10.12.24
The Gelateria, St. Louis, MO.

Max Cassilly is Bob Cassilly's son, who worked with him at Cementland and City Museum. He is the host of the Cassilly Chronicles podcast.

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Daniil:

Do you remember your first time seeing or hearing about Cementland?

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Max Cassilly:

I remember the first time. It was after my parents had separated. [My dad and I] went on a bike ride and took the Riverfront Trail there, 14 miles or something. We got there, and he pretended he had never been there before, but I could tell that he had. 

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Daniil:

And why do you think he did that?

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Max Cassilly:

I don't know. Because he was exploring with his mistress there, probably. Well, I guess that was his girlfriend now. 

We called it Cement Factory, and that was probably what we called it for the first six months. And then one day, I heard people calling it Cement Land, and I thought that was not as cool of a name. City Museum was more a descriptor of what it was, not fancy. And Cementland kind of seemed hokey.

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Daniil:

What year was this? 

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Max Cassilly:

Would've been 2000 probably. I would've been 14–15.

I sent you that video of him driving the bulldozer at Cementland from 2000. My parents were getting divorced, and my dad had stopped communicating with the person who had funded Turtle Park. And all that person wanted was for the cracks in the turtles that had been forming to be addressed. It was only a year or two old, so they were complaining, and my dad was taking offense to that. He was saying it was the natural patina. 

But I don't think he responded to them. From what I remember, he just didn't say anything. He was petty like that. So they addressed it by hiring a pool company, who came and sprayed them down with a protective epoxy coating. And I remember driving by them, and they were a different color. I said, "Dad, they painted your turtles." And he was like, "What?" And he almost crashed the car. He got so mad. And when I woke up the next morning, he had the orange marking spray paint—it was biodegradable, not real spray paint—and he was like, "You want to play hooky? We're going to go spray paint the turtles." And I said, "No, I don't want to play hooky. That's terrifying. Mom will kill me." 

But in that video [I sent], he gets interviewed [about the turtles getting spray painted], and it goes right over the reporter's head what's happening. And he kind of explains it, and it still goes over her head, because his protest actually didn't make any sense to anybody else. I don't even know if it made sense to you.

When he went to drum up some publicity for that, that's when he allowed them to go film him at Cementland. That's why we have that footage of him on the bulldozer. That was a really dangerous move that he was doing there. You would be pretty pissed if you were on that bulldozer with him.

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Daniil:

And the time you guys went there together when you were 14, that was before he purchased the land?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. That was the only time I went all the way up the smoke stack.

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Daniil:

Would you guys go exploring abandoned sites together a lot?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah, it was definitely one of the bigger ones that we ever went through. I think the thing that he really liked about it was that underneath all the buildings, there was water. They had to pump out the water to keep the structures from overfilling and flooding. So since they weren't, he was able to make it look, in his mind, like it was Venice, Italy. Or he could make a moat for a castle, because, theoretically, anywhere you dig that would eventually start to happen.

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Daniil:

So when you guys went, was it flooded?

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Max Cassilly:

It was always flooded. If you just leveled that out and dug it up, a lake would form eventually. Everything was haphazard out there and reused if it could be.

I think it was just a zen meditation practice for him to go to. Cause everything was a hangout before it was opened. And then once it opened, it could no longer be a hangout. That happened with the caves at the City Museum. There are the first caves that they opened with it, and then there were the ones in the middle. And we would all go hang out in the caves in the middle and be scoundrels. If you wanted to show people something interesting, you'd go show them the center shaft of the building. And then when they opened that up, the rooftop became that hangout. And then they opened up the roof, so that was going to be the new place that people would go hang out at. When you open, I think you lose a lot of privacy, and you have to worry and curve the art to the public's fascination and safety. And I think that Cementland would've been too messed up to open.

When he left, it was so manicured. There were no trees anywhere. If there were trees, they were purposely planted trees. And just over the years, the amount of random trees that grew on the sides of those hills undid most of the work. And I don't know how you would bounce back from it, to be honest. The last time I went there, I was like, "Oh, can't even tell that anything was here." Especially compared to when it was actual pyramids with straight looking slopes.

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Daniil:

Do you remember what some of the other abandoned sites you guys would go to growing up were?

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Max Cassilly:

Well, there was the City Hospital around the corner from our house in Lafayette Square. Now people live in it. That was a scary one to go into. I don't even remember where the other ones were, because I was so young. He kind of stopped doing it after Cementland. We were just focused on that.

