Dashon started off on the porch and ended up right in the middle of the streets of St. Louis. Him and his squad must learn the rules of survival while maintaining a love life in the midst of all the drama. Reading their story gives you a better understanding about how and why we lose so many young black men to the senseless gun violence and penitentiaries.

With a historical narrative and comprehensive index of street names as well as a thorough appendix of state governors, city mayors and city schools, the Magnans show how the famous, infamous and unknown have left their marks on the city with a street sign.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the St. Louis Street Department generated one of the most extensive troves of photographs ever taken of the city. Ostensibly created to document municipal challenges and improvements, the images inadvertently captured richly detailed scenes of everyday life. Largely led by Charles Clement Holt (1866-1925), St. Louis's photography operation expanded until it produced about six thousand images per year in 1914. Many of these photographs were lost, but a city historian salvaged a collection of three hundred glass plate negatives in the 1950s, which are now in the Missouri Historical Society collections. This small, but superb, group of photographs provides a wealth of information on the visual culture of St. Louis during a period of rapid transformation. Capturing the City is the first book to examine these photographs, placing the people and landscapes depicted within the broader context of a swiftly urbanizing and industrializing metropolis. Collected and analyzed here by Joseph Heathcott and Angela Dietz, the compelling images in Capturing the City reveal the national trend among cities to use the camera as a documentary tool. Reformers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine imagined the camera as a truth-telling instrument and used their photographs to mobilize public consciousness. Across the nation, cities used photographers to document slums, workhouses, and crime scenes, as well as municipal improvements like street lighting, pavement, and model housing. In this vein, Holt and his staff showcased both the challenges and the successes of government action in St. Louis. Consistent with their Progressive-era peers, their efforts contributed to the record of ongoing public works while shaping the narrative of urban progress itself.

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

From iconic buildings like the Old Cathedral to the Polish butcher shop in North City, Oldest St. Louis explores the history of St. Louis through the history of the city's oldest institutions, streets, and businesses. From the oldest library book, to the oldest museum, Oldest St. Louis traces the history of the city's rich cultural life. From the oldest Italian bar to the oldest bowling alley, the book recalls St. Louis's ethnic traditions. In following the stories of the oldest businesses and institutions, the book becomes a sensory tour of St. Louis featuring the crunchy oatmeal cookies made in the Dutchtown neighborhood the same way for 82 years, the fragrance in the 138 year old Greenhouse in mid-winter and the beauty of St. Louis's 184 year-old Lafayette Park. Oldest St. Louis is also a nostalgic look at recent history from the space-age design of South County Mall, to a cherry Coke made with a secret recipe since the Chuck-A-Burger drive-in restaurant opened in St. Ann in 1957.