- [Jim] His musical career has taken him to New York and soon to LA, but Royce Martin returned home to St. Louis and the Scott Joplin House to record his interpretations of, what else, Ragtime.

- This album is something, it's something that I've been sort of dreaming of for a long time.

- [Jim] This guy is not on a subway train.

He's actually in this building at Webster University.

- It's pretty uncanny.

- [Jim] How state-of-the-art production facilities have students putting people just about anywhere they want.

And a look back at what Mill Creek Valley was and what it failed to become and why there are those working to let new generations know the story.

It's all next on "Living St. Louis".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - I'm Ruth Ezell.

The musical genre known as Ragtime had its heyday in St. Louis more than 100 years ago, but it's never really gone away.

Ragtime just keeps getting rediscovered, even reinterpreted by new generations, and it's happening again right where it started.

The Scott Joplin House on Delmar is temporarily closed, but that's where a young local piano player we first introduced you to several years ago has decided to once again bring an old music into modern times.

(upbeat piano music) Bet you've never heard a Scott Joplin tune interpreted quite like this.

"The Entertainer" is one of Joplin's best known compositions, but in the hands of pianist composer Royce Martin, it's a ragtime remix incorporating bebop, swing, and other forms of jazz that have influenced Martin over the years.

On November 12th, 2022, Martin gave us a preview of what he recorded here the following day, an album of his favorite Scott Joplin works performed inside the Scott Joplin House.

- I'm really excited about the album.

This album is something that I've been sort of dreaming of subconsciously before I realized for a long time.

I think it's just the thing that this place needs, the Joplin House.

I could be biased, but I'm just excited to do it for a multitude of reasons, personal reasons obviously with regard to my career, but for the city, for the Joplin House, for my friends, for black boys, I'm really happy about this for jazz music, let's go.

- [Ruth] Martin first captured our attention and the public's attention as a finalist in the 2016 Teen Talent Competition at the fabulous Fox Theater.

Martin was a 16 year old student at the Grand Center Arts Academy and played one of his own compositions.

But up to this point, Martin had never taken a piano lesson.

To call him a natural was an understatement.

(applause) And yes, he won.

It wasn't long before Martin started receiving formal instruction.

Two years later, he was in Boston studying at the Berkeley College of Music.

- My concentration was in film scoring and I'm really fortunate to be able to say that too because Berkeley has a really great program for film scoring and it was really challenging, but it was just what I needed it to be.

It took me to the next level.

- [Ruth] Martin was so successful at Berkeley that by the time he graduated in May of 2022, he already had professional scoring credits under his belt.

- I've been really fortunate, I just wanna start off with that.

It was really a secondary consequence of all the kind words, hard work that people have put in on my behalf here in St. Louis.

Coming up in high school, I have been fortunate, even through college in Boston to take work from platforms like HBO, scoring for big projects.

Like in 2020, I was able to score... We were doing a special for the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" on HBO Max and that was an opportunity that I probably wasn't even prepared for.

- [Ruth] Royce Martin's relationship with the Scott Joplin House began after high school graduation.

That's when he started working there during summer breaks between 2018 and 2022 as a tour guide.

- It was a really great experience for me.

It wasn't until I would get to the music room which is at the end of the tour that I would start to explain the music after playing it.

So I would play a Joplin tune for the guests and then explain the music and the time that is associated with those compositions that I would play, and explaining that I figured out that I had this immense interest for the music and the time that characterized the pieces.

And all of that really sort of turned me into a historian, actually.

It was like all of a sudden I was a historian explaining to people things that I found really, really interesting about the music that were uncovered to me as a result of just talking to people.

- [Ruth] At the time Martin recorded his album, the Scott Joplin house was temporarily closed to the public.

The previous month, the museum was vandalized, windows smashed, furniture and artifacts damaged or destroyed by a man authorities say had a history of mental illness.

But as they say, the show must go on.

- We had scheduled this a year ago.

- [Ruth] Almetta Jordan is superintendent of the Scott Joplin House.

She says she's looking forward to the album's release and to following everything else Royce Martin will do.

- He's just one of those people that you just root for and you want great things to happen for them.

- [Ruth] Martin is relocating to Los Angeles to pursue a career that's already gotten an impressive jumpstart.

He also wants to be an international ambassador for the King of Ragtime.

