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click to enlarge MONICA OBRADOVIC The 21st Ward includes the O’Fallon neighborhood and parts of Fairgrounds, College Hill, Penrose and Kingsway East.

In the early morning of January 7, fire ravaged the Sanctuary.

It had been more than a decade since anyone worshiped in the north city church. For a few years, it housed a community center. The nonprofit North Campus Partnership later turned it into an after-school center for neighborhood kids. Decades ago, families paid for the church’s beautiful stained glass windows. Their names remained at the bottom of each.

Most recently, the church — once a beloved building and center of community in the heart of the 21st Ward — sat vacant. And as flames shattered its windows and firefighters’ ash-blackened water flowed from the building into surrounding streets, the church’s life was extinguished with little fanfare.

Yet to residents of the 21st Ward, or at least those who noticed, the church was only the most recent thing lost, just another dilapidated relic of the past in a ward where nearly a third of housing units are vacant. And just the most recent setback.

Today, more than a quarter of the area’s residents have income below the federal poverty level. Its residents, who live mostly in the O’Fallon neighborhood and parts of Fairgrounds, College Hill, Penrose and Kingsway East, are 95 percent Black.

This May will mark a year since the ward’s former Alderman John Collins-Muhammad resigned in light of a federal investigation into bribes he took in exchange for his political leverage.

His corruption was worse than what became publicly known. Constituents tell of years of businesses being “shaken down” for money. For some ward residents, Collins-Muhammad’s time in office was simply marked by years of lies and broken promises.

While their hopes for the former alderman are now effectively shattered, the people of the 21st Ward still look to the future of their community. The ward will soon balloon from a population of 8,400 to about 20,000 after redistricting takes effect in April, and much of what is currently Ward 21 will become part of the new Ward 11. Those vying to represent the ward in this new era are looking to repair some of the damage done.

Laura Keys, the alderwoman who took Collins-Muhammad’s place, hopes to be the leader that Ward 21 needs. But she faces a hefty task — to repair constituents’ trust after her predecessor stained their views of government.

Even after the numerous plights that affected the ward and so many other north city neighborhoods post-World War II (redlining, racism, freeway construction, lack of public transportation, white flight and more) there’s still so much Ward 21 has to offer. It contains two parks, it’s 10 minutes away from downtown and the airport, and it lies just a hop away from the nearest interstate.

And it still has its people — many whose families have lived in the ward for several generations. There’s “Ms. Rosalind” and “Mr. Harris,” who tend to a community garden in the plot of a demolished house and mow the lawns of vacant houses on their street. There’s Monique Reese, who rallied her neighbors to donate Christmas presents to all the children on her block.

There are many more like them — people who look to a better future for their ward. Can they get there?

click to enlarge BRADEN MCMAKIN Current Ward 21 Alderwoman Laura Keys has lived in the ward for over 30 years.

At 7 a.m, Laura Keys already has her day planned through 9:30 that night. That’s when she tries to cut her days off — even if her phone has yet to stop ringing.

Keys’ election to Ward 21 alderwoman in August was her third attempt at gaining the seat. A Democrat, she earned 57 percent of the vote in a special election to replace Collins-Muhammad. He’d beaten her by only 29 votes in 2017, and Keys lost to him again in 2021.

When Keys won her election to Ward 21 alderwoman in the aftermath of Collins-Muhammad’s indictment, she knew she had a lot of work ahead of her.

“The majority of my time is spent cleaning up things or conversations that he was involved in and then trying to assure people that administration is gone,” Keys says. “Let’s move on. Let’s see what we can get accomplished. A lot of work has to be done.”

For many Ward 21 residents, Collins-Muhammad’s election in 2017 signaled a new hope for the ward. Age 25 at the time of his election, Collins-Muhammad was the youngest person and the first Muslim to ever be elected to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.

The scion of a prominent political family — his mother, LaTonia Collins Smith, is now president of Harris-Stowe State University; his sister, Kimberly-Ann Collins, became a Missouri state representative for several north St. Louis neighborhoods in 2020 — Collins-Muhammad, with both his background and charm, gave many of his constituents hope.

“He represented our next generation, what could be,” one longtime Ward 21 resident says.

Collins-Muhammad ran into trouble almost immediately. A few months after his election, Florissant police arrested him on outstanding warrants for driving on a suspended license. He was arrested again for the same violations and the ones from the 2017 incident after getting into a car accident in 2018. He apparently did not resolve many of those warrants because he was arrested again in 2019 on nine outstanding warrants for traffic violations.

click to enlarge COURTESY ST. LOUIS CITY Ward 21 will be part of Ward 11 after redistricting in April.

And there was, of course, the $7,000 in cash, the $3,000 in campaign donations, the Volkswagen sedan and iPhone 11 Collins-Muhammad accepted in bribes during a two-year undercover investigation into him.

