Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering group sees St. Louis through new eyes
The EECE EDI committee visited parts of St. Louis with Bob Hansman
In March 2001, 10-year-old Rodney McAllister was killed by a pack of stray dogs in Ivory Perry Park, just 2 miles from Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth Campus. Twenty-three years later, a group of faculty, staff and students from the McKelvey School of Engineering learned more about the tragedy when they visited the park as part of a tour of north St. Louis with Bob Hansman, senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. The park visit and other sites they visited that day affected those on the tour deeply and prompted ideas about how to address some of the issues from an engineering perspective.
Janie Brennan, senior lecturer in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, organized the bus tour with Hansman on behalf of the department’s equity, diversity & inclusion committee after hearing about it from others within the school. But what she saw was unexpected.
“This was life-changing for me,” she said. “I wish everyone could do it. I see the world a little differently now than I did before.”
In addition to Ivory Perry Park, the tour took the group to Kinloch, the oldest Black community to be incorporated in Missouri and what was once a thriving community, to the site of what was to be the Kinloch History Museum, an effort that never became a reality.
“There was some energy behind this initiative 10 to 15 years ago, but the rate at which it has deteriorated is so sad,” Brennan said. “It felt like I was entering an ancient history site, though it wasn’t ancient history.”
Brennan said she also noticed tremendous amounts of trash dumped around Kinloch, particularly at the site of a failed neighborhood development not far from where she and her family play disc golf.
“I saw Kinloch and realized it’s right next door,” she said. “Someone decided to bulldoze this area for something that never happened, somewhere near where I’ve gone to have fun. It’s so much darker than I thought it was.”
Christina Alexakos, a rising senior majoring in chemical engineering, said seeing the trash at the Kinloch site also has stuck with her.
“We’ve all seen litter before, and it’s so disrespectful, but I’ve never seen an area so tarnished by so much,” she said. “It’s clearly being used as a dump. There was a pile of mattresses, about 20 to 30 feet tall that stretched for 30 to 50 feet long. Our tour guide was great at making sure we were thinking about what we were seeing. We were 5 minutes from WashU, and I thought, ‘Wow.’”
Alexakos said seeing the situation in Kinloch was meaningful to her as an engineering student.
“It was a reminder of why engineers exist, which is to help people and to make life better for people,” she said. “We should not innovate for the sake of making something new. We should innovate with purpose. Right here in St. Louis, so close to our school, all this is going on. It was a sobering reminder to listen to what people are asking for and use that as a guide. I think that’s really important, but it was a bit of a slap in the face to remember that.”
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