In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it's ranked 48th.
In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That's out of two and a half million people in the metro area.
In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.
At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They're stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.
A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they're empty. Nobody's there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America's most devastated urban landscapes.
Some people say the city is no longer dying; they say it's dead.
