Lisa Cranford, 53, has no clue where she’ll be living a day from now. Cranford’s landlord has ordered her out of the cramped and ramshackle apartment she lives in on the 4700 block of Michigan Avenue.
The individuals running a years-long, illegal rooming house operation appear to have been enabled in part by the way the city handles occupancy inspections for rental properties, a system that city officials say they hope to begin the process of reforming. This week saw the city of St. Louis drop a bombshell of a lawsuit against Dara Daugherty, Keith Mack, four other people and a whole host of LLCs they control.
The owners of the now-shuttered Central West End restaurant Brew Tulum have sued their landlords and the site's property manager over the lead contamination they found on site, saying their landlord's negligence caused them to sustain "serious injury and damages." The RFT first broke the news last year that Laura McNamara and Alberto Juarez had closed the eatery in September after finding evidence of lead contamination on site in their Delmar Maker District space. The contamination was discovered after their young son tested positive for exposure during a routine health screening — and after they ruled out the presence of lead at their home, began to eye the commercial space that housed their year-old eatery.
Members of a group hoping to stop the City of St. Louis from using pesticides in its parks and other city properties say they had a productive meeting with officials on Wednesday — a potential breakthrough after two and a half years of advocacy on the issue. The St. Louis No Spray Coalition has drafted an ordinance to limit pesticide use on city-owned land. And while officials didn't go so far as to sign on to the plan, coalition member Daniel "Digger" Romano tells the RFT they were "wiling to commit to a dialogue on it." He says, "All I can say for our side, we were wondering if they really are open to the bill or if the public pressure had just pressured them to talk to us reluctantly."
The most famous drag star in the U.S. is set to come to St. Louis — to talk literature. The St. Louis County Library Foundation will be hosting RuPaul on the book tour for his new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings, in which the drag queen discusses his rise to fame and growing up "Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance, found family, and self acceptance." He also shares the philosophy he's developed that allowed him to succeed over difficult circumstances.
As 2024 is getting started, there is a renewed sense of anticipation, and it's exciting to think about the year ahead reviewing weed for you, dear reader. It makes sense to start with a company that has evaded my review radar, unintentionally, so it's a great time to kick off the new Gregorian calendar with a visit to the big blue machine: Cookies.
Watching Origin, the mind-stirring new film from writer-director Ava DuVernay, I found myself leaning forward, the way you do when a friend you haven’t seen in a long time relates an intensely personal tale of loss or love or both. University students no doubt do the same when Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian portrayed in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, stands before them, lecturing.
One of St. Louis’ most well-known arts nonprofits has had a major staff shakeup. Two longtime employees of Cinema St. Louis, which puts on the St. Louis International Film Festival, or SLIFF, are no longer with the organization as of January 5.
The heat and hot water finally returned late Thursday morning to Sherri Robertson’s apartment at Norwood Court, in north St. Louis County. But Robertson says she is still irked by the fact the company that operates the sprawling apartment complex has not offered any explanations or apologies for the ordeal she and her fellow tenants endured during this past week’s Arctic weather blast.
Sheriff Vernon Betts seemed to reach an agreement this afternoon with St. Louis circuit court judges, who had previously publicly mulled no longer working with Betts’ deputies and being responsible for their own security. Last month, a letter from presiding Judge Elizabeth Hogan said that the court had plans to hire 36 bailiffs to provide daily security to the courtrooms, duties that are currently under the sheriff's department's purview.
Newly released video shows the aftermath of a St. Louis police SUV hitting Bar:PM. The video was shot by a bystander and released via the Twitter account of Javad Khazaeli, the attorney representing Chad Morris.
For 21 years, Joe's Cafe (6104 Kingsbury Avenue) has been one St. Louis' most hidden hidden gems, a top-notch music venue and a bar with a major quirk: It doesn't actually sell booze. If a BYOB bar sounds weird to you, well, you're overdue for a visit to Joe's — but hey, it's only open on Thursdays. And tonight, a Thursday, it won't even be open.
Even as a child, St. Louis native Dominic Chambers felt a burgeoning desire to make art. In school, he spent countless hours challenging classmates to drawing competitions. Still, the Hazelwood East alumnus didn't plan on an art career or even on going to college until his high school girlfriend dealt him an ultimatum: Go to college or we're breaking up.
The streets — and alleys — of St. Louis have a prominent place in R&B artist Neco Heartaway's new video, and so does one of St. Louis' biggest hip-hop breakout stars in recent years. "City Girl" is an ode to a "woman from the inner city with dreams and ambitions beyond her surroundings," according to its press materials. It seems to have been shot entirely in St. Louis, with images of the Central West End, the Arch and even a Metro bus.
Missouri circuit courts have cleared more than 100,000 marijuana charges from people’s criminal records so far — a mandate that was a big selling point for those who voted to pass the constitutional amendment that legalized recreational marijuana in 2022. However, court officials said it’s hard to determine how many more charges are left because many court records are not digitized.
Earlier this week a lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis limned in 57 pages the human misery brought to bear by a group of slumlords’ sprawling south city operation. The city accused its perpetrators of turning condemned buildings into illegal rooming houses, preying on vulnerable people by taking their cash in exchange for near-uninhabitable spaces.
No one could find Brian Dorsey the day after his cousin Sarah Bonnie and her husband Ben Bonnie were found murdered. The couple had been shot to death in their home in New Bloomfield, Missouri, where Dorsey had been the night before.
Nearly 100 years after the end of the Civil War, and a year after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, many Black Americans, particularly in the Southern United States, were still systematically denied the right to register and vote. World premiere play Hold On!
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