Spanish Lake Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be
The Film:
Spanish Lake
The Director:
Phillip Andrew Morton
Release Date:
June 13, 2014 (United States)
Spanish Lake is a documentary film about Spanish Lake, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. The film examines how the Spanish Lake area transformed from a white suburb into a mostly black one after a notorious St. Louis housing project called Pruitt-Igoe closed.
Located on the north side of St. Louis, Pruitt-Igoe was designed to be a joint, racially segregated middle-class housing complex, with Pruitt housing black residents and Igoe housing whites. Initially, the sentiment surrounding Pruitt-Igoe was optimistic. The complex opened in 1954 as one of the largest public housing projects in the country, with 33 ll-story towers, and was seen as a huge improvement over the substandard housing that it replaced.
The optimism didn’t last. During the complex’s construction, the builders cut corners and used cheap fixtures to keep the project’s budget in check. In addition to that, maintenance in the complex was reportedly shoddy from almost the very beginning. Local authorities said they didn’t have enough money to pay for the workforce that would be necessary to properly maintain the buildings. Then, the Brown vs Board of Education desegregation decision happened in 1954, and white residents abandoned the Igoe side of the complex after segregation in public housing was banned. By the 1960s, the complex had deteriorated and was in pretty rough shape. By 1971, there were only 600 people living in 17 of the buildings. The remaining buildings were vacant and boarded up. All of the buildings were demolished in the 1970s, which brings us to Spanish Lake.
Even though I’d added Spanish Lake to my My List on Netflix, I was hesitant to actually click play because I thought it might bum me out. From the description, I just knew it would focus on how a bunch of racists didn’t want black people in their town. Spanish Lake had been a white area for decades before Pruitt-Igoe closed. There had to be long-time Spanish Lake residents, called Lakers, who didn’t want blacks in the area because they didn’t want to live near black people.
The film and its subjects, the Lakers, surprised me, though. I expected to loathe the Lakers, but I weirdly ended up understanding their position. You’ve got a close-knit community full of families who’ve lived there for generations. Then new people move in, and all of a sudden, you don’t know who all of your neighbors are anymore.
Many of the Lakers placed the blame for what happened to their community on the government, rather than on the newcomers. From their perspective, the system was the problem, blacks were caught up in it just like they were, and there wasn’t much that any of them could do to change the course of things. Most Lakers claimed that they didn’t have problems living in the same community as blacks, as long as everyone shared the same values, and they viewed the situation through more of an economic class lense than one of race.
The problem with many of the people moving in, according to the Lakers, is that they didn’t take care of the properties that they occupied. It’s an accusation I’ve often seen leveled at renters. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not. In the eyes of the Lakers, it was true, and it stung them because of the memories they had of the community and because they knew how hard their families had worked to acquire that property and make something of it.
I’m actually glad that I watched Spanish Lake. It highlights the fact that behavior and attitudes that are easy to dismiss as racism are sometimes more complicated than that. Race remains a factor, but in this case, it’s one that is also closely tied to economics. But then there’s also the issue of how race and a legacy of institutionalized racism has affected economics. But that’s a discussion that’s probably too much to get into here and now.
Spanish Lake originally premiered in theaters in St. Louis in June 2014, but I watched it when it was in Netflix. That was a while ago, though, and the last time I checked, it was no longer available there. It’s available for rent on YouTube and Amazon, though.
