CULTURE 33

its new art installation Pillars for the Valley. The ceremony featured speeches by Davis, St. Louis CITY SC President and CEO Carolyn Kindle, Great Rivers Greenway CEO Susan Trautman, former Mill Creek Valley resident and author Vivian Gibson and Mayor Tishaura Jones.

The public art exhibit, located at the intersection of Market and 22nd Street, recognizes Mill Creek Valley, a Black community once home to nearly 20,000 residents in Midtown that was bulldozed to the ground in the late 1950s to build a highway in the name of urban renewal.

Since then, the history of the neighborhood, the businesses, the churches and the people, has largely been erased.

“In our not-so-distant past, 64 years ago today, the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was demolished,” Jones said. “To be clear, this was an act of intentional racial injustice. Mill Creek Valley was a Black neighborhood.”

The installation is part of the 20-mile Brickline Greenway being built by Great Rivers Greenway. It will extend throughout the city, from Forest Park to Fairground Park to Tower Grove Park to the Arch. The pillars will be placed on multiple sections of the Greenway, including at CITY PARK and Harris-Stowe State University. Davis, 37, started working on the project nearly five years ago. A world-renowned artist, Davis created the public art exhibit All Hands on Deck and the documentary Whose Streets? — both centered around the aftermath of Michael Brown’s killing.

When Davis designed his most recent work, Pillars of the Valley, he wanted to symbolize time. He built hourglasses with tan limestone inside to represent sand.

“[The sand] doesn’t move because time has been stopped,” Davis said. “We stopped time to remember, recognize, commemorate, and more than anything, give vindication to a neighborhood of people that were purposefully forgotten. So we never forget again.”

A wall along the west side of the exhibitions lists the names, ages and occupations of people who lived on a block in Mill Creek Valley in 1940. When Davis first started researching Mill Creek Valley, he came across an old newsreel, which he called a “smear campaign,” labeling it as a “slum.” He wanted to contest the mischaracterization of Mill Creek Valley with sculptures, such as this name-engraved wall.

“This was a thriving neighborhood [with] multiple economic classes because segregation just pushed everybody that looked a certain way together,” Davis said.

“So it was diverse in the types of Black people that were there.”

Davis didn’t only design this to be St. Louis-specific, though. He intended it to serve as a place for all people to visit.

“I wanted to make something that could be a site of reverence for all displaced people — refugees, people that get moved around without their consent,” Davis said. “And hopefully people from all over the world can come here, and take it in and feel some vindication, some validation.”

As Davis finished his speech in the ULTRA Club, he turned to the right side of the room, where dozens of people sat, the people who had lived in Mill Creek Valley.

“And one thing for the elders of Mill Creek. This,” he said, “for ya’ll.” n