When Jolanda Woods was growing up in North St. Louis, in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, she and her friends would take the bus to the stores downtown, on Fourteenth Street, or on Cherokee Street, on the south side, or out to the River Roads Mall, in the inner suburb of Jennings. “This was a very merchant city,” Woods, who is fifty-four, told me. There were plenty of places to shop in her neighborhood, too, even as North St. Louis, a mostly black and working-class part of town, fell into economic decline. There was Perlmutter’s department store, where women bought pantyhose in bulk, Payless shoes, True Value hardware, and Schnucks grocery store.
Almost all these stores have disappeared. As St. Louis’s population has dropped from eight hundred and fifty thousand,…