But all of this is just what’s already known about Collins-Muhammad’s illicit activities. Ward 21 residents say there’s much more.

It’s widely speculated that Collins-Muhammad did not live in the ward he represented, rather somewhere in south city (those who spoke to the RFT say they could never prove his exact address).

As for the cash bribes Collins-Muhammad seemed to have been accustomed to receiving in the indictment against him — they were far from the first.

“From his first administration almost immediately, I started getting calls from business owners who were telling me that he was shaking them down for money,” Keys says.

These calls occurred “on the regular.”

“People who own businesses in the ward would call to say he [Collins-Muhammad] would say, ‘I better have $5,000 by Friday, or I’m gonna have to shut you down,’ which aldermen do not have the ability to do,” Keys says.

Former Alderwoman Melinda Long, who represented Ward 21 for two years before a recall vote ousted her from office in 2003, recalls a moment of shock during her first encounter with Collins-Muhammad shortly after his election to office. Long says Collins-Muhammad started ranting to her about his disappointment with a $12,000 cash payment he received from a business in his ward. He had expected more.

“Maybe because he thought I was a former alderperson he could be frank with me,” Long says.

click to enlarge RYAN KRULL Former Alderman John Collins-Mohammad received a 45-month prison sentence.

Collins-Muhammad was hardly old enough to drink when Keys first met him during former Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed’s first mayoral campaign in 2013. Even so, he had a political acumen greater than people who’d been in St. Louis politics for decades, according to Keys. He was charismatic, a natural people person.

“I told people, ‘That boy’s gonna be somebody,'” Keys recalls.

“The thing about John is he’s very charismatic,” she says. “He would bond and connect with people, particularly older people. He’d call them, ‘Mama This.’ Hell, when he first met me, I was Mama Keys.”

Collins-Muhammads’ former constituents described their impressions of him in letters to Judge Stephen Clark before his sentencing. “JCM reminds me of a pimp,” wrote Long, the former Ward 21 alderwoman. “JCM was alluring in dress, gave seductive looks of admiration and spoke well.”

Other residents described a series of lies and broken promises.

The former alderman “violated the trust” of his community, according to Amber Cole, 65, who has lived in Ward 21 for 25 years. He “made promises to our community and withheld services from others, threatening me personally,” she wrote to the judge.

Cole and Collins-Muhammad once butted heads when he proposed to change the name of the O’Fallon neighborhood’s namesake park because it was named after a confederate colonel. Collins-Muhammad proposed in a 2017 bill to change the park’s name from O’Fallon to York, in honor of a slave who traveled with William Clark and Meriwether Lewis on their Corps of Discovery. Clark was O’Fallon’s uncle.

While O’Fallon owned slaves and was a staunch supporter of slavery, no historical text could be found that identified O’Fallon as a confederate. Cole says she told Collins-Muhammad as such. The bill didn’t go further than a first reading.

“I had great hope for him,” Cole says. “He’s very articulate, very knowledgeable. But he’s narcissistic.”

Neither Cole nor fellow Ward 21 resident Michael Harris were very surprised to hear of Collins-Muhammad’s corruption.

“I had my doubts all along because he promised some stuff that never materialized,” Harris says.

Harris, a senior citizen who lives in the O’Fallon neighborhood, keeps a community garden near his home off Clarence Avenue. It takes a labor of love for Harris and one of his neighbors to maintain the garden. He says he wanted a place to grow vegetables, so a few years ago he started a garden with Seed St. Louis, a nonprofit for urban agriculture.

Collins-Muhammad made “promises he didn’t keep,” Harris says. He was going to help Harris get a fence around his garden, but it never materialized. The alderman also promised to repave a sidewalk near his house. That didn’t happen either.

“But he did get a building torn down, and that’s part of my garden,” Harris says. “That’s the best I can say about him.”

click to enlarge COURTESY MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY Ward 21 includes O’Fallon Park, which was founded in 1875 and was memorialized in postcards in the early 1900s.

On a recent morning, Keys drives around Ward 21 in her “mobile office,” a Toyota Highlander she calls “Tammy Toyota.” She’s wearing a black collared shirt embroidered with her name and a city emblem — her “uniform,” designed by her and made by a business in her ward.

By the time she meets with a reporter at 10 a.m., Keys has her whole day planned. First on the docket is to bring the owner of Kingz Korner an application for the city’s small business grants. Then she has to meet a man about a sidewalk near his property he says the city destroyed. After that are a few other engagements, with a birthday party at an independent-living facility as the last event of the day.

“I’m trying to be the alderman I never had,” Keys says. She tries not to ignore people, as so many of her aldermen have in the past. Aldermen who’d never call back. Aldermen who had good intentions yet still struggled to remain responsive to constituents. Aldermen who’d lie.

“I don’t want anybody to feel like they don’t matter,” Keys says. “To return a phone call is a pretty simple thing to do.”

