Mapping Decline Jonathan Karp creating the structures and expectations

creating the structures and expectations that define the idea of “Americanness

and smelled like—from the allspice-seasoned lamb and rice shared in mosque basements to the sound of the trains on the Rock Island Line rolling past the dry goods store

Milton Katz

They tell incredible stories because…

Mapping Decline Jonathan Karp creating the structures and expectationsOnce 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