To Restore the Sara Lou

Eric Kim, Design Director Emeritus & Evan Trabitz, Features Editor

Neatly bound in a rectangular section of North St. Louis, The Ville neighborhood is emblematic of the city’s long and ongoing struggle with racial segregation, disinvestment, and vacancy. Historically a center of Black culture which hosted significant activity throughout most of the 20th century, the neighborhood has since suffered a heavy decline in population and economic activity.

Today, The Ville is marked by its density of empty lots and vacant buildings, one of which is the Sara Lou Cafe on the corner of St. Louis Avenue and North Sara Street. Once a beloved local establishment, the restaurant was well known across the city for offering “Sara Lou Shrimp,” crispy fried frog legs, and generous servings of liquor at the bar during its 96-year-long lifetime. For the last 30 years of operation under its most recent owner, the late James “Jimmy” Owens Jr., the Cafe hosted a popular bar lounge, The Golden Slipper, and even served a unique tartar sauce that competing restaurants failed to replicate. Delicious home-style cooking aside, the Sara Lou was more than just a restaurant that would bring in hundreds of customers a week — it was a cultural mainstay of the neighborhood. The location gave Black residents a gathering place during an era of segregation. Politicians would visit to speak with the patrons. The Sara Lou Cafe stood as an icon of historical and local pride for all the families that frequented the restaurant.

The restaurant was tragically forced to close in 2002 under the increasing pressures of upkeeping the business and building maintenance according to historic preservation codes. In 2011, the death of James Owens Jr. led to the Land Reutilization Authority acquiring the property in its dilapidated state. Given the building’s structurally unstable condition, the Sara Lou Cafe faced demolition until the Northside Community Housing Incorporation (NCHI) released an option in 2022 with the City of St. Louis to stabilize the structure and explore adaptive reuse of the iconic restaurant. There is now a chance to restore the Sara Lou Cafe to its former glory, complete with renewed use and structural revitalization, but the time, resources, and investment involved in restoring the building beg the question: why save the Sara Lou?

Bats smash storefront windows and car doors as shouting people fill the streets and alleys, some divesting those abruptly opened buildings of their wares and leaving them in disarray, all while marching forward towards symbols of power, unified in outrage, roaring slogans against oppression. Flames of unrest consume police stations, their heat felt far beyond the borders of the property, feeding off the combined rage of the protestors. Days and weeks after this night of unrest, the effects can still be seen: those same windows boarded up, the same streets eerily quiet and empty, and the symbols, once contemptuously proud, defaced. These protests and protestors were deemed riots and rioters, their aims reduced to anarchic whims and public fervor, the object of their anger obfuscated — all succinctly summed as acts of violence.

Such images are not uncommon, filling media cycles every year, accompanied by headlines labeling the protests as anything from courageous acts of justice to vile displays of anarchy. Close to us here in St. Louis, nine years ago, the American public witnessed yet another tragedy — the murder of Michael Brown — and the ensuing unrest in Ferguson. The media was quick to take sides, condemning the acts as “inappropriate” or “going too far,” simultaneously sensationalizing the affair. Violence sells. Especially if it is real and caught on tape.

Sometimes the violence is not conducive to being recorded, though. Consider a sparsely dense urban landscape of unkempt lots overgrown with weeds. Vacant buildings crumble at the corners. Metal is piping stripped and windows are boarded up. Vines creep up cracking brick walls. Streets stretch riddled with yearsold potholes. Schools are underfilled. Storefronts empty. These are the images confronting the residents of The Ville: brute vignettes representing years of neglect. What is the difference between these manifest conditions and those resulting from the aforementioned protests?

The answer lies in the speed of the act. Princeton University professor and author Rob Nixon defines slow violence as “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and

space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Such violence, crucially, occurs “gradually and out of sight.” Not out of sight to those living in damaged conditions, nor those immediately involved in attempts to remedy such injustices, but to those same audiences watching protests on television. Out of sight to institutions of power. For instance, how many Wash U students know what the Ville is, much less are able to point it out on a map, despite the neighborhood being an eight-minute drive from the Loop? And so gradually does the violence occur that many would hesitate to call it violence at all, yet the resulting physical effects appear to be the same. This is not to claim that the fast violence of protests is unjustified, but rather to highlight that violence itself is a nuanced act, occurring along varied spatial and temporal axes, requiring deeper analysis beyond immediate sensory perceptions.

A simple phrase like “acts of violence” fails to capture intent. When one is confronted with

images of violence, fast or slow, they must ask: violence against whom? For Ferguson, it was not any QuikTrip or other business, nor mindless passion, but instead against the agents of economic and political oppression who have been disenfranchising citizens for decades. Just or not, it is folly to claim otherwise. Conversely, the slow violence manifesting in The Ville is directed against the residents themselves; a long history of racist zoning policies, predatory housing practices, displacement, and disinvestment has subjugated them to cycles of oppression that prove nigh inescapable. Therein lies the rub: two types of violence, fast and slow, have the same consequences yet different targets. While the QuikTrip has the necessary capital to repair its shattered windows, The Ville is left without resources. Fast violence can be corrected quickly; slow violence requires continual effort to be resolved.

So, again, why save the Sara Lou Cafe, and why should Wash U help in the efforts? At the most basic level, the neighborhood needs support to repair the physical deterioration caused by the history of socioeconomic slow violence that has crept across The Ville over the last half-century. Considering the adverse ambient and psychological effects on residents that live in these under-maintenanced environments, efforts and resources expended on repairing such landscapes are a direct investment in the well-being of Ville residents. Only through the improvement of The Ville’s material conditions can the effects of slow violence be (slowly) reversed.

In addition to the basic monetary input that is necessary for revitalizing the physical structure of the area, the NCHI’s rehabilitation project holds the potential to achieve a significant symbolic victory: replacing a landscape of manifest violence with architectural imagery of hope. That is, a thoughtfully constructed signifier that institutional investment from within and outside the community is returning at greater capacities to The Ville. After its structural rehabilitation and restoration into a proud local symbol, the space can also serve the community materially,

whether through the return of delicious home cooked shrimp or the space turning into some community resource center.

To make that determination of what function the space will serve, NCHI President Michael Burns has been engaging those living in The Ville to gather input on what is most needed and desired by the community. By this effort to get local residents directly involved in shaping their immediate built environment, the project is an exploration of participatory democracy and local autonomy to embrace The Ville’s strong racial identity, reinforce a St. Louis-specific Black aesthetic, and develop a collective vernacular architecture. Critical to this initiative is the NCHI’s capacity to engage Ville residents, invite them, and empower them to act as designers of their own cultural institutions.

That is not to say that the adaptive reuse of the Sara Lou Cafe building will suddenly make architects out of Ville residents, nor would one rehabilitated building immediately restore the street it shares with overgrown lots and hollowed-out houses. Rather, there is a greater experiment in motion as the NCHI seeks to develop established channels for generating financial and intellectual backing from broader communities and for supporting creative input from the resident community. By refining this model of the process in leverage of direct material improvement to a deteriorating built environment, an architectural language of hope can be reproduced and propagated not only in The Ville but throughout the many communities that face similar problems. To save the Sara Lou Cafe is to take a look towards building a more just urban landscape in St. Louis — one that everyone can enjoy.

Eric Kim ‘23 studies in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. He can be reached at eric.kim@wustl.edu.

Evan Trabitz ‘23 studies in the McKelvey School of Engineering. He can be reached at evan.trabitz@ wustl.edu.