Dick Hart would have liked the way the Skinker-DeBaliviere area was so graciously portrayed in Robert Duffy’s opening article of the “Where We Live” series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Everyday section of Sunday, May 31, 1992. It shows our neighborhood in wonderful photos and tells stories of a diverse group of people that help to make our part of St. Louis what it is today. I, however, would have changed the opening title from “Skinker-DeBaliviere’s history goes back to the Chouteaus” to read “Skinker-DeBaliviere’s history goes back to Richard C. Hart.”
From my perspective, I can look back twenty-eight years to a time when this community was threatened by the onslaught of urban blight: massive move-out by white home owners and renters; surge of crime; a very over-crowded and segregated public school; whole blocks of crumbling tenement-like apartments with literally no tenants services; no enforcement of building regulations or codes; block busting real estate tactics; red-lining by FHA, banks, insurers, real estate brokers, etc.; an over concentration of the ill-conceived HUD 235 program by greedy real estate investors; negative media coverage; the making of another segregated St. Louis neighborhood. Complaints to police and municipal offices often brought the retort, “Ya better move out of there.” These problems left unchecked would have prevented forever our west end area of the city from developing into the impressive neighborhood depicted in the Post-Dispatch article.
I had just met Dick Hart and was pulled by him into a rush of community action that is still racing forward today. Dick had lived in our Skinker-DeBaliviere community all his life and was planning to raise his family here. Hart was also committed to integration and was not going to move because of the color of someone’s skin. Dick Hart was motivated by these simple aspirations.
Still in his twenties, with wife, children, and a law degree, he began to take seriously his part in the existing community organizations. He served at various elected offices over the years in the old Rosedale-Skinker Association. Dick Hart soon had me working in Rosedale-Skinker and its neighbor to the east, the Washington Heights Neighborhood Association. Through these early years of finding alley light captains, controlling dogs upsetting trash cans, and calling the city to enforce building codes, it became apparent to Dick Hart that these part-time efforts, as noble as they were, could not stem the social and urban decay that had sickened so many large city neighborhoods across the country.
I sat with Dick at Ollie’s, a little bar at the corner of Delmar and Rosedale, after yet another aimless neighborhood meeting, when Dick said, “This part-time community effort is not working and will not work. My God, we are spending entire meetings keeping dogs out of trash cans, and the dogs are winning! We are not addressing the real problems. We need a full-time staff.” From this point in mid-1965, Hart’s self-appointed task was to organize a working alliance between two neighborhood associations, the three neighborhood churches, and Washington University, which by March of 1966 incorporated as the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council. It is a great oversimplification to condense this incredible undertaking to a few written paragraphs.
By this time in Dick Hart’s life, his friends and neighbors knew him by his integrity, fairness, sharp logic, wit, and humor. It was these attributes of leadership that allowed Dick to move forward.
In founding the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council, Dick Hart changed the road to decline, and began our renaissance, providing our neighborhood with the conduit, forum, meeting place, and table at which a legion of community leaders have met and shared their inspirations and ideas on how to make Skinker-DeBaliviere a very special place to live. One such community leader is John Roach, who served on the early council for three years. Of Dick Hart, Roach recently said, “What is so remarkable in these very transient times is that one man can make such a unique contribution to his neighbors and neighborhood and live his entire life in that same neighborhood.”
Thank you, Richard C. Hart, for being a good neighbor.
(Jim L’Ecuyer was the first Executive Director of the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council and lives with his wife Cllori at 5777 DeGiverville.)
(The Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council has established the Richard Hart Memorial Fund, which will be used for special projects such as the planting of trees. Contributions may be sent to the Council office at 6010 Kingsbury.)
