population: 2,047
household: 739
Families: 451
Married couples with children under 18: 226
% of married-couple family with at least one worker: 84
median income: $17, 219
while the median income is about $10,000 a year less than citywide figures, census tract 1114 sounds like your typical neighborhood - families with kids and folks with jobs... it is not the prettiest neighborhood but the tree lined streets add a little beauty - to the beast that lies beneath...
St. Louis Ave is in census tract 1114, and one block of this street (the 3800 block) is enough to skew the statistics of the neighborhood:
number of killings in one week: 3
Von was shot during a dispute over a debt... his death was swept under the rug without any fanfare... Shaneka (15 years old) was shot while sitting on her cousin's front porch (from all indications she was an innocent bystander caught in a drive by)... her death, like Von's, was swept under the rug... Alexus (13 years old) was stabbed to death in her front yard...
Alexus' death rang an alarm through the city and... her killer was a 12 year old boy... allegedly he was a bully, who upon being confronted by a frustrated Alexus, went home, got a steak knife came back and stabbed her to death... now there is a question of whether to prosecute him as a juvenile or as an adult...
Alexus' death also rang my alarm...two young lives lost to the 3800 block of Census Tract 1114...
welcome to the Jeff Vanderlou neighborhood....
One hour; 3 shootings
1:00 a.m, a passerby found a man with a gun shot wound to the face, sprawled half in, half way out of his idling vehicle...welcome to Hamilton Heights
1:30 a.m... a drive by blasted a 35 year old man several times...welcome to the Goodfellow-Wells neighborhood...
2:00 a.m....another drive by, this time two teenagers, 15 and 16 years old, caught in the middle...welcome to the Gates District...
last year when st. louis claimed the dubious honor of being one of the most violent cities in america, our city leaders got in arms and cited various statistics to bolster their counter claim... the picture is not so grim they said... but this is because they live in the county (suburbs) while most of the crime is centered in the city...
not all parts of the city is "bad"... in fact, most of the city neighborhoods are relatively safe... but some areas are more heavily crime ridden than others...thankfully, those crime ridden areas do not make up the larger part of the city... for folks living in these high crime areas, no amount of dressing or padding the numbers can change the fact that, a walk down the street or a chit-chat on your porch can make you scared beyond wit's end...
