Larry Williams/Post-Dispatch

On March 3, voters in St. Louis’ Shaw Neighborhood will decide a local tax initiative. Actually, “hyper local” better describes it.

The tax would apply in just 1/100th of the city, the 54 blocks that make up the neighborhood just to…

Renee Racette at the Obama field office in the Shaw Neighborhood. Eddie Roth/Post-Dispatch

To understand why Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, it helps to visit the old Lester’s Music Store on the corner of 39th Street and Castleman…

Debbie lives just a block from where it happened, but didn’t realize at the time that a 20-year-old man had been gunned down on the street the night before. “We didn’t hear a thing,” she wrote in a note on the…

Not that many years have passed since I was most involved in community organizing.

I first was asked to become an officer in the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association in 1994. My busiest stretch was from 1997-2000 when we were working on a lot…

My family and I just bought a home in the Shaw Neighborhood, a couple of blocks north of Tower Grove Park.

Let me tell you, the annual PrideFest today has a big turnout, auto and foot traffic thick up and down Magnolia…

Crime was down in the city of St. Louis in 2007 — violent crime falling 11 percent and property crimes down 17 percent in 2007. No small accomplishment, even if violent crime now appears to be on the rise.

But these trends…

I came across the above posted clip of Don Messer and His Islanders performing the Pea Soup Reel, and I thought of people (such as me and maybe you) who devote themselves to puzzling through problems…