In the course of celebrating the new year, you may have missed the fact that visitors to MayorSlay.com voted to select Old North St. Louis as the 2006 “Person / Place / Event / Group” of the Year. This is a great honor and further proof that some phenomenal things have happened in ONSL over the past year – much of it fueled by great passion and dedication of supporters inside and outside of the neighborhood.

On December 28, the Mayor’s people invited visitors to their website to choose the person, place, event or group that had the biggest impact on the City in 2006. We were very pleased to see that ONSL was included among the 15 choices, alongside the World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals, Senator-elect McCaskill, the St. Louis Board of Education, and the Danforth Brothers; we were thrilled to see that ONSL had surged ahead of the pack by the time the online balloting ended at some point in the first week of January.

So, what happened in ONSL during 2006 to warrant such recognition? Apart from surviving two major storms that left many residents without power, the neighborhood had much to celebrate in 2006. On our list of highlights would be the completion of historic rehabilitation of nine historic, formerly abandoned, crumbling buildings to create 32 affordable apartments; the public announcement of a $26 million redevelopment plan for the 14th Street Mall; the construction and sale of nearly a dozen new homes on formerly vacant lots in the North Market section of the neighborhood; the heroic efforts of community members and ONSLRG to keep the storm-damaged historically significant Mullanphy Emigrant Home building from getting demolished; the most successful ONSL House Tour ever; another successful summer series of outdoor movie nights; a one-of-a-kind public poetry exhibit and companion events, such as the first-ever poetry bike ride and an evening of poetry readings and ice cream sundaes at the North Market Place display house; the filming of a movie here for the 48 Hour Film Project; and a whole year’s worth of community-building activities, such as our annual pot-luck dinner, National Night Out celebration, construction worker appreciation events, community garden tending, and vacant lot clean-ups. For more details and photos of all of these events, please check out our archives by clicking on the months displayed at the bottom of the column along the right side of this page.

For complete results of the MayorSlay.com online poll, click here:
St. Louis Person of Year Poll Results