THIS IS NOT MR. ROGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD

Each time (that is once a year for us) when we leave the comfort zone of the suburb to go to the Polish Falcon Hall for the Polish Heritage Festival located on St. Louis Avenue in downtown St. Louis, we passed by these abandoned buildings in neighborhood where once was full of promise and potential.
The City of St. Louis never regained its glory of the World Fair, no longer a bustling city of steamboats and trading, socio-economic changes, political activism and conspiracy, and hopes for a more peaceful and safer life led many St. Louis residents to flee the city, prompting "white flight" by white residents who found integrated neighborhoods undesirable.

“The whites took their money with them when they left and the economic base for these neighborhoods collapsed. Poverty, crime, anger and a feeling of hopelessness settled into the once prosperous neighborhoods. This is the "White Flight" phenomenon that has turned East St. Louis into what it is today.”, these were words of deep resentment by those who were left behind.

I read an interesting fact that when Fred McFeely Rogers saw the television for the first time in the spring of 1951, he commented, “I just hated it.” For someone whose work was centered around this kind of medium, it is ironic that throughout his adult life, Mr. Rogers rarely watched TV.

There is no Mr. Rogers sitting on the front porch in a long sleeve cardigan sweater over a white shirt and a tie with a khaki pants and black sneakers, asking “Won’t you be my neighbors?”