City Museum was supposed to be a climbing wall in the beginning. Have you heard that before? They were just like, "What can this be?" But then it never really became that. So for a while, we had a whole bunch of paintball supplies, and we'd go paintballing with our friends out there. And that would be terrifying, because it's not set up for that.

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Daniil:

When do you think he started actually working on Cementland?

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Max Cassilly:

Probably immediately after he bought it, right? I think my mom did it with him. They bought it when they were together. It's weird. We were looking back into the history of it all, and she's on the deed. And I think in their divorce, it got signed over to him fully.

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Daniil:

And he bought it later that same year that he brought you there for the first time?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. 

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Daniil:

At first, was your dad working alone there?

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Max Cassilly:

I think so. And I think he would have Ricky [Fortner] be there. I ended up working there for a couple summers. It would've been 2004 and 2005.

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Daniil:

And you were straight out of high school?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah, it's crazy.

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Daniil:

What would you do out there?

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Max Cassilly:

A lot of it was organizing stuff and moving stuff and then running equipment. And then me and Ricky installed some concrete things to make some of the silos look like a castle. It's a pretty cool art deco looking thing. They developed a way to put these things on the silos to make it look like they were columns. That's definitely still there. There's no way you would get rid of that. You might not even notice that it's there, but it is.

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Daniil:

How long were you working there for?

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Max:

Just during the summers, for a couple months. And eventually, I didn't like just how harsh it was there. So one of the times that I stopped working with my dad was because I was working around some boilers, and we were carrying them, and they snapped, and a whole bunch of asbestos went all over me. And I was not impressed by that. So I was just like, "Dad, I can't work out here anymore. I don't think you want me working here either."

The asbestos is all over that place. I think the roof, that concrete looking stuff that's corrugated, is concrete with asbestos in it. So if you ground that up, broke it up enough, it definitely is pretty bad for you. And it's just cement dust too. I'm too much of a hypochondriac in my brain to mess around with that for a very long time.

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Daniil:

So you quit one of the summers?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah, that was the time that I quit working on the crew. Then I would take other jobs for the Museum.

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Daniil:

And before you quit, you were bouncing back and forth between the Museum and Cementland those summers?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. Cementland became a place where they would store stuff that was too big, and a lot of people were storing stuff there. A lot of it was salvaged.

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Daniil:

When you were out there in 2004–2006, were they still building the mounds and bringing the dirt in? 

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. I wonder when they started that. 

When I was in high school from like 2000 to 2004, I would see Cementland occasionally. He had that barge out there for a little bit. But he had a different house that he was also living at, so on the nights that we would be there, we would stay at the other house.

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Daniil:

You wouldn't go on the barge as much?

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Max Cassilly:

During the weekends maybe. I went to Crossroads High School, so driving all the way there from Cementland in the morning was not worth it.

Actually, I hung out more at Cementland when I was in rehab later. I was in this rehab organization called Crossroads—unrelated to the Crossroads High School, just to make it confusing. It was for people from age 12 to 27 who had drug problems or were depressed. I was 18. My friends were caught with drugs at school, and I didn't get caught, but they threatened to kick me out. So I was like, "Alright, I'll take this path for a little bit."

There's this theory that they have in this rehab: "Kids just want to have fun. They are looking for that dopamine rush. They don't actually care where they get that from. Maybe sometimes they want to get the dopamine rush from not doing drugs and just hanging out with each other and acting stupid." It's called enthusiastic sobriety, and it's a scam. I'll start by saying that.

They would bring us into different places, and we'd have parties there. They would call them fear missions. We would go find a place in St. Louis, like maybe an old building that was run down, and go walk around there and destroy some stuff. And then when the inevitable kid would get caught doing something, the sobriety program would say, "Hey, at least they're not doing drugs. They're hanging out with our people. It's cool; they're just having fun. Maybe you don't see it as being productive, but at least it's not doing drugs."

I went to Cementland twice with that group, and that was the scaredest I've ever been there. It was probably 150 people running around, and they were from all different parts of town. All sober-ish—they would've kicked you out if they caught you doing drugs. One of my friends said that he fell through a hole and caught himself. He almost died. He had a broken rib or something. 

That was probably 2004. We would also go break into the City Museum. We did that probably 20 times.

