Like everyone else in St. Louis City’s southern half, I frequently get YMCA booklets in the mail, imploring you to join the Y on Loughborough and take advantage of their services.
I got another one today, but it didn’t look like most of the ones I received in the past. So I didn’t pitch it right away, and instead, opened it up. It’s a glossy fold-out brochure, that was revealing in more ways than one:
Remember all that fuss Mayor Slay made about recreation centers a few years ago? After the Cards beat the Tiggers in the World Series in 2006, in fact, the very next day after the clincher, St. Louis beat Detroit again, for the title as Morgan Quitno’s most dangerous city. Room 200′s strategy at first was to shit all over MQ’s methodology, but then it shifted tactics — They stopped dumping on the survey methodology and results, and said they were indeed true. But since St. Louis was the worst crime city in the country, this is the reason city voters had to rush out and pass a sales tax to fund new recreation centers, so that ghetto thugs have something to do other than doing that which made St. Louis the worst crime city in America. Now, while they played the “it’s really that bad let’s build rec centers” card, they genuflected back to their initial strategy of shitting all over MQ. Slay had endorsed John Kerry for President several years before, so I can understand his being for it after he was against it and against it after he was for it, all at the same time.
Nevertheless, the sales tax passed, and this was used to build two new ones, and rebab the existing ones.
And the result? One of the two new ones, the one in Carondelet Park in South City, is nothing more than a new building for the Y, just a fraction of a mile to the west of their old building on Loughborough. What this means in essence is that half the new recreation centers funded by this sales tax was nothing more than a gift of a new building to the Y, not a city O&O facility like the rest are, and like the new rec center on the north side, in O’Fallon Park, will be. City residents will have slightly reduced membership fees for that particular YMCA — Two words: Big whoop.
Someone explain to me how, at least in the context of what I just described, how this will deter at much as one violent crime in the southern half of this city. Please?
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