- [Jim] It made for great pictures, but as a business the Loop Trolley failed after a year, but a lot of money's still on the line.

That's why Bi-State's taken over with plans to get things rolling again this summer.

- Yeah, of course, look, it's a tough project, there's no doubt it.

- [Jim] A few blocks east on Delmar the streets come to symbolize the city's racial and economic divide.

In step's Build-A-Bear founder Maxine Clark.

- So this was a real hub of activity, and I think we can do it again.

- [Jim] The big plans for a place called The Delmar DiviNe.

They came as refugees from a war-torn country.

What St. Louis' Bosnians have gained and what they want to make sure they don't lose.

- And all of them have stories to tell.

- [Jim] And this state of the art ship went into service two years ago, but the Navy might already be done with the USS St. Louis.

- Its' a hard thing to make a decision to decommission ships.

- It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and these street car tracks along DeBaliviere and Delmar are no longer merely remnants of a failed project.

The Loop Trolley is making a comeback.

It's risky to try, but possibly very costly not to.

(trolley horn blowing) There are plans to get the street cars running again this summer, perhaps by August.

The big difference though is that Bi-State which runs our buses and Metrolink has taken over.

It doesn't own the trolley, but it will be in charge of operations.

We talked about the plans with Bi-State CEO Taulby Roach.

I think you've taken on more than given quite a challenge on this.

- Yeah, of course.

Look, it's a tough project, there's no doubt about it.

But look, we're at about providing solutions at Bi-State Development.

We're hoping that we can make this project work.

- [Jim] You know the story, Delmar Loop businessman Joe Edwards, he of Blueberry Hill, The Tivoli, The Pageant, spent years promoting and pushing the project, a 2.2 mile trolley line built from the University City Library to the Missouri History Museum.

- It will draw tourists and convention business to St. Louis because it will connect the loop to two Metrolink stations, and the 12 million visitors to Forest Park attractions.

If a large convention has narrowed its choices to St. Louis, Indianapolis and Louisville, this trolley project might tip the scale in favor of selecting St. Louis.

- There were plenty of doubters, plenty of complainers during construction, which hurt businesses, and there were delays, and the cost, more than $50 million.

More than half, and this is important, was Federal Transportation Money.

The trolley cars started running in 2018, but after initial interest it suffered from low ridership, financial short falls, and technical challenges, and never really got fully operational.

Finally, a year later, the trolley stopped running in 2019.

Local governments just didn't wanna pour anymore money into it, but there was the real possibility that the Federal Transportation Administration would want it's money back.

I know there was a lot of opposition to this, a lot of doubt about taking it on, what's really at stake here?

- Well really at stake is our reputation.

So one of the things we do at Metro Transit, we work with that same Federal Transit Administration to ask for hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for our buses, for our trains.

So regionally we have a reputation that we need to keep up in order that we can compete for federal dollars in the future.

Look, I know it's a tough project, I will admit that any time, but we need to make it work, and be sure that we don't default on the federal grant.

- [Jim] What's the business plan?

- The business plan is to run this more like a tourist entity.

Work on weekends, try to work and enhance what's happening in the Loop.

The energy and excitement of the Loop needs to be enhanced by this asset, not hurt by it.

I need to give my team Jim to evaluate, to analyze those trucks, to be sure that we follow, and pass all safety certifications.

So likely we'll see the trolley running in August.

- [Woman] If you're standing on the platform, please have your tickets ready to be validated.

- [Jim] The Loop Trolley will soon be owned and paid for by the Loop Trolley Company and its tax district, with Bi-State aiming to match service to revenue.

Roach says most likely they'll start with three or four days of operation, focused on weekends and building ridership.

- [Taulby] Okay, we need to make it work soundly, and show up when it should.

That I know we know how to do.

- We don't have to go very far for our next story, just up the street and around the corner.

We're going to look in on another project that is rooted in the past.

It's really all about shaping a better future.

This building started out more than 100 years ago as St. Luke's Hospital.

It used to be just one of the many busy places on what was once one of the city's busiest streets, Delmar Boulevard.

It's always been a natural north/south border between neighborhoods, but in recent years those neighborhoods have been increasingly defined by race and economics.

It's a barrier not easily crossed.

The so called Delmar Divide.

But now this big building is coming back as a place called The Delmar DiviNe.

It's the vision of Maxine Clark, a high energy doer of things.

She's served on numerous boards, including Nine PBS, and has brought her skills to building businesses and communities.

- I have many titles.

I'm probably best known as the founder of Build-A-Bear Workshop, but in this project I'm the chief inspirator of the Delmar DiviNe, and the president of our board of directors.

- [Jim] It's a place that's bringing together nonprofit organizations addressing all kinds of neighborhood and community needs.