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Daniil:

So was your dad working with that sobriety program, inviting them in?

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Max Cassilly:

No. In those situations, the sobriety groups like that will use scare tactics to get the adults to let up on the kids. By being like, "Oh, your kid is doing drugs; they're going to die. So we'll take 'em on for a little bit." And my dad caught on pretty quick that it was some malarkey, that it wasn't sustainable. They want you to go to all these meetings and stuff too. And my dad went to one or two and was like, “This is not something that I'm going to do.”

And then they were like, "Well, your dad's part of the problem." So then I wasn't allowed to hang out with my dad, because he was part of the problem. You see how they did that? So initially it was him that wanted me to go there for substance abuse issues, and he was the first person to be like, "We've been sold a false bill of goods."

And when you're in that type of program, you tell them stuff. You're way too honest with everything. And then they sit your parents down, and they're like, "Well, what about this?" And they'll tell you something that happens in every family, probably. Every parent snaps. The severity of that is different with each parent, but I have yet to meet a parent that has been perfect. So they fine-tooth comb your life and find those few parts and then bring them up. I didn't ask my dad about this, but from the research that I've done talking to people who are no longer involved with this, this is what was said to their parents. So I can imagine what they... You just have to insinuate abuse, and that would probably shut up most parents. I think my mom was sober at the time, so they did a good job of playing to her and then just knocking him out. 

He was gruff and rough, and the reason that program appealed to him is that it was a tough love type of approach. And that was kind of the Midwest way. I think that parents respond really well to that. You just want your kid to be alive. 

So we were running around Cementland. We were trying to find places to park across the street, so that it doesn't look like there's anybody in there. And we ended up taking up that whole grass area. Crossroads at this time had probably around 700 people in it, and there was North group, South group, West group and the younger groups. They were all already in town for an event, so that's why there was 150 people there. We were all so muddy, and it was a blast. Don't get me wrong: everybody had a blast. But we were really lucky. That was probably the most people that were out there at one time.

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Daniil:

And this was happening without your dad's permission?

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Max Cassilly:

Nobody's permission. It was baby Cementland. Honestly, it was probably the best time to do it, because there was a lot of stuff left behind from the companies before. So you would be in certain rooms, and there'd be chairs and furniture and stuff. A little bit of that might still be there, but it's probably gotten destroyed. That's probably when it happened, with those 150. That was probably the initial damage.

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Daniil:

So do you think that the approach of going to abandoned buildings and exploring to give kids a thrill was also part of what appealed to your dad about that program?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah, if you could manufacture that experience a little bit. So that you feel like you're exploring something, but you're not really. Because when you are in those circumstances, they are way more dangerous than people realize. We're just lucky it was him that died there, to be honest. Did Dave Blum tell you about the time that he almost died there? That was so scary. I don't even know if I saw it or if I was around that day. It was just one of those things where you hear about it and... Yeah.

Cementland became the place where you would send the non-social workers too. The people who weren't good at handling other people. If you got an employee that was just kind of done with the general public because it was starting to get really busy in the Museum again, they'd be itching to go out to Cementland. Especially when the weather would start getting nice. They'd have to come up with a reason, a job for you to do out there. They'd have to go spark my dad's interest.

And the Museum would get so busy that they couldn't build. So what do you do with those 15 people? Because if you think about the brass tacks of it, the average cost of the crew every two weeks was like 30 grand, when you have to pay the insurance and the taxes. So money out of your pocket. They were making money from doing projects, but it was an expensive vanity project.

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Daniil:

In your understanding, how was Cementland being funded?

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Max Cassilly:

It was purely being funded through the sales of City Museum tickets. My dad was using his money and trading up, if you will, from owning the City Museum building. And then he used the money from selling the front building [of the International Shoe Company] to secure the funding. The front building is now The Last Hotel building. It was the first, original International Shoe Company building. It’s kind of a replica of the Wainwright building, so it's got a steel frame and wood floors. And it's 10 stories tall. 

My dad and my mom bought the front building and the back building for really cheap. Those buildings were trashed. So the first thing they did was just make money on the front building by renting it out to a catering company, and a whole bunch of other things. And then once they made enough money, they started to work on [City Museum in] the back building. And then when my parents got divorced, Dave Jump bought my mom's share. So that means that he owned the front building and the back building half and half. Then, when he also bought half of Cementland, that absolved my mom of owning it, so she got the money for it. Basically, there's one person that made out like a bandit, and it's my mom, because she actually made good money.

