"If you want to truly know a neighborhood, you have to walk down the alley. That's where you see the truth. That's where it really happens," says Gary Newcomer, St. Louis' foremost expert on the topic of its alleys. His interest isn't just academic — though it is that, too. He's spent as much time as anyone traversing up and down them.
The 32-year-old's enthusiasm for alleys dates back to his childhood in St. Louis Hills and Princeton Heights, where he spent evenings and weekends in the alley with his neighborhood friends playing basketball and hide and seek among the dumpsters.
"Growing up, it sort of became kind of an identifying thing, having an alley meant that you were from the city. If you had an alley, it was a very distinguishing thing," he says.
After earning a bachelor's from Boston College, Newcomer returned to St. Louis for graduate school, where as part of his master's degree in urban planning and development he began his alley research in earnest, eventually producing a thesis titled "Alley-OOPS! The Economic Impact of Forgetting the Back Streets."
Alleys have existed since ancient Rome, he says, and the ones in St. Louis took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the city's population boomed.
"Alleys were like an escape valve, a space where people can be, but also a space where the trash can be, a space that could look bad so the front could still look good," he says. "If you need to do anything behind the scenes to keep the city running, it happens in the alley."
Newcomer wanted to know what sort of role alleys play in shaping the neighborhoods surrounding them. Did a good alley make for a good neighborhood? A bad alley for a bad neighborhood? What even made an alley good or bad to begin with?
Luckily for Newcomer, he was in the right city. St. Louis holds 600 miles of alleys within its limits. He focused his energy on 14 alleys in four neighborhoods and started walking, devoting several days a week to the enterprise over the course of a year — as he puts it, an "embarrassing" amount of time walking the alleys.
He got yelled at. He got the cops called on him. Mostly, the typical alley denizens were confused.
"People would constantly come up to me and ask me questions, and when I said what I was doing, they didn't understand," he says. "They were very skeptical. I just started telling people I was doing research for the city. I brought a clipboard and I'd look at the dumpster and take notes."
The alleys of the city, he learned, are as varied as the neighborhoods themselves. One Compton Heights alley has been restored to its original brick, which allows it to drain more efficiently. In Lindenwood Park there is an alley that starts off normally enough, but gradually gets narrower and narrower until all of a sudden the pavement disappears, turning to grass, and the garages on either side get closer and closer together. "Then you get stuck," Newcomer says. There are few spots in North Pointe that should be alleys — there are fences and electrical wires and other alley accouterments — but instead of a hard surface, there is now only trees and weeds and grass.
The North Pointe non-alleys are likely a direct result of alleys historically being seen as a haven for criminality and general sketchiness, which resulted in efforts by government agencies like the Alley Dwelling Authority to eliminate them in Black neighborhoods. (The Alley Dwelling Authority was never active in St. Louis, but its existence elsewhere in the U.S. from 1934 to 1973 speaks to the general anxiety alleys have provoked.)
While Newcomer's qualitative research consisted of months and months of walking, he investigated our alleys quantitatively, too, finding that access to an alley will on average boost the value of your home in the city by 3.9 percent. Despite all his research, Newcomer isn't exactly sure why that is, especially given that when people are looking for homes they rarely take the alley into consideration, except for those who expressly say they want an abode without one.
"My initial thought is that if you have an alley, you don't have the trash in the front of the house, you're more likely to have trees in the front of the house," he says. "So when people are looking at houses, they're more likely to choose the house that looks pretty on the outside."
Newcomer stresses that is just a guess. However, one thing he is certain of is that you can learn a lot about a block by its alley.
Bad signs include gates that sport padlocks locked and rusty from little use. Same for newly constructed, very high fences. A "private property" sign signaling a homeowner is trying to claim a swath of the alley as their own is perhaps the worst of all.
On the flip side, a flourishing block may well feature an alley with basketball hoops, miniature gardens and, ultimately, a sense of what Newcomer identifies in his thesis as a slightly "blurred distinction between the private and public realms." Best of all, in alley terms, is a sign indicating some neighbor has taken it upon themselves to name the alley as if it were a street. These signs, Newcomer writes, go a long way in "counteracting the perceptions of the alley as a wild and unregulated space."
Newcomer is currently living in Sweden as his partner, a microbiologist, works for Nestle there. "There aren't as many alleys here," he says.
He hopes to one day return to St. Louis and again traverse the alleys of the Gateway City, furthering his research and our understanding of these underappreciated thoroughfares.
"Why is St. Louis not the epicenter of alley research? We should be," he says. "There's so much to do. There's so much to learn."
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters.Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
