Monday, July 03, 2006

Sold!

The sign that said "For Sale 13 Acres on Snake Road" is gone. They finally found a buyer who was neither triskaidekaphobic nor ophidiophobic.

7 comments:

Jay Noel said...

It's Cobra Commander! I knew Destro broke him out of prison.
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Destro (below) looks like he would live on Snake Road, and like it!

I'm not afraid of snakes, but I would not buy property there.

Metal Mark said...

It's not quite as cool of a location as 1313 Mockingbird Lane, but what is?
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lol -- it took me more than a second to get it!!!!

Jay Noel said...

In St. Ann near Northwest Plaza, there is a street called "Easy Street." Interestingly, all the houses and lots on this little street are grand.

We're talking HUGE homes with horse stables, three fireplaces, and inground pools.

Very out of place in a city like St. Ann, which is pretty much run-down.
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"Lazy Lane" is in the River Oaks area of Houston, house are in the $10 million range, so it's literally true

Metal Mark said...

There is a town in Tennessee called Stinking Creek. I knew a girl in college who was from there and she went to Stinking Creek High School. I think she smelled okay though, but I really can't remember.
Wish I lived on Easy Street.
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there appear to be "Stinking Creeks" in several states, my guess is that the smell comes from natural sulfur deposits

Shirley said...

Hey... I live in St Ann. The houses on my street aren't run down! I think I'm the only one on the block who doesn't spend hours and hours every week on beautifying my property, but I'm at least making a start on it. (Photos on my blog - note I have weeds, but my house is not run down or tiny.)

I live within three blocks of Northwest Plaza. There are approximately half a dozen houses nearby that are not in the best shape, half a dozen out of hundreds. Many of the houses are small, but there's a difference between small and run down.

St Ann is a fine community to live in. Excellent school district, low crime rate, and NICE NEIGHBORHOODS
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Willow you could probably take down Phoenix with one sucker punch!!! Please post pictures!

The Google image below shows part of St. Ann -- if you enlarge it you can see that many, many streets are named for saints, as they are in nearby St. John. [St. Louis used to be called the "Rome of the West" because it was so Catholic.]

When Northwest Plaza was built, it had a Scruggs Vandervott, & Barney department store, the then St. Louis equivalent of Neiman-Marcus. The mall has had a lot of bad press in recent years, and was very recently sold.

Shirley said...

Yes, the mall has had a lot of bad press in recent years. So have a lot of other malls in the St Louis area, most notably "The Mills" mall which opened fairly recently, and has severe gang problems. (Oops, let's not talk about gang problems, that can drive away customers. But when a gang conflict lead to a riot that closed the mall one night, The Mills had a hard time putting a spin on it for the press. They blamed the problems on groups of teenagers. Yeah, OK, we'll all pretend to believe that one!)

My street is one of many lined with moderately priced homes inhabited with working class people. My neighbors take inordinate pride in their homes, and they're in good repair. Most homes are nicely landscaped. (I'm working on my landscaping but it's not done yet.) There is a small section of rental homes nearby, and some of the tenants don't take care of things like they should. The tenants who cause damage are moved out fairly quickly, and the owners come in and fix things. They may not be as pretty as some of the other homes, but I would not describe them as run-down.

If you go out into St Charles county, you can find a lot of nice new large homes in St Peters and O'Fallon and other nearby towns. You can also, in those same towns, find some really really bad trailer parks, within blocks of those nice new $300,000 homes. So, for anyone who wants to throw stones, check your own backyard first.
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to be successful, a mall has to attract adult women, who will stay away if they feel unsafe -- it is a problem that malls all over the country are having, some even playing Barry Manilow music nonstop to drive teens away.

when TV news points their cameras at a problem, it often appears to be larger or smaller than it actually is -- news stories about Northwest Plaza made it appear that there was gang warfare in the streets of St. Ann (an impression the mayor of that city should have demanded TV time to correct) -- news stories about Katrina never truly captured the scope of that diaster!

no city in the area has a poorer image than E. St. Louis, and there are some very dangerous sections of E. St. Louis, on the other hand there are some really nice residential sections that you never see on the news -- I used to do a lot of consulting for IDOT (I know, gasp!) and was in E. St. Louis two or three times a week, I never had any problems and never felt that I was in any danger.

For people in other parts of the coountry (if you are still with us), this is a very short social history of St. Louis:

all white, except for a section next to the Mississippi SE of downtown -- that was torn down so it could become industrial, blacks moved into the Mill Creek Valley west of downtown (which was already a slum) -- everything in Mill Creek from 21th to 36th (Grand Ave) was torn down, blacks were moved into giant public housing projects -- meanwhile "block-busting" (scaring whites so you can buy their homes cheap) swept through North St. Louis (as did fumes from chemical and other factories) -- whites moved west to St. Ann, St. John, and other surburbs -- some of these surburbs north of where Willow lives had nonstop airplanes flying over them, housing prices fell, blacks moved in -- whites moved further west into St. Charles County -- every time they tear down something big in downtown St. Louis it moves the black population further north and the white population further west (into Warren County) and east (into the area where I live) -- the growth in Missouri and Illinois counties has been explosive but it's just the overall population shifting around, there is essentially no real growth in the St. Louis metro population (1% a year or something) -- that means for all these real estate developments and retail outlets in the outlying counties to be successful, you have to keep moving whites out of north St. Louis County, and what better way to do that than create negative images for the older surburbs

Anonymous said...

If this particular piece of property is pretty flat, they could have advertised it as "A Plain on Snake."