At least by 2011, my dad didn't own the front building anymore. And it was a surprise to me, because I always thought it was a cool building. He sold that building completely to Dave Jump. Before, they were 50–50 partners. And he used that money to buy Cementland fully. So then, he didn't have any business partners on Cementland. He didn't owe anything on it; he just owned it and that was worth it to him. Worth completely ruining any ability to carry on his involvement [after his death]. Now, the people that you were doing business with don't really want to share that with you anymore. They don't want to build Cementland. There's no reason for them to do it. 

The downfall was that he just didn't have a will, and he also got rid of the board of directors [at the City Museum], so removing the guardrails that he did not like ended up ruining everything. That's the Cementland conundrum. There was no force driving a business plan, and that's really what it needed to be. And the City Museum just didn't stay in the family. I think in Missouri law, business partners always get control, if you just use Missouri's business charter. 

When my dad passed, the estate went against everybody else. The estate wanted to take on and own all of the assets of everything, and claimed that me and my sister would never be able to have any of it. And that we should just be thankful for the time that we have on this pretty Earth, and that everybody should just listen to them. They wanted full cut control over City Museum. And it's just not how you work with other people. So everybody involved with the Museum, including Dave Jump, were like, "We don't need that." You can go on the internet and look up the stories about the estate being like, "We're continuing this on." I think it was like six months after my dad passed. And the next day or the next week, the crew quit because of that article. They all quit in solidarity against the estate, I'm pretty sure. 

It's hard for me to forgive a lot of those crew members. Because I was telling them from the beginning that we just need to buckle down, that it was going to be the crew of Cassilly versus the world (and I considered myself in that at the time), that we're going to have to tell City Museum proper and the estate what should be happening. There should be a board set up to make the artistic decisions with City Museum and to keep the artistic legacy going. A board where the family, anybody that knew Robert Cassilly, and anybody who was involved, whether they like each other or not, have to make decisions together somehow. But there was never once any talk like that.

And that's a little bit because of how my dad set things up. If my mom had been involved from the beginning... She set City Museum up as a not-for-profit, and it was successful. All he really had to do was shut the fuck up and collect money, and he could have gone and bought Cementland and created that. 

But it's all about control in life. He didn't have any control over anything there. And the not-for-profit was actually thinking about making City Museum look a little bit more like other art museums around. And they had tons of programming about different aspects of art and making different art. And then there was the architectural aspect of it all. So it was definitely getting more art based and had communal aspects to it, and my dad hated that. 

That’s where you get the money from, but all the money that was donated to the not-for-profit, which paid him, had purse strings attached to it. And he wasn't happy with that anymore. And he was also getting a divorce from half of the people involved: half the people at the Museum picked my mom's side, and half the people picked my dad's. And the board of directors eventually caved to my dad somehow, through some tricky business. And he ended up dissolving the not-for-profit. When my mom was no longer involved, my dad was able to raise the rent all the way, and he actually kicked them out. They didn't fail or anything. He just kicked them out. And they were gonna let it just close on them, but I think they found Dave Jump to step in pretty quickly. They had to pay a bunch of money back to the different entities that donated the money and then opened back up the next day. And he was already purchasing Cementland at this point.

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Daniil:

What do you think he was after with Cementland?

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Max Cassilly:

He once told me, "I get on the bulldozer, and I take one mound of dirt and push it to the right. And then the next day, I get on and push that same mound of dirt to the left." I think it was his therapy to a certain extent. It was his outlet. He used a bulldozer more like it was a tool than using it like a bulldozer. And that's why he died. Because you can't use it like a trowel.

It's pretty interesting watching him make art with plaster. He's taking the plaster and putting it against the wall and pushing up, putting it on the wall and pushing up, always at a 90 degree angle from the surface. He understands that. But the reason why he died is because when he was running his bulldozer, he did it at the opposite angle. Does that make any sense? He understands the physics of the plaster going up on the wall, but he doesn't understand that if you go horizontal, it just falls off. When you're watching people mud a wall, they're always pushing up because of gravity. 

When you detach yourself from the functionality versus the way that something looks—I want the soil to move in this way because it sculpts it better—running it in those parameters becomes unsafe. If you're running it like you should, it actually takes more skill. You have to hit it at the right angle, and you have to have the bucket at the right spot, and you're not relying on an avalanche effect. That's kind of what he was doing. Does that make any sense? I have studied the accident. It's fascinating. You could legitimately show that site to people and teach them how not to drive the bulldozer.

