Where is "Greendale" Missouri? It's a municipality in the St. Louis area located along Natural Bridge Road in St. Louis County. Ever heard of it? Not me. What about these:
Berdell Hills
Black Walnut
Burke City
Village of Champ
Crescent
City of Fern Glen
Goldman
City of Greendale
Grubville
Hematite
Horine
Machens
City of Montgomery City
Morse Mill
Murphy
City of Old Monroe
Olympian Village
Otto
City of Robertson
Robertsville
Rock Community
Village of Schuermann Heights
City of Shady Valley
City of Sherman
City of Springdale
Village of Sycamore Hills
Ware
Anyone ever heard of these places? Every one of them is a unit of local government listed in the St. Louis phone directory with a 636 or 314 area code. Yup, we like our politics local!
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15 comments:
I know a lot of hippie types that have lived in Grubville over the years. It is located in Jefferson County.
Olympian Village is on the way to SEMO. Stopped there for gas before.
Black Walnut is out by St Charles, I believe around the Orchard Farm school district.
Several years ago I saw a severe weather alert on TV, listing the affected towns. A bunch of places in north county -- Black Jack, Bellefontaine Neighbors, Florissant ... and Shoveltown. We thought it must a joke that someone slipped in on the list, but no. In the internet age I've been able to discover that there is (or was) indeed a Shoveltown, MO in STL county.
Here's a guide to some of the suburbs of St. Louis I made last year. I had no idea how many little municipalities were in the inner Northwest ring. http://robryancartography.com/portfolio/stl_suburbs.pdf
the "f" in ".pdf" was missing. stl_suburbs.pdf
Burke City: Used to go there to score weed in the early 70's, and meet a nice young lady with a voice like a frog. Up in North County, not far from McCluer, sandwiched between Ferguson and Florissant.
A lot of you may not know why there are so many municipalities in St. Louis County. The root of it lies in the fact that St. Louis City is not part of St. Louis County, and was never able to extend it's municipal boundaries. (Baltimore is the only other city in the US that is not part of a county, and has many of the same issues St. Louis City has.) That's both encouraged and allowed small municipal bodies to form to exercise govermental authority that normally would have assumed by a growing metropolis.
/pedantry
It's interesting how there are so many tiny municipalities along Natural Bridge, just beyond the city limits.
I wonder why that is.
The reason we have so many municipalities can be understood by analyzing the incorporation of Black Jack.
St. Louis City and Baltimore are not the only independent cities in this country.
Cook County IL, the only home rule county in Illinois, has 138 municipalities. Chicago is the largest of Cook County's 63 home rule cities. Go figure.
Doug-
Is this what you were talking about?
Statement from the Mayor of Black Jack
Some on that list are actual incorporated muni's, some are unincorporated places whose names are not used much anymore.
As for Greendale: the mayor, Monica Huddleston, is a dynamo! Like most of the small cities' mayors and council members, she serves without pay.
Greendale has gotten grants from the MO Dept of Health & Senior Services for a citywide fitness program. Also they worked with Maryland Heights' comm dev director John Oldroyd who (pro bono) developed a master plan for them. Monica also sits on the board of the Greater St. Louis Regional Empowerment Zone.
I also once worked with the late Prof. John Boswell, an UMSL psychology professor who was Greendale mayor for several years in the 1990s. He also had interesting ideas about the future of the area around UMSL, some of which have since come to fruition.
Greendale is a quiet little suburb, sandwiched between a park and a golf course, racially-integrated and with a mix of large and small houses. It has no significant commercial property though.
The "Village of Schuermann Heights" disincorporated probably 25 years ago. It's now part of the City of Woodson Terrace.
Berdell Hills, similarly, is now part of the City of Normandy.
If you compare, say, a gas station map from 1970 to a current map, you'll see that a number of those very small muni's have disincorporated and been absorbed into slightly larger adjacent muni's.
As for Robertson -- I'm not sure it ever incorporated. That was an historically African-American pocket along N. Lindbergh just NW of Lambert Airport. Much like Kinloch, it has been bought out and largely demolished due to airport expansion and noise abatement.
Most of the others on this list are tiny hamlets in Jefferson County and other semi-rural counties. They may have a fire dept by that name, but not necessarily a true city or village govt. That's where the Blue Pages get a little confusing and misleading.
But, yeah, some of those names are pretty funny.
Yes, there was a ShovelTown, not large, it was basically the immediate area of what is now the intersection of North Hwy 67 and Old Halls Ferry Road. The Sunland Hills neighborhood built in the 60s largely composes what was once called "ShovelTown".
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