The Model With a Tragic Air

Brewster McCracken posted a YouTube video trashing St. Louis. It may not be a masterpiece of comic timing, but it has become one of the more widely covered moments of the current mayoral campaign. St. Louis does have some problems, but picking a fight with another city seems feisty.

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By Shawn Shillington in News on May 1, 2009 6:00 PM 0 Comments

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heyzeus

A few important differences between St. Louis and Austin:

1. St. Louis was a major American city during the industrial revolution. It's location (on the frontier and on the confluence of two major rivers) made it successful. Now, the industrial and manufacturing jobs have left the country and as a nation we don't ship that much stuff by river barge. Those are the main reasons for St. Louis' decline since 1904. Not sure what Brewster would've done about that had he been in charge. Every industrial midwestern American city has and is suffering.

2. Because of local political idiocy dating back a hundred years, the City of St Louis itself is tiny and only has about 300k citizens, the majority of which are in poor neighborhoods. Imagine if the City of Austin was only its 5 poorest zip codes, and the rest of us lived in other municipalities. That's St. Louis. Over a million people live outside of the city limits but effectively in the city.

The reason this ad is dumb is that there are great places and neighborhoods and employers in St Louis and there are bad ones. There's revitilization in some parts of downtown, and there's decay. To portray a whole city as the "what not to do" fear case is insulting to people that have been there or are from there and know otherwise. You end up just looking like a schmuck.

Wes

St. Louis' best days are behind it. The same is true of cities like Detriot, Buffalo, and almost the entire state of Ohio. Judging by the video responses on YouTube I guess that BrewCrack's ad hit a little too close to home for the folks in St. Louis.

sean

Having gone to school and lived in St Louis, I have to agree with this ad. It's harsh, but it's so true that the urban core of St Louis is just dead. There are abandoned buildings and most of the city has just sprawled out into suburbs. This has brought crime and major economic and racial segregation to the city, and don't get me started on East St Louis...

It may have been city-to-city sniping but I don't think that was the intention and I feel like his point holds true. We don't want Austin to degrade and turn into a has-been city.