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Daniil:

How would you describe the idea of Cementland in your own words? What do you think he was planning?

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Max Cassilly:

My dad would take people up to the top of the smokestack and then say, "Hey, we should all throw our cellphones off the top of here. Let's just see how far they'll fly." So I think it would've been a lot of, "I'm trying to detach you from the electronic world." City Museum chews up your cell phone. It's always falling out of your pocket, scraping up the front. I think he would've leaned into that. He would've made it so that it would have been impossible to film yourself. No selfies allowed.

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Daniil:

The first time we met, you mentioned there used to be a cruising spot near Cementland. Can you tell me more about that?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. The first few times we pulled up there, before he bought it, we parked in the parking lot across Riverview Drive. There was something like a rest stop there, just a bathroom for the park. I remember getting out, and one of the workers walked up to us and was like, "Sir, what are you bringing the kids around here for? I can't do anything with that." And he was like, "What?" He had no idea. The guy left and my dad was like, "So that is probably a prostitute, I would say." And slowly but surely, we realized that at least at that point, it was definitely the spot for a lot of promiscuous activities not of the straight variety. So you could see why they were confused when this dude got out of his car with his kids. Now there's a playground there. So that's even weirder to me.

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Daniil:

Do you think it's still a spot?

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Max Cassilly:

Not that I know of, but I think that switches, right? When I lived on South Grand, there was the prostitute section. And every six months they would clean that area up, and then six months later it'd be in a different area, and then six months later you're back. So I think it's a lot like that up there, from what I really put together. And especially in the beginning, when we'd be going up there and there was really no place to park, those two cultures were really mixing together and it was just a different world.

All up and down the riverfront there people participate, and that was very obvious. And my job a couple of times was to go clean up Coney Island whitefish. There'd be a bunch of them.

One time I found three messages in a bottle. I wish I would've kept them. One of them was like, "Hey, call this number when you find this. This is crazy." And then a couple of them were like, "Call this number for sex." Probably kids joking around, but I thought it was weird that many people thought of littering their bottle.

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Daniil:

So was it a busier area when you guys were going earlier on?

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Max Cassilly:

No, it was pretty quiet. It's always pretty dangerous, just because nobody else is around. Why I think St. Louis can be more dangerous than a place like New York is that there's just so many more people around you in New York. If something disastrous happens to us here at 11 o'clock at night and you scream and nobody hears you, you're screwed. But in New York, you can scream and somebody will hear you.

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Daniil:

Would there usually be a lot of cars in the parking lot, other than folks who were there for Cementland?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. And later there were fishers, people showing up and fishing right out of the Mississippi. But that was later, when they stopped the cruising a little—I just think that it changes spots. They were probably always fishing, but it was less noticeable when there were other activities that were more distracting.

There's a lot of cops that would do shooting target practice out of Cementland.

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Daniil:

They did that while you guys were out there working on construction in 2004–2005?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah. I'm sure they did it the whole time. At the end of the day, generally they'd be doing it. So I'd get the fuck out of there, to be honest.

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Daniil:

Did your dad have some kind of a deal with them to let them come in and do that?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah, they could just shoot whatever they wanted there. They had a specific spot. I don't remember which one.

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Daniil:

What do you think the deal was?

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Max Cassilly:

I don't know. It always freaked me out though. I don't like it. I'm of the opinion that if we weren't in capitalism, then they'd be good people. But yeah, they were just protecting Cementland, probably.

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Daniil:

Interesting, I would've assumed that your dad wouldn't have wanted cops around.

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Max Cassilly:

No. They don't care as much as you think. It's pretty siloed. As long as you're not murdering anybody, the St. Louis cops don't care. You know what I mean?

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Daniil:

Were there other ways you guys interacted with the community around there?

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Max Cassilly:

Not really. They owned a bunch of the houses around there though. The Cementland property did.

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Daniil:

The ones around Scranton?

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Max Cassilly:

Yeah.

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Daniil:

So your dad owned them?

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Max Cassilly:

Mhm.

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Daniil:

Was he renting them out or something?

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Max Cassilly:

I have no idea. They didn't do much with them. I always thought that was weird too. I wish we could have those resources. I think they were part of the parcel, probably. Who knows who owns them now.

