LETTERS FROM HOME: FEELING LONELY AND ABANDONED ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF TOWN

July 10, 1997

Dear Julie,

While staying at the in-laws' cabin last weekend, we dropped in on their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. B. They're considered neighbors even though they live about a mile away.

Mr. B had a bad accident in his backyard sawmill last month. We watched, flinching, while a home-care nurse tended his wound. The stoic Mr. B hardly changed his expression, but he did seem to stare at my Grateful Dead golf T-shirt.

Mr. B's not a man accustomed to having others do for him, but when pressed he allowed us to mulch a row of cucumbers and whack some weeds. Mrs. B thanked us with a big stick of venison sausage.

That was neighborly, the way neighbors used to be with each other and the way some neighbors still are. Something crucial is lost when people inhabit a community without knowing or caring about their neighbors. Or their neighborhoods.

One of our south-side neighbors is worried about Cape Girardeau's historic downtown. He's concerned that the Las Vegans that want to dock a riverboat casino here have tied up valuable downtown properties in anticipation of an event that might not occur.

The state is being stingy with gaming licenses, pots of gold that they are. Meanwhile, offers to buy the buildings and put them to productive use are turned down.

In effect, our downtown is being held hostage.

Last month, one of the downtown's two banks closed. Also last month, the last drug store on the south side of town ceased operation. The owners simply retired, but you can be sure no new drug store will be going in. Much of the business in Cape Girardeau is currently done on the west side.

This week, the company that owns the south-side grocery store where DC and I shop announced that the store will close later this month. Poor sales are blamed. The company's store on the west side of town is doing fine.

If you're spotting a trend, so are we. Some members of the city council have begun a campaign to spruce up the south side of town but it might take more than rakes and paint brushes.

What it will take, the neighbor worried about downtown Cape says, is an investment by the city in a part of town its citizens haven't given up on even if some business interests have.

Many of the city's poorer people live on the fringes of downtown and on the south side. Perhaps some would live elsewhere if they could afford to. But to many this is home.

Some doctors, lawyers, artists, academicians, architects and professionals live in the downtown area because they, like DC and I, appreciate its character. It's character that cannot be reproduced somewhere else. This is where the city was born and where, if not cherished and nurtured, it will begin to die.

There are rundown apartment buildings that once were classy and could be again. One of our neighbors is restoring a house that had been sliced up into apartments. The top floor was once a ballroom.

Other neighbors have bought buildings they don't want just to keep them from going downhill.

Institutional-sized buildings sit abandoned and allowed to rot.

I think of the conflicts between pro-growth people and environmentalists that at times have divided Arcata and wonder at the accommodations you and other politicians have been able to reach there. The conflict here is not political, it is emotional. It is the feeling of being abandoned.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.