Walking down Parkdale Avenue in Clayton, it’s quiet. Joggers pass by, and workers tend to lawns in the summer heat.
The streets are clear of debris, and while homes show damage, it’s hard to tell that a tornado ripped through this neighborhood roughly 100 days ago. Tarps cover roofs and, in some places, windows are shattered — some buildings are condemned but under repair.
As I walk down the street, I run into Sunny Solanki. It’s 91 degrees out as he jogs around the neighborhood. He grew up in the area and lives on Parkdale.
Solanki remembers the day of the tornado well. He says he jumped out of the shower when his ceiling started to rattle midafternoon on May 16, as a powerful EF3 tornado ripped through the St. Louis region.
“I looked through my windows. I saw debris flying up the street. Then I saw a tree in front of my yard disintegrating, and I saw roofs kind of falling apart,” he says. “It went dark, and then there was light — and I think that I thanked every higher power on this planet.”
Solanki shows me photos of the aftermath on his phone. Trees in the street, bricks on the ground. All of that is gone as we look over the street. He says Clayton’s quick cleanup impressed him.
“There was also Richmond Heights, University City; I saw Webster,” he says. “I saw all of these trucks from other surrounding areas coming in and cleaning up.”
The May 16 tornado touched down near the eastern edge of Clayton, tearing through the neighborhood before storming across the city-county line, into Forest Park and bending north into the DeBaliviere Place neighborhood, then Academy, Fountain Park, the Greater Ville and on, until crossing the Mississippi River and continuing several miles into the Metro East. All told it cut a path of damage nearly 23 miles long.
St. Louis estimated that the tornado left more than 10,000 properties damaged or destroyed as it devastated neighborhoods throughout the St. Louis region and killed five people. It marked the first deadly tornado in the city since 1959.
About 100 days after the tornado, criticism over the uneven recovery and repair grows with each passing day. Residents and stakeholders complain the response from every level of government hasn’t met the moment — while officials say they’re doing their best.
What’s more, people in neighborhoods on the city’s north side — where the tornado dealt the most severe damage — worry their communities might never rebound from the destruction.
I wanted to see for myself. So over several days, I walked and drove the path of the tornado from Clayton to the riverfront, exploring the damaged neighborhoods and talking to the neighbors about how they’re getting on.
In Clayton, stumps are clean-cut where damaged trees were removed. Many people I talk to say it’s hard to believe how far the neighborhood has come in the months following the twister.
I follow the tornado’s path for two hours in this inner-ring wealthy suburb, where the average home value nears $700,000. I search for damage, other than tarped roofs and homes in repair. One building on top of a hill that from afar appeared to be a heavily damaged home turned out to be new construction. Another home’s columns that hold up its antebellum-style porch roof have collapsed.
On Wydown Avenue, the manor-style homes saw substantial damage. Most of them appear empty, and some — including a home listed on the National Historic Register of Places — are badly damaged. Much like on Parkdale Avenue, roofs are tarped, windows are shattered, and some structural damage is visible from the sidewalk. Repairs seem to be underway on the homes, and on the street, workers look for gas lines underground to repair.
I make my way to the neighborhoods north of Forest Park, where the winds increased significantly as the tornado raged on.
On DeGiverville Avenue, neighbors and crews sweat under the sun as the heat index reaches 107 degrees. Here, brick houses took a beating.
From the sidewalk, I can’t tell how badly the tornado affected Joanna Jacques' house as it traveled just 300 yards south of the 113-year-old home. But it becomes clear as I climb the stairs of the old house with her. As I reach the top, where a roof should be, fluffy white clouds drift through a bright blue sky.
“I got a skylight. You got to pay for yours,” she says, laughing. “Mine was free. That’s what I tell people.”
Jacques has lived in the house for roughly 50 years. She’s soft-spoken and likes old things — she laments cracks to some of the pottery left by the previous owner of the home as her husband opens the door to their collapsed second-floor sunroom.
The couple had left their house for a doctor’s appointment 15 minutes before the tornado passed through the DeBaliviere neighborhood. The tornado ripped off the back of their home’s flat roof and flung it into the street in front of their home. The remains of the roof and a sturdy gate spared their dogs, Shy and Sookie.
“When I got on my street — when I got out the car, my knees buckled,” Jacques remembers. “I almost fainted.”
As I stand on the roofless second floor of her home, workers stay busy above. One fires a nail gun again and again as another tosses debris from the ceiling.
Most of her belongings sit in boxes, and she and her husband sleep in a room on the front end of the second floor with their dogs. It’s cool in there, but they’ll need to be out in eight days for further repairs.
“It's hard to pack when you've been here for almost 50 years — and I'm doing it by myself,” she says, looking over the big boxes stacked up in the room, baking under the summer heat.
She says insurance covered most of the damage and will put her up in housing well into 2026. Jacques worries about others who can't afford insurance and can’t rebuild. Even without a roof, she says she at first didn’t plan to apply for Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. Her siblings talked her into it, but she says she worries others need the money more.