- I have other projects that I want to do too so maybe I play this project in addition to the other projects on something like a tour that's currently unannounced.

But you know, we'll see in the future.

- The epicenter of Ragtime in St. Louis at the turn of the last century was Tom Turpin's Rosebud Cafe.

It was on Market Street just east of Jefferson.

Of course, it's long gone, as is the entire Mill Creek Valley neighborhood that it was a part of.

And that brings us to a story that was in the news this week back in 1963.

It was about Mill Creek, not what it had been, but what the city was still hoping it might become.

(upbeat jazz music) 60 years ago this week, there was a debate in City Hall about the Mill Creek renewal project in the area between Market Street and the Railyards and from Union Station to Grand.

It had nothing to do with the people who'd been forced to move from what had long been one of the city's most densely populated black neighborhoods.

No, the criticism in the Globe Democrat headline refers to those who felt the development of the cleared land just wasn't going fast enough.

There was still plenty of confidence among city leaders that clearing Mill Creek had been a great idea.

Mayor Raymond Tucker said it was a vital project responsible in many ways for the total rebirth of St. Louis.

It wasn't.

Today, St. Louis University and Harris-Stowe take up much of the cleared land, but in 1963, they were still talking about industrial and office development and probably not about the far-reaching social consequences of uprooting thousands of people.

But it's not as if there hadn't been problems that needed to be addressed.

(bright music) - [Announcer] This is the slum.

- [Jim] We don't use the word slum much anymore but in the 40s and 50s, it was clear that a lot of the old housing stock in St. Louis from the 1800s was in bad shape, especially in poor and black neighborhoods like Mill Creek.

- Now I'm not talking about some vast national problem with a lot of statistics and graphs.

I'm talking about St. Louis, Missouri.

- [Jim] One of Channel 9's first serious programs nearly 70 years ago was about slum conditions, apartments with holes in the floors and roofs, leaky water pipes, rats, lack of heat, overcrowding, outdoor toilets.

We invited some residents to talk about what they were dealing with.

- As we've heard the experts, but now I want you to be the experts for us.

You know these problems.

You know more about them than any of us do.

You live there.

- They're paying because they're paying the ramps, but they're just not getting the things that they should get.

- This bad rain that we just had, I've had to have buckets sitting all across the front inside the house.

- [Jim] This discussion took place before the Mill Creek project and these folks from a different part of the city declared a slum area were hoping to find apartments in the new Pruitt-Igoe housing project.

While there often was relocation involved, urban renewal was not so much about people, it was about land.

The plan for Mill Creek was not just to tear down substandard housing, but everything, all the homes, businesses, and buildings, so that a large swath of land would be open to development that could compete with growing suburbs and to make room for a new highway, now 4064.

60 years ago, mayor Tucker said everyone would be happy if all this just went quicker.

He said the slum clearance had been essential.

Another official said "we should never apologize for the demolition".

The Post Dispatch ran this photo of two women moving out of their Mill Creek homes, some of the last residents in the last remaining buildings in Mill Creek.

That was 60 years ago this week in St. Louis history.

- Mill Creek is making a comeback of sorts, or at least getting recognition.

And not just of the place, but of the people who live there.

Take a look at this footage.

As part of the city's greenway system, a monument now stands on Market Street at the new soccer stadium.

It commemorates the once vibrant neighborhood and preserves the painful memories of its destruction.

A formal dedication of the monument is scheduled next month, and among those in attendance will be Vivian Gibson.

She's the author of "The Last Children of Mill Creek".

It's a memoir of Gibson's childhood there, and she joins us now to talk about it.

Welcome, Vivian.

- [Vivian] Thank you.

- [Ruth] Just now looking at this story, what kind of memory did that bring back for you?

- Well, I heard the word slum, which is like a knife in my heart every time I hear it because it was where I lived, it's where I went to school, where I went to church, where my friends were, and to hear it repeatedly referred to as a slum is hard for me to hear even now.

- A slum as opposed to a true community which is what you experienced.

- Exactly.

It was a segregated community, but it was an enclave.

We had everything there a regular neighborhood needed.

And it's just very hard to think of it in those terms or to hear our family referred to as slum dwellers.

Well, in fact, many of the people who lived there rented from landlords, and we never heard about slumlords.

- Indeed, it didn't start out as an all-black community.

In many communities you have ethnic groups moving in and moving out.

