The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People Who Tried to Save Them (review)

Bonnie Stepenoff begins and concludes her study of homeless boys in St. Louis with family stories. The first involves her father, "a high school dropout hanging around the bowling alley and the pool hall" in the late 1940s. The book's concluding tale is of Stepenoff's eighteen-year-old daughter's boyfriend playing with his "emo" band at a notorious East St. Louis club. Each anecdote reveals the anger and desolation of teenage boys and their search for a meaningful release of their frightening emotions. The stories also highlight the book's central, though largely unexplored argument: that family—its internal order and emotional and financial stability—is primarily responsible for shaping individual lives. Although Stepenoff, in the tradition of social reform studies, argues explicitly for an emphasis on social environment, her narrative returns again and again to family, and sometimes to individual psychology, to explain the deviant, and often criminal, behavior of boys and young men in nineteenth-and twentieth-century St. Louis.

The Dead End Kids of St. Louis presents detailed family histories and accounts of crimes and achievements of the city's boys. Stepenoff has mined St. Louis newspapers, court records, government reports, and census records, as well as documents from orphanages, prisons, and asylums to provide evocative and often heartbreaking portraits of impoverished youth and their communities. There is nine-year-old John McCarty, who was run over by a streetcar in 1884. "Of course the boy had played in the streets," Stepenoff writes. "What else could he do? . . . In all likelihood, there was no greenspace behind his home, since backyards in poor neighborhoods were places for using the privy, hanging out laundry, raising a garden or a few chickens, and throwing out garbage" (p. 20).

Stepenoff also scoured the memoirs and letters of St. Louis's famous native sons. She cites the childhood experiences of Chuck Berry, William S. Burroughs, playwright A. E. Hotchner, and boxer Sonny Liston. Each, in different ways, offers a view of a city lost to the pressures of changing economies and urban policies. Urban renewal, the federal policy designed to improve living conditions, took down many fondly remembered neighborhoods, leaving behind stark patches of vacant land. "Something less tangible than buildings had been lost," Stepenoff comments. "In those old shabby, chaotic streets, boys had found trouble and danger, but also inspiration" (p. 92).

Stepenoff's analysis, while sketching the urban environment, repeatedly stresses the role of family in shaping young lives. "Within the poorer neighborhoods of St. Louis, children became the victims of heartless, neglectful, and alcoholic parents," she writes of the late nineteenth-century immigrant Riverfront slums (p. 39). Sixty years later, families living in the massive high-rise public housing development Pruitt-Igo felt the pressures of poverty and racial discrimination. "Even when they managed to stay together, parents found it almost impossible to keep their children under control," she writes "because of the seductive life of the street" (p. 126). Impoverished families almost always proved too weak to counter the temptations of life on the street. Yet, the relationships among family, urban environment, and social reformers are left largely unexamined.

Stepenoff, along with chronicling the lives of destitute children, tracks the evolution of "poverty knowledge," or changes in dominant theories concerning the causes and solutions to childhood poverty. She begins with the "child-saving" movement of the 1870s and 1880s. Influenced by New York's Charles Loring Brace, a Harvard-trained minister and founder of the Children's Aid Society, St. Louis reformers advocated removing poor children from their families and placing them in orphanages, asylums, and sometimes with other families. Stepenoff lists the series of institutions and the reformers who supported them from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth. The House of Refuge, the city's first government-run institution, opened in 1854; the Mission Free School...