“I was going to leave it to people who didn't have it,” she says. “I have insurance, and they don't have anything … without that insurance, you're not going to go far.”
I head north of Delmar Boulevard, through Fountain Park and into the Greater Ville. The average home value here is less than $50,000, according to many real estate trackers.
In this neighborhood, brick homes have collapsed in on themselves. I can see second and third floors from the street, and the neighborhood echoes the silence of Clayton — but the eerie stillness of the shattered buildings couldn’t be more different. As I walk down Cora Avenue, I notice a bedroom completely crushed by the roof that once protected it.
The future for these century-old houses, each intricately designed and constructed, now collapsed, is far from clear.
Debris covers the streets and, while in other neighborhoods most houses appeared to be under repair, the vast majority here lay abandoned. Whoever lived in these homes is long gone, and neighbors I speak with say they don’t expect them back.
Joe Wood sits on the front porch of a building on Deer Street. He owns Black Brothers Flooring. He’s taking a break from working on the house, repairing water damage sustained after the tornado passed through the area. He says he lives nearby and calls the state of the area “depressing” for the people who live here.
“We're in a lower-class area where the income is not really that high,” he says, wiping away sweat. “These are the people that's — let's be honest — that's kind of forgotten about. … Things kind of get swept up under the rug here.”
People are discouraged by the slow cleanup of their streets, he says, a common sentiment among people and stakeholders in the area. The houses may never be built again in some places, but Wood says he expected more to be done about the fallen trees and debris that still litter the streets.
“[We] just need more people out here doing some things,” he says. “Everybody was out here when it first happened, but I don't see anybody out here anymore.”
Farther north on Cote Brilliante Avenue, I meet a woman who calls herself P. Baby and her cousin, who doesn’t want to give her name. As her cousin carries things from her boarded-up apartment building, P. Baby calls its owner a slumlord and says her cousin had no notice that the building would be boarded up.
“It’s already a shitty place to live, and the tornado made it even worse,” she says. “It’s inhumane living conditions.”
The pair continues packing the car with bedsheets and other belongings. P. Baby says this is the only place her cousin can afford. She’s on disability and has no other place to go. She says that’s the case for many of the tornado-struck buildings in the area.
“Slumlords — they own them — they're renting them to poor people,” she says. “They can't afford anything, so [landlords] put them in inhumane conditions, and they get used to it.”
I exchange goodbyes with the pair as they drive off, and then I head farther toward Elmbank Avenue in the Ville, where several crews work on roofs and cleaning debris on private property. Scaffolding surrounds this building, and bricks cover the front yard.
At least, they’re working while they can — the city is still experiencing a heat wave and work can only go on for a few more hours. Natalie Hughes, who operates a construction business, BrickLady LLC, climbs down scaffolding to talk. Her crews started working on this three-story building before dawn.
“Everybody lost most of their parapet walls and roofs, so we're going to repair those,” Hughes says. “I've been doing this for a while, and you know, when you see it, the scope of it, I'm in awe.”
Hughes has people throughout this area working on the brick buildings that still stand. She says they’ve taken on a lot of work for those who can afford it. But for some, she says, these century-old houses are beyond repair or too expensive to fix.
“All of the homeowners are desperately trying to get their homes together, but sometimes the number gets a little more than people can handle,” she says. “So I'm just trying to get people to not give up. But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. I already know the city's going to come back. The question is, with whom and how?”
I head over to Newstead Avenue, where the tornado’s path began to straighten, plowing into the O’Fallon neighborhood from the Greater Ville. At Newstead and San Francisco avenues, a tree lies on a half-collapsed home. From a gaping hole in the basement, water shoots out into the street, splashing into a giant puddle. The water was running like this a day earlier, when I drove by, as well.
Across the street, James Hudson sits in his wheelchair. He lives in the Latter Glory Manor Apartment complex. He says the tree fell on the house during the tornado, and the water started more than a week ago. He’s tried to stop city workers who were doing yardwork nearby to get the water turned off, but he says they’ve been unhelpful.
“They had one guy cutting grass over there or something, and I told him to tell them the water was running,” Hudson says. “He said it wasn’t his problem.”
Neighbors in the Greater Ville tell me the same thing. They wonder why the city isn’t doing more to remove debris, fix issues like this and make things more livable in the area.
From here, the tornado traveled northeast into O’Fallon, crossing the Mississippi River and damaging parts of Pontoon Beach and Granite City before finally dissipating near Edwardsville.
Repairs continue throughout the path of the storm, but neighbors in north city fear how their community might make out in the long run. Neighbors I spoke with say they’re worried about whether there will be reinvestment in the area, when it might come and what it could look like.
“I hope they don't forget about this area,” Joe Wood told me from the stoop on Deer Street. “We do have a lot of residents here who are still displaced. We just can't forget about those people.”