- [Jorge] Hey, welcome to Delmar DiviNe.

You're right here in the main entrance.

This is the main entrance to the nonprofit office buildings where everybody who's... - [Jim] Jorge Riopedre, who used to run the immigrant and refugee healthcare center Casa De Salud, is now the executive director of The Delmar DiviNe.

- At the end of the day, the thing we're providing is space and ancillary services for over 30 nonprofit organizations here in the region.

We are providing this space so that number one, we can create a platform from which the nonprofits can better collaborate together, therefore maximize the availability of the dollars, and in fact their expertise.

- [Jim] If that sounds a lot like what Cortex is doing for technology and research in Midtown, you're right.

In fact, this is where Maxine Clark got the idea.

- Why don't we do this for nonprofits?

I was traveling around, working with a lot of nonprofits, and especially after I left, retired from Build-A-Bear, and everybody was all over the place, and nobody was really working together.

And so it seemed to me that if we could create a space similar to Cortex we could really work together better.

- The construction is ongoing, and probably will continue to be ongoing then?

- It will be ongoing through June.

At the end of June, the apartments, and the unfinished conference room spaces should all be done.

- [Jim] It's a big job at a very big building that you'd never now guess was a hospital, and it would have been easy to get lost if I hadn't had a guide.

This was a gut rehab.

- [Jorge] Correct.

But- - This looks like something you kept.

- This is original to the hospital building, and Maxine Clark is going to refurbish it.

It won't be a working phone, but get it back to its original luster so that people can appreciate the history of the building.

- I feel like all the reporters should be rushing to the phone booth to call in the verdict.

(Jorge laughing) That's great.

He took us to the offices of the largest new tenant, BJC's Behavioral Health Response.

It's not a clinic, they go into the community to provide mental health services, including the Cops and Clinicians Program, which sends mental health professionals out with St. Louis police officers on certain calls.

Their offices were relocated here from Creve Coeur.

- And so coming down to the city has been fabulous for us.

- [Jim] But President and CEO Pat Coleman says it's not just the geographic location, it's the very concept of the place.

The other nonprofits providing other kinds of community services around health, education, economic development.

- Exactly.

And so that is another reason why it's important to be here because we get the opportunity again to collaborate, to talk to one another, to work side by side with all of the services that's needed in our community.

- [Jim] This is not the only thing happening north of Delmar.

There are plans for example to turn the old Hodiamont street car right of way just north of Delmar into a Greenway, a linear park that will run through six neighborhoods.

When we did a story with Great Rivers Greenway about the plans, we were joined by Kevin Bryant, who was advising on the project, but is also a developer here.

- So there's always a lot of talk about the Delmar Divide, and this represents a connecting point to offset that.

So with the central west end, which is basically a hundred yards from here, you have one of the highest valued real estate tracks in St. Louis.

And just a hundred yards north one of the poorest.

But what you have now is major investment going in Founders Park, and the Greenway becomes the connecting point between the two.

And I'm surprised every time I speak to someone who never even noticed this park, never even noticed these homes.

And these homes were built the exact same time as the homes of the central west end.

- [Jim] Maxine Clark knows the history, loves the history of Delmar Boulevard, and the old neighborhoods north of Delmar.

- At the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century, this was a prosperous immigrant neighborhood.

And I don't mean prosperous by rich people, although there were big houses around here, meaning there were lots of jobs, 45 delis between Martin Luther King, or Easton at the time and Delmar.

Bakeries, meat markets.

It was a real hub of activity, and I think we can do it again.

- What we're doing here is extremely important, but also what Maxine's vision is to make sure that the entire project has tangible value for people who live north of Delmar Boulevard.

- Yeah, I mean you've gotta reach, I mean you're not just sitting in a building.

- Correct.

- You've gotta connect, bring in the community.

- Absolutely correct.

- And be part of it.

That could be the hardest challenge, though, in my mind.

- It is, it is.

But one of the principle ways we're doing that is with this space right ahead of us, about 7,000 square feet, and it's our multipurpose community room.

In that space, which is gonna have state of the art technology in it around video conferencing, and high speed internet, any group that's working north of Delmar Boulevard will be able to reserve this for no money, and come in and have events, community meetings, et.

cetera.

So they have a space here that's there's.

It's not usable by the tenants, it's strictly for the community north of Delmar.

Now we're also gonna be running some programs that address community identified needs such as older adult enrichment, and after school programs for students.

- [Jim] Have you gotten any pushback from the community of like here come the do-gooders again, that sort of thing?

There has to be some skepticism perhaps.

- Yes, I think there was a lot of skepticism at first because lots of people have come into these neighborhoods and said they were gonna do X, Y and Z, and I think they thought I'd be long gone by now, but they didn't know me very well.

