I was recently giving a colleague the “Naffziger Tour” around North St. Louis and we passed through the Fountain Park neighborhood; I realized I had not really looked at the area in a while and came back to delve a little deeper.

I went up Euclid Avenue, the same one that goes through the wealthiest part of St. Louis City, the Central West End, but yet as soon as you cross over Delmar Boulevard, the red line, property values drop at least a half million dollars, if not way more, even though the housing stock is the same.

This is the area where the African American middle class long lived, the civil servants and other college-educated or union workers who voted in huge numbers, bringing political power to the North Side.

But we all know what’s happening; they’re moving or dying, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to these fragile neighborhoods. There seems to be some early signs of gentrification and I’ve met some people who’ve moved up to Fountain Park with plans to rehab houses.

There are mostly single family houses but there’s the occasional apartment building such as the San Remo, which interestingly enough sits along the southern side of the Hodiamont Streetcar right-of-way, sometimes referred to as “Suburban Trak.”