So what did it start out as?

- Well, it's one of the older parts of the city.

It's right down the center of the city.

The creek that that it's named for was where the railroad tracks that lead to Union Station once was, but it started off as Europeans, Germans, Italians, Irish all lived there as they came in as immigrants and moved out, and as they could move out, they could eventually, around the turn of the century, 1900, it became pretty much African American community populated by people coming up from the south in the Great Migration north.

- Which was the case for your father.

You tell the story in your book of how both your parents came to be in St. Louis and especially for your father, this was a big opportunity.

- This was a huge opportunity.

He and his mother, he was an only child.

His mother worked from sun up to sundown and he virtually raised himself.

He had to cook and chop wood and do house chores before going to school and after.

But unfortunately in his town or even near his town, there was no high school for black children.

Black children could only go to the eighth grade.

They heard about this new school called Vashon High School in St. Louis, and they packed up and moved from Arkansas to St. Louis so that he could go to high school.

- And your mother, it was quite a contrast in terms of their respective background.

She came from a very gentile background.

- She did in the South, and that's sometimes surprising to people that there would be a community called gentile for black people in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is where she came from.

She was at Talladega College and came here for a summer break to visit a relative who was a school teacher and met my father in Mill Creek.

They spent some time together that summer, and I think she came back again for winter break.

Soon after they married, and years later, they had eight children.

- You have done a TEDx talk.

It's now online.

It looks like a nice compliment to the book because you can go into a lot of the detail about the entire backstory, the life and death of that community.

- The life and death of the community, but I really wanted to talk about the people.

Again, when you're just described as living in a slum and being slum dwellers, I think what was lost was the sense of community, the neighborhood, the institutions.

We have the churches.

There were 42 churches in Mill Creek and only one was not demolished in that neighborhood.

So I'm happy that this book has been able to shine a light on what was lost, what was just eliminated, which was that community.

- I adore this book.

I love the descriptions of your childhood.

It's a story of so many people.

It's an American story.

- Yes, it is an American story, and I think that's what I'm most proud of.

- Thank you so much, Vivian, for joining us.

Again, the name of the book is "The Last Children of Mill Creek".

- Thanks, Ruth.

Just in my lifetime, I've gone from using VHS camcorders to digital recorders to just a lot of time using my phone.

As technology gets more advanced, devices get simpler to use.

In fact, students studying filmmaking at Webster University don't even have to leave campus anymore to shoot, say, a scene at the beach or even a car chase, because where they're going, they don't need roads.

(bright music) There's a well known story in the world of cinema about an early film made by the Lumiere Brothers.

Because the concept of film was so new, when "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" was shown to audiences for the first time, it was said that people ran out of the theater in a frenzy for fear that the train would not stop and would plow right off the screen.

127 years later, the technological advancements of filmmaking have these students captivated by a train on a screen for much more complex reasons.

- This is the first virtual cinema system in the St. Louis area and it's gotta be one of very few in an educational institution anywhere in the country.

- Do you guys wanna try?

- You can put it on the camera.

- [Crew] Sure.

- [Brooke] This virtual cinema system utilizes advanced technology to create any setting or atmosphere and calibrates it to this LED studio wall as a soundstage.

Basically, it allows a video to take place in any real or imaginary location.

- You can shoot a sunrise scene inside a soundstage all day long.

You can shoot a rainy day indoors, you can shoot a sunny day indoors on a rainy day.

It gives you complete freedom of production.

You can also shoot actors in an imagined environment.

You can invented environments and so on.

- A major production to utilize this technology was "The Mandalorian", in which over 50% of the first season was shot with a virtual cinema system.

And while these film and video production majors at Webster University probably won't be creating something as large scale as that, this technology is a recently added feature to the major renovations of the School of Communication's production facilities.

So when I was in undergrad here, this was...

I'm lost right now.

I don't even know where we are.

The media center was this way.

So what's happening here?

- So this remodeling was a complete gutting of the building.

So everything but the exterior envelope was demolished and pulled out and then reconstructed so that it could be purpose-built as a communication and media production facility.

- [Brooke] The Sverdrup Building was built in the 1980s before Webster even had a School of Communications.

As the field grew exponentially, they built a small TV studio and fashioned classrooms into editing labs, dark rooms, and a media center.

So now through this remodeling process, students no longer have to squeeze into makeshift studios, but have access to more intentional production spaces.