And I've made friends with people.

I've made, people trust me, and I think they, they're still questioning whether it's doable.

Will this last?

How are you funding it so it'll last forever?

Or is this gonna be something that'll be empty in 10 years again?

That's what we're working towards is really sustainability, not just because we'll raise enough money for that, but because we'll have the people that are renting here, whether They're in the apartments, or the offices or the retail will be thriving because there's enough people all around here to make that happen.

And also when you have a restaurant, when you bring some food places for people to eat, they come across the street.

I think we're gonna see the revitalization of this incredible neighborhood, and an appreciation for Delmar.

Our goal isn't just to make Delmar better, our goal is also to help connect this to Page Avenue, to Olive and then Page and all the streets in between that we can make sure that the neighborhoods are all getting better and better because the people want them to.

They just didn't have a place to start.

- Stories about refugees, today it's Afghans and Ukrainians, often focus on the struggle to start new lives in a new country, but those stories continue long after that.

Even after they settle in, maybe succeed and raise American kids, their lives are still rooted in the places and events that brought them here.

Brooke Butler on a new effort to make sure the story of St. Louis' Bosnians is not forgotten.

(upbeat music) - [Brooke] These items may seem foreign to the average Midwesterner, but for a large portion of the St. Louis community they resonate a little deeper.

The newly opened Center for Bosnian Studies at Fontbonne University houses books, artifacts, images all to better commemorate the nearly 70,000 people in the Bosnian community who now call St. Louis their home.

- We interact in St. Louis every single day with members of the Bosnian community.

And all of them have stories to tell.

- [Brooke] Dozens of people gathered for the official opening for the center on March 1st, which was also the 30th anniversary of Bosnians' Independence.

And while the center itself is no bigger than the average conference room, the history it holds is vast, and perhaps more importantly greatly reflected throughout our city.

- The way I became involved was by meeting people from Bosnia in St. Louis who had migrated here after the war and the genocide.

When I realized that there was just this really interesting population that was becoming part of St. Louis, and that was... - [Brooke] Dr. Ben Moore is the senior researcher at the Center for Bosnian Studies, but for the past 15 years Ben has been working to preserve the history through his founding of the Bosnian Memory Protect, which is really how the center came to be.

- We recorded, along with our students who were participating in the process our first interview of a Bosnian genocide survivor, and it was just a really moving experience.

That lead to more interviews.

We had, with the help of our friend, Amir Kurtovic and Patrick McCarthy, an exhibit at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in 2007 that focused on the survivors from the Bosnian city of Prijedor.

And then that exhibit traveled around the United States.

And I really credit that exhibit with galvanizing our interests and leading to more oral histories and more collections.

And that exhibit was really the beginning of the Bosnia Memory Project.

- [Brooke] Bosnia and Herzegovina, what is commonly referred to simply as Bosnia, is a country of about 3.8 million people in Southeast Europe.

As a former Republic of Yugoslavia, the country's history is complex.

There was an extensive timeline of events that led to the Bosnian War, which took place between 1992 and 1995.

We won't go into all of the political details, but essentially the war was deeply rooted in multi-ethnic tension between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, Croats and the Yugoslav Army.

- It was a genocidal war.

So there was war and there was ethnic cleansing, and this led to so many people being expelled from their homeland.

And they came to St. Louis beginning, well the first migrants came in 1993, really directly from some of the worst visited places in Bosnia Herzegovina.

- [Brooke] After the initial wave of refugees came in 1993, there was a second wave that relocated to St. Louis after the war had ended, in the late 1990s.

Shortly after that, a third wave of immigration happened when refugees who had relocated to parts of Europe were told to go back home to Bosnia because the war had ended.

- The problem with that was they didn't have a place to go back to.

Not only were their homes destroyed, but many of the perpetrators were now in positions of civil power and political power.

Another factor that's really contributed to the growth of the community is secondary migration from other parts of the United States because Bosnians generally have come to view St. Louis as a good place to live, in part because there's so many Bosnians here.

I mean it's one of those things that generates itself.

- [Brooke] When Bosnian refugees first came to St. Louis, they began settling in the Bevo Mill area, slowly starting to rebuild their lives by renovating houses and starting businesses.

Many families have since moved toward south county, but you'll still find plenty of Bosnian ties, like bakeries, restaurants, and of course this replica of the Sebilj in Sarajevo.

This upward mobility for the community, however, came with it's fair share of obstacles.

Bohidin Piric was an intern with the Center for Bosnian Studies, where he himself recorded an oral history of his experience as a refugee.

- I had started school in Bosnia, came to the United States, and I was put in the first grade.