In “Tammy Toyota,” Keys answers a call from a resident who wants a pickleball court. She stops the car for a 10-minute conversation about speed bumps. When an old neighbor walks by, she honks twice, rolls down her passenger window and yells, “Hey, Miss Shellie!”

En route from stop to stop, Keys notices everything, and has a memory for just about each block she passes. There’s the 13-bedroom rooming house a “Mrs. Gardner” owned before she passed, and a stately house with a well-manicured lawn she’s always loved. There are also the houses that maintain their original beauty even if they’re clearly vacant, like a Second Empire home Keys points to on a corner. “I love old buildings,” she says. “It’s such a shame that people just don’t have the money to really dress them out.”

There’s a certain energy she feels when she’s in her neighborhood, she says. Not just a sense of home but of potential.

“We are ripe for development,” Keys says. “We have a lot of land that could be developed. Land that could be used for big box stores or grocery stores in our food desert. We need commercial businesses that are doing good business in our ward.”

It’s that potential Keys hopes to make reality. But first, she has to tackle the basics. Like trash. The situation in Ward 21 is “untenable,” she says. “We have rats as big as dogs and raccoons as big as cats.”

In her opinion, city staffers downtown, who she calls “suits,” are “administratively incompetent.”

“I’m not saying the suits downtown aren’t working, but there is a problem when we cannot hire, retain and pay people what it’s worth to do the job we need them to do,” Keys says.

Keys’ time to solve even the most basic of problems may be limited, however. In April, voters will choose between her and Carla “Coffee” Wright as the next alderwoman.

Wright, who has twice run unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate, has recently turned her political interests more local.

For Wright, the past is prologue, and Collins-Muhammad is a relic of the past, something to be forgotten. Anyone who handled politics in the 21st Ward, she says, “needs to go” as part of a clean sweep with redistricting.

click to enlarge COURTESY MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY Another postcard of O’Fallon Park.

After the April election, most of what’s now the 21st Ward will reside in the new 11th Ward.

“The 21st Ward is over, gone, bye,” Wright says. “John has resigned, and I think anybody else on his team needs to follow his lead. We got a new ward. We ain’t carrying nothing back from the 21st.”

A former actress who left St. Louis for a career in California, Wright moved away from St. Louis but came back in 2003 to a different community. Her new home in north St. Louis near Fairground Park didn’t match what she knew from childhood. Back then, there were small businesses on every corner. She says her family washed their clothes at Cops Cleaners, ate food at C&K Barbeque and Wilbert’s Pizza, and bought shoes at Yellow Ball Shoe Store.

You knew everyone, Wright recalls, and you knew everyone’s mother.

“The only thing we worried about was a stray dog or maybe somebody stealing our bikes,” Wright says. “Now you got to worry about a stray bullet.”

It wasn’t always that way. Most of what’s now Ward 21 was once the largest prairie in the city. By 1850, most of the land was owned by a prominent riverman and the wealthiest man in Missouri at the time: Colonel John O’Fallon, whose country estate along then-Bellefontaine Road became O’Fallon Park after the city purchased it in 1875. An agricultural and mechanical fair, complete with a natural history museum and zoological gardens, came to O’Fallon’s land once a year.

The ward would later become a haven for middle-class African Americans, many whose descendants still reside in the ward.

Twenty five years ago, Cole, the long-time Ward 21 resident, faced a tough decision. Should she live in a pricier south city neighborhood or move to north city? She chose the latter. Not because it was cheaper, but because she saw potential.

At the time, Cole’s address was in the Third Ward, and then-alderman Freeman Bosley, Sr. sold her on his vision for a better north St. Louis. She says she saw a strong Black community that was on the up-and-up. Then, redistricting moved her home into the 21st Ward, and alderman after alderman came with their own visions, stymieing any consistent progress, Cole says.

Her neighborhood used to have small, Black-owned businesses, plenty of schools within walking distance and homeowners — the neighborhood’s houses are now being bought by slumlords or “land-grabbers” who buy properties and do nothing with them.

The past two decades have “been a slope,” Cole says. “Then we started getting politicians who weren’t doing what they were supposed to.”

When Keys moved to the ward in 1989, the community was very “alive,” she says.

“There wasn’t as much blight — vacant lots, vacant buildings, stuff like that,” Keys says. “It’s just been constant decline.”

Still, if you ask Keys why she still lives there, despite the shortfalls that have already driven so many of the disinclined away, she’ll go on for 10 minutes about everything she loves about her ward. The architecture, the people, the potential, the community organizations working to make it better.

She still has a community that continues to work and continues to try, she says. They haven’t given up.

“This is where I live, it’s where I raised my children; I’m not going anywhere,” Keys says. “And if I’m going to be here, I have to make life better for me, and I’ve got to make it better for everybody who lives where I live.”

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