So technology has helped in a lot of ways.

It's also raised the question, everyone with a phone is a filmmaker now.

Everyone can go on YouTube and learn how to program a game.

How has that affected enrollment?

- I believe one of the reasons we've seen growth, everybody wants to tell visual stories, and young people have more facility with visual stories than earlier generations did.

But you may not be a master storyteller yet.

We all speak English.

That doesn't make us all bestselling novelists.

So we can take those native skills and shape them into professional skills.

So this is an immersive sound system.

There'll be 19 speakers in here.

That creates a full 360 degree spherical sound field.

- So all of this, just the process for this room, there's a lot of money in this room is what I'm saying.

Do you see the return on investment happening?

- Absolutely.

The facilities we're providing our students now mimic, they're designed architecturally and technically to mimic the kinds of workplaces they'll be moving into after they graduate.

- [Brooke] Having these educational settings that resemble real industry workplaces especially makes sense with instruction from faculty members who continue to work in the industry.

- I'm still, even though I'm full-time teaching here, I'm still out there working.

This past summer I worked on "Hocus Pocus 2".

- So now I'm working on a film which I have 3D actors.

- [Brooke] Joshua Johnson and Juraj Bohus are co-teaching the first class utilizing the virtual cinema system.

And while most film and video production classes don't rely on a textbook way of teaching, this class is particularly flexible.

- It's not like other programs where you have a selected curriculum and there's a bunch of tests you have to take and materials you have to cover.

This is a process where everybody is learning, including the professors.

It's completely experimental.

My goals after I graduate I think are to get with some larger production houses with LED walls and visual effects and stuff like that.

- I think that's really important for students to have a professional, their professor, to actually be there still working in projects.

Because as you can see, technology changes pretty quickly.

- Things are kind of changing to the point where in the future it'll be very interesting to see like what is what.

It's pretty uncanny.

- Finally, there are some things that you just can't rush through and get it right.

A lot of folks who have discovered that have been profiled by our friends at stl.org.

This story from them focuses on Molly Svoboda, the owner of Boda Clay, which is much more than a business.

(gentle music) - I'm always thinking about my ideas, I'm always thinking about something else.

I have always had a pretty short attention span, but the touch and the interaction is unexplainable and you just have to feel it.

(gentle music continues) Growing up, I had a really huge family.

At one point we had like six extra people living in our house and always had extra plates at dinner.

So that was something that carried a lot of meaning for me.

Finding ways to deepen that and create a more grounded feeling through tableware, it's special.

(gentle music continues) I was homeschooled in high school, and so I was going to take an art credit, and one of my friends wanted to take a ceramics class.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

I had no idea what it meant to pay rent or make a living, but I was being told by so many people around me, "you're gonna be an artist".

Later when I started dual enrolling at Forest Park Community College, I was like "let me give this a real shot" and it just clicked into place.

I was spending eight to 12 hours a day in the studio working there and mixing glazes and pugging clay and I wasn't thinking too hard about it, but I haven't stopped pursuing it since then.

My focus has been tableware.

That's kind of where I found meaning and connection to ceramics was just through food and the story that that tells.

The weight of something, the balance of something just makes that moment a little bit more meaningful.

The interconnected nature of our world is really evident through food.

Our culture is very hungry for handmade items and I think we create interactions that tie us together, and you remember that person.

You think of them when you use their work.

What that practice has done for me is somehow infused in the work and I want that to somehow rub off on people.

I want them to slow down a little bit, a little touch point to let your mind rest and provide just a moment of positivity and ease throughout your day as you're noticing a little wobble in the handle or the glaze or the way it falls a certain way, or how the rim of the cup feels when you're drinking from it.

Finding ways to quiet your mind enough to pay attention to your work and to slow your body down.

I think that's the hardest part about being an artist.

It doesn't matter how talented you are, the ideas will come.

You just literally have to keep working.

The energy that you put into something does reveal itself.

I think I just never have been able to stop pursuing it.

It was never a decision that I am going to be an artist.

I just chose to continue doing it and I haven't been able to really choose something else, or wanted to.

I believe that this can become something more, and I'm not ready to give up on that.

- And that's "Living St. Louis".

Feel free to get in touch with us at ninepbs.org/lsl or check us out on our social channels.

I'm Brooke Butler.

Thanks for joining us.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.