And then I didn't really learn anything.

I mean I didn't know English.

- [Brooke] Bohidin's oral history depicts his struggles of adjusting to the American school system and the loss of community he and other Bosnian refugees felt.

And although he was old enough to have some memories of living in Bosnia, it was not like his parents' experience, which is why the oral histories collected by the center is so meaningful for younger generations and those to come.

- My dad came to the United States with, his legs were shattered because he had stepped on a mine in Bosnia.

Just shrapnel everywhere in his body.

He was close to death.

My mom, there was really no food or anything like that so she would go and look for food anywhere she could.

If that meant going into places that had been abandoned, the whole villages where the Army had come through and killed everyone just to find a scrap of bread or whatever, or another big thing that was quite dangerous for her and for all the people of Bosnia.

The United Nations and the United States, they would drop food from big transport planes, but whole palettes of food.

So these palettes of food would fall, and there would be a parachute.

And it would be in the middle of the night.

They do it in the middle of the night because if they do it during the day the soldiers that are surrounding the city would just kill everyone there that's trying to get the food.

And a real big threat with these huge palettes, you know how big a palette is, they would crush people.

They would be trying to look up, trying to get there, and it would just crush people.

- Watching now what is happening in Ukraine, seeing the refugees leaving their homes, innocent people, it brings back so many memories for the Bosnian population in St. Louis.

It's, again, a situation of an innocent people being the victims, civilians being the victim of another nation for it's belligerence and just pure aggression.

(gentle music) - (speaking in foreign language), which means the book of photographs, but it's more widely known as the book of belongings because of what the photographs represents.

It was intended to enable the identification of remains that were found in mass graves in Eastern Bosnia.

People who were victims of the war and genocide.

- [Brooke] The center has one of only four copies of the book of belongings, and while it's contents are sometimes too painful for Bosnians, it's another important layer of preserving that part in history.

The center also spreads that preservation by working with researchers from around the world, hosting community events, and even working with local high schools to incorporate that history into classrooms.

- Who are we and why are we here?

- We learned a lot, or I learned a lot in the United States school system about genocide and the holocaust, and all these horrible things that happened, but then I would always kind of look at look what happened to me, and the Center for Bosnian Studies what they're trying to do is put that into the narrative, the Bosnian story.

- Because of the way, and the reasons behind the Bosnians coming to St. Louis being really narratives of hate and discrimination, the center also has this larger purpose of educating people about why it's important to counter those narratives, what they can result in.

(gentle music) - Finally, I did sort of a mental double take when I first found out about this.

A U.S. Navy ship that's only been in service for a couple of years is on the list to be decommissioned, taken out of service.

What really caught my attention though was the name.

The USS St. Louis.

In August of 2020, a brand new state of the art navel vessel went into service as the USS St. Louis.

And now it looks like the Navy may already be done with it.

The ship is a freedom class Littoral combat ship or LCS 19.

Built in a Wisconsin ship yard, it was christened by its sponsor, St. Louisian Barbara Broadhurst Taylor of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car family.

And two summers ago she officially put it into service at the commissioning ceremony in Florida.

- Commander Hagan, officers and crew of the USS St. Louis, man our ship and bring her to life.

- [Sailors] Aye, aye cap.

- [Jim] This is the seventh American ship to carry the St. Louis name.

The first was a sloop of war put into service in 1828.

This USS St. Louis protected American shipping from pirates, and later suppressed the slave trade off the coast of Africa.

In the Civil War, there was an ironclad built in St. Louis by James Eads that went into service for the Army, attacking confederate forces on the Mississippi.

The most famous was the World War II cruiser that escaped Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack, and went on to fight in key battles in the Pacific, earning the name the Lucky Lou.

But the USS St. Louis and other freedom class LCS' have been anything but lucky.

There were mechanical problems in getting it to reach top speeds, and a new anti-submarine detection system just didn't perform well.

The Navy decided the costs of repairs and upgrades was throwing good money after bad, and put nine of the ships, including the newest one, the two-year-old USS St. Louis on its list for decommissioning in fiscal year 2023.

- It's a hard thing to make a decision to decommission ships, and as we look across LCS, this is a place where we have identified that there are real costs, especially for the freedom class to be able to make some of the repairs that are needed on those.

- This could be part of the back and forth of the defense budget process, and Congress would have to approve.

But if it does the USS St. Louis goes out of service, and into the history books maybe as just a footnote.

As the ship's sponsor, it's possible that Barbara Taylor would be on hand for the decommissioning much earlier than anyone expected.

But it's not final so stay tuned on this one.

And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Thanks for joining us, I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Living St. Louis" is made possible by the support of the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation, the Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan charitable trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.