Colin Gordon, a University of Iowa history professor, was at Left Bank Books in the Central West End this evening to talk about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.

Mr. Gordon gives us a bird’s eye view of the worst and most intractable civic pathologies that afflicted the St. Louis region:

Combining maps and geographically-based data he plots this community’s grim and determined 20th Century defense of racial division. He marches through consecutive strategies of forced segregation, followed, when this ultimately failed, by large scale race-based flight.

This toxic brew is then seasoned with more than one instance of mass racial expulsion — with the whole sorry mess then set in amber though exclusionary land use laws codified in myriad municipal zoning codes and reinforced by a racist federal mortgage loan policy that as late as 1962 prevented investment in black or integrated communities.

As though this weren’t bad enough, superimposed on the wreckage are serial “urban renewal” projects — ranging from pubic housing, to enterprise zones, to downtown development — none seemingly untainted by the segregationist spirit or baggage.

The scarred maps remind me of the painted portrait in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, here with every ugly, depleting mark caused by the region’s ignominious, largely unrepented, and not long distant history of racial brutality indelible.

Asked if there’s any redemption in what he found and charted, Gordon had this to say: Choices not fate created these problems. This holds open the possibility that other choices can reverse some conditions.

This seems intuitively true. But if you look at the maps it becomes plain the road is long and steep.

Which means we must pick up the pace if we hope to find our way back.