get paid a month or more late.

The police force of 70 officers is at half the authorized strength because of layoffs. Its newest patrol car is nearly five years old. Many cars no longer have functioning two-way radios for lack of repair funds, and some cops have had to buy their own. There is no money to hire recruits, and the average age of the force is up to a doddering 46 1/2 years. "We just don't have the money and the personnel to keep the peace," sighs Inspector Lawrence Brewer, a veteran of nearly 22 years in the department. "There are guys literally jumping on our car hoods to sell us crack, but there's no money to pay informants or make buys. We have the highest homicide rate in the state, and people come across from Missouri to buy crack and dump bodies here. The bad guys know we can't handle it all."

The financial stress worsened dramatically in April last year when city assets were temporarily frozen after East St. Louis failed to begin payment on a $3.4 million judgment arising from the beating of one local jail inmate by another in 1984. The city is now beset with dozens of lawsuits. Firemen have sued successfully to collect three years of back uniform allowances, only to be told that the award left no money in the till to pay their salaries. A bill making its way through the state legislature will erase the deficit in the current budget and finally put an end to payless paydays for city employees, at least for the time being.

Until then, toilet paper will remain a rarity in city hall rest rooms. The city cannot even afford new bulbs for its traffic lights. Parking meters work, but nobody feeds them because there is no money to hire meter maids. Garbage collection stopped for several months after the city fell $262,000 behind in payments to its trash contractor, and remains sporadic at best. Residents routinely dump garbage in vacant lots or abandoned buildings. As fast as buildings are boarded up to stop looting and dumping, thieves steal the plywood. Bob's Board-Up Service in St. Louis no longer accepts jobs in East St. Louis because customers there don't pay their bills.

Last December a task force appointed by Illinois Governor James Thompson declared a financial emergency in East St. Louis and noted, in understatement, "There is growing public concern over the city's ability to provide basic municipal services required to ensure public safety and the welfare of its citizenry." Protested Mayor Officer: "I do all I can with the revenue I have." The task force offered a loan but conditioned it on Officer's accepting a state-approved financial director with total control over city spending. So far Officer has not agreed to that condition, and the municipal crisis deepens.

Antiquated city pumps break down all too regularly, backing up raw sewage into East St. Louis High School and forcing the cancellation of classes. At the Villa Griffin public housing project, a persistent pool of sewage on a playground, dubbed Lake Villa Griffin by angry residents, led to the filing of criminal charges against the city to force sewer repairs. When Mayor Officer failed to appear at a hearing on the matter, a county judge clapped him into jail briefly for contempt.

State police, moved in to supplement the understaffed local force, are concentrating on drug arrests and housing-project security. Selling crack has become the city's biggest business, and is so widespread that peddlers sometimes flag down motorists on nearby I-70 to hawk crack packets at $20 a pop. Traffic backups on city streets often turn out to be buyers lined up at drive-through crack houses.

Much of the crack trade is conducted in the housing projects, which have been run by a private firm since 1986, when the corrupt local authority was ousted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Living here is hell," says Villa Griffin resident Rosie Kimble, 44. "I'm scared to go out to church at night for fear someone will break in while I'm gone. It's already happened once. With all the dopeheads around here, there's shooting almost every night. You walk out the door, they're liable to shoot you dead."

It wasn't always that bad in East St. Louis. Katherine Dunham, a grande dame of the dance, was able to operate a studio in the city in the late 1960s. Heptathlon gold medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee recalls a happy childhood there and still returns occasionally from the West Coast to visit friends. But today the hottest ticket in East St. Louis is a ticket out of it. The two high schools produce perennial state champions in football and basketball, putting - a few gifted athletes on the road to college, hoping for stardom in the N.F.L. or N.B.A. For other youngsters, there is profit in peddling crack but not much else.

"There's nothing here for me," says Jeffrey Hickman, 18, a Villa Griffin resident. "Only dope, gangs and shooting every night. I'll stay and graduate from school, but there's no way I can make something of myself here. I got to go someplace else, anyplace. Maybe the Coast Guard."

Over at city hall, Mayor Officer somehow manages to remain determinedly upbeat, citing an ambitious $437 million plan for developing the East St. Louis riverfront that would include a cargo port, recycling center and high- rise apartments overlooking the river and downtown St. Louis. But no work has been done on the project for three years, and the tax-exempt status of the bonds sold to finance it is under review by the Internal Revenue Service. "I'm still optimistic," Officer insists. "We'll haul ourselves up by our bootstraps." But attorney Rex Carr, a lifelong resident of the city, has a dimmer view. "East St. Louis today doesn't even have bootstraps," he says. "I see no way out."