Delmar Boulevard
St. Louisans have for a century conferred upon this long, otherwise-unremarkable commercial thoroughfare an almost talismanic power to define the bounds of their racially-identified communities. In the process, the more complex reasons for its status as a marker of racial difference—reasons rooted in the city’s geography, shored up by the real estate market’s desire for predictability, and sealed in place through generations of social antipathy or simple inertia—have disappeared under a veneer of geographic inevitability.
