Where Downtown West and Midtown now sit, there used to be a city within the city. Mill Creek Valley had been there for 200 years — German immigrants first, then Black families who arrived during the Great Migration and built something remarkable: 43 churches, hundreds of businesses, two YWCAs, schools, hospitals, nightclubs where Scott Joplin played. Josephine Baker grew up there. The poet Walt Whitman stayed there when he visited his brother.

In 1954, the mayor of St. Louis announced he was going to tear it down.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it the city’s “No. 1 Eyesore.” A bond issue passed. Federal funds were allocated. On August 7, 1954, Mayor Raymond Tucker stood on a rooftop overlooking the neighborhood and announced its destruction to the press. Demolition began in February 1959. By the time it was done, more than 5,000 buildings were gone. Twenty thousand people — 95 percent of them Black — were displaced with no plan and no compensation. Many ended up in Pruitt-Igoe, which the city would demolish 15 years later.

The land sat largely empty for decades. Saint Louis University expanded into it. A highway was built through it. The soccer stadium now stands on part of it, with a public art installation honoring the people who lived there — their names and words etched into stone pillars.

“They were calling you a slum dweller,” said Gwen Moore, a historian at the Missouri Historical Society who grew up in Mill Creek Valley. “Calling your parents slum dwellers and your friends and your neighbors. This is just robbing people of their humanity.”

The Missouri History Museum opened an exhibit on Mill Creek Valley in 2025. It runs through 2027. The neighborhood it documents no longer exists. You can drive through where it was without knowing anything was ever there. That was, in some ways, the point.