2025-03-08
25 分钟Lidia, I'm Lydia DePillis and I'm an economics reporter for the New York Times.
When cities grow, they often do it in a fairly organized way.
Roadways are set up, neighborhoods are laid out.
There are houses side by side served by garbage trucks and mail carriers.
On the other hand, when a city shrinks, it's complete chaos.
People disappear.
It's like a mouthful of missing teeth.
It's happened to farm towns in the west,
and it's happened to the Rust Belt cities of the Midwest and Northeast,
places like Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore.
The story that I'll be reading for you in a moment is
about a city that has seen some of the worst population decline in the entire country
and what they've decided to do about it.
St. Louis was one of America's original boom towns.
It was located on the Mississippi River, a vital artery of trade,
and was an entry point for products like cotton and rice heading south,
manufacturing goods heading north.
It was one of the biggest producers of cars, of shoes.
It thrived in the wake of the Civil War and grew all the way through World War I and World War II.
In the early 1900s, it hosted the World's Fair and then the Olympics.