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Follow-up on 11.14.24
The Gelateria, St. Louis, MO

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Daniil: 

What was Lafayette Square like when you were growing up there?

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Max Cassilly:  

It was pretty dangerous. I've always known what gunshots were versus fireworks, because the Peabody projects were so close. There's Dolman right there, and if you pass Dolman, there's a dead spot where they ripped down a lot of the houses, because they were very bombed out. And then they built the Peabody projects. So there was that little buffer there, but people were constantly spilling through and breaking that invisible barrier. There was supposed to be an actual physical barrier, which was going to be that highway. 

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Daniil:  

The highway was gonna be the barrier between Lafayette Square and the Peabody projects?

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Max Cassilly:  

No, they were just gonna take out the Peabody projects and Lafayette Square, and it was just gonna be a huge expressway to ship you out of the city. All those houses were just going to be ripped out. And nobody lived in them, really. They did at the Peabody projects. 

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I remember coming outside because I heard police sirens. The next door neighbor had his motorcycle helmet on, and he saw a guy come up to him, and he reached for his helmet, and the guy shot him right in the stomach. The robber was trying to get his money, but because the guy couldn't understand him, he had to take his helmet off. And he considered that to be a form of aggression. So he just shot him. That was one of the first times I put together that guns really weren't that cool. So there was always that scary side too. It felt like both sides didn't belong. 

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Daniil: 

What were the sides?

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Max Cassilly:  

Well, you got the haves and have nots so close to Dolman, the barrier. The next street over is Truman Parkway, and it's this really dumbed down version of what they wanted to do. It was supposed to go all the way up north. That area where they put the stadium, it was also slated to be that, and that's why they were able to build the soccer stadium there. I learned all this today from Chris [Naffziger].

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Daniil:  

When you were living in Lafayette Square, was it a majority white area? 

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Max Cassilly:  

Yes, I would say that it was. I don't ever remember a Black person living on our street. Chris was telling me that it used to be a working class hoosier neighborhood. And south of that—yeah, there was going to be a whole bunch of gentrification in tearing down the Peabody projects. They were like, "People live there, but we're just going to put in trucking terminals." And where are those people gonna go? Who cares, you know? 

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Nobody in Lafayette Square was trying to save everything. They just wanted to be able to save the little thing that they saw in front of them. It was a group of people that bunkered down in an area trying to hold on to the bricks as people were selling them. Like tearing down these houses and selling the brick. That still happens today. What's happening now is, builders will sometimes buy a house or two, and then they'll knock them down to take all the bricks and move them to Chicago and build a new house out. I've never met anybody that's doing that, but I've heard stories

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Daniil: 

When you were a kid in Lafayette Square, what was your perception of the income levels in the neighborhood, if you ever registered that?

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Max Cassilly:  

It seemed to be middle–upper class, especially as you got into the center of the square. If you could see the park, you had a nice house. There were a lot of gay guys in the neighborhood, but most of them died off by the time I was born. The AIDS epidemic ravaged Lafayette Square. My dad told me it was like 30–40% gay. And it was one of the hardest times of his life, just watching friends upon friend upon friends slowly disappear. 

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Daniil: 

Did you guys know anyone in the neighborhood whose family lived there since before the 70s? 

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Max Cassilly:  

Most of the people were transplants. Was rehabbing Lafayette Square gentrification? I mean, sure. But it also actually might be doing the opposite, because I think the initial plan was to just tear it down. There was just supposed to be nobody living there.

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Daniil:  

Were there other low income neighborhoods that Lafayette Square was in direct proximity to, besides the area around Peabody?

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Max Cassilly:  

I don't remember them offhand, but for example the Gate District. They changed their names a lot. Where the Lafayette Shop was, that was definitely more of a gentrification, really. More so than living in Lafayette Square, in my opinion. That area was terrifying. There were no houses around there. All around the shop, it was kind of bombed out. A couple people lived around there in a couple of the houses. Now they're all selling for $300,000–$400,000.

It almost wasn't even a neighborhood. It was probably supposed to be more of an industrial part of town. That's where the Shop n Save was, the National Store, Bettendorf's, which is what the Lafayette Shop building was originally. And then that's when I came into the picture. It was definitely a food desert, looking back on it. Everybody would have to go to Clayton to do their shopping.

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