Crown Candy Will Get Speed Bumps After Years of Waiting

Andy Karandzieff has seen all kinds of chaotic driving in front of his restaurant, Crown Candy Kitchen. There have been people chasing each other at high speeds as they fly past a stop signs and a driver who hit a school bus. Once, two drivers decided to run a stop sign and collided in front of the historic Old North restaurant.

"One of the cars rolled and just barely missed hitting our building," Karandzieff says.

But it wasn't until this week that Karandzieff saw a vehicle strike a pedestrian. Karandzieff shared footage online — as he does with some of the crazier traffic violations his security camera captures. The video showed the driver of a black Chevy Malibu roll a stop sign and hit a man walking in the crosswalk on the other side of the intersection.

"This is perfectly acceptable and expected in the city nowadays," Karandzieff wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "This is the sad, sad state of our world. We have failed as a community."  

This is perfectly acceptable and expected in the city nowadays
This is the sad sad state of our world
We have failed as a community pic.twitter.com/CiQNtl6Hdn

— Andy Karandzieff (@kzieff) November 1, 2023

What heightened the response to the incident was how preventable it was. City residents have long bemoaned the way that a shortage of traffic enforcement has emboldened bad drivers. And Karandzieff has lobbied for the past five or six years for City Hall to do something about the increasingly reckless driving in the area surrounding Crown Candy, he says.

It wasn't until recently that his efforts gained some headway.

Ward 14 Alderman Rasheen Aldridge sponsored a bill this fall to bring two speed bumps near Crown Candy. The measure passed the full Board of Aldermen and now awaits the mayor's signature. After that, Aldridge says the Streets Department has committed to installing the speed humps sometime next spring. One will be right on Crown Candy's block.

"After me complaining and posting all these videos, we're finally going to get it," Karandzieff says.

Before Aldridge, aldermen either didn't respond to Karandzieff or their efforts got lost in the cogs of the city bureaucracy, Karandzieff says.

Former alderman James Page, who represented the area before ward reduction shuffled borders and he lost his bid for reelection in March, got a bill passed that would have allowed for a speed bump on Crown Candy's block. But Page was unseated before he could fully see the process through, Aldridge says.

"After you pass the speed hump bills, they have to get signed and you have to allocate the necessary funds to actually pay for it to get installed," Aldridge says.  "(Page) never paid for it."

That level of detail is beyond Karandzieff, who just wants to see the city do something to keep his customers and neighbors to be safe.

"Fortunately, now I have someone who will actually respond to me and check in on me after he sees these videos to say he's still working on this," Karandzieff says.

The man who got hit earlier this week, Stephen Marx, was walking down North 14th Street when the still-unknown driver plowed him to the ground. The 71-year-old Marx was on his way to work at the store he owns down the street, Marx Hardware & Paint Co.

When reached by phone on Friday, Marx was at work in his store; he says being there "beats sitting around at the old homestead getting bumps on your butt."

Marx was vague on what injuries he'd sustained as a result of the hit-and-run (though, he says, "corrective measures had been taken"). But he spared no words in decrying the "'who cares' attitude" of reckless St. Louis drivers.

"It was probably an unlicensed, uninsured driver in a car with no license plates," Marx says. "This is an epidemic here in town."


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