Wow, I suppose 6,500 posts have a way of sneaking up on you! I also suppose since Paul McKee and his failed Northside TIF is in the news, it would be germane to talk about it and how I’ve been investigating and shedding light on his dealings for eighteen years now. Some of the first posts on his quiet buying up of properties in St. Louis Place are from these posts back in March of 2008, here and here. According to my records, the first purchase of property hiding under LLCs was in 2003–twenty-three years ago!

Back then we called it Blairmont, after one of the LLCs Paul McKee was using to hide what he was doing. It came out a year or two after that. For a while we were criticized for saying this was bad for North St. Louis. Who were we to say that this kindly gentleman who falsely claimed to have grown up in North St. Louis shouldn’t be allowed to revive a struggling swath of the city? Remember, the City under Slay was hugely supportive of McKee’s plan.

But we knew we were right. We knew that what he was promising would never happen, at least not under his ridiculous plans. And then came the absurd corn fields!

First his grocery store failed, and then his hospital failed, though bizarrely it’s reopened under a new name.

Fast forward eighteen years, and the City is now correctly filing eminent domain proceedings against McKee, which I wholeheartedly support, to wrest control away from the do-nothing developer. It will be a long time before we see substantial, equitable change in St. Louis Place and JeffVanderLou, but the first step is to rid the City of St. Louis of Paul McKee forever.

In other news, I thought I would check in on what happened to subjects I had talked about in other recent anniversary posts. The bombed out Jack in the Box at Russell and Gravois, which I talked about on my 18th anniversary, is now a really good Mexican restaurant, and the St. Louis Public Schools have lost full accreditation, whose plight I talked about in my 6,000th post.