In "Mapping Decline," author Colin Gordon uses a new system for merging maps and statistics to survey the decline and fall of St. Louis as a great American city.

Even in the St. Louis area, few shoppers are likely to shell out $55 for a book that teems with numbers, governmental acronyms, and the arcane corners of economics, sociology and public policy.

And the few who decide to dip into "Mapping Decline" will probably come away depressed. Back in 1900, St. Louis ranked fourth in population among America's cities. As of 2000, it had slid to 48th place. Along the way, neighborhoods crumbled, racial relations hardened and whites fled to the ever-expanding suburbs.

It's an all-too-familiar story for old-time residents. Indeed, bits and pieces of it pop up in this newspaper all the time — conflicts over eminent domain, for example, and the competition among municipalities here to grant property tax breaks to developers.

But author Gordon (he teaches history at the University of Iowa) steps back to put it all in a sad and sorry perspective.

Again and again, he returns to the tract at 4635 North Market Street, in the city's Greater Ville area. In the 1890s, a sturdy, two-story brick house rose there. Now, the lot is empty, with many of the remaining houses in the neighborhood abandoned and boarded up.

In Gordon's view, the story of 4635 North Market is a microcosm of the story of St. Louis.

Naturally, Gordon cites The Usual Suspects — for example, racism, as written into restrictive covenants in St. Louis realty transactions, and the pull of postwar suburban serenity. But he also faults:

— The ease with which postwar suburbs could incorporate. The result was the Balkanization of St. Louis County.

— The tendency of suburbs to zone themselves into islands of affluence, holding blacks at bay.

— Urban renewal projects and programs that Gordon says invariably backfire. He says that "if the long-term goal of local planners was rebuilding the tax base, their favorite short-term strategy was to dismantle it — the equivalent, in local public policy terms, of burning the village in order to save it."

— Abuse of "blighting" laws that grant tax breaks to developers — and thereby set off a race to the bottom among municipalities to attract shopping centers and big-box stores.

In the city, Gordon says, such tax breaks have produced stadiums and shopping areas while doing nearly nothing to help truly blighted residential neighborhoods.

Gordon hammers home his points with color maps dotted with statistical data. (One problem: Most of the maps that cover St. Louis County break the county down by census tract rather than municipality. That, plus the absence from almost all of the maps of the area's landmark interstate highways, makes it hard to pin down precisely what's happening where.)

Still, even these maps without landmarks show clearly how wealth abandoned the city and moved westward through Ladue, Frontenac and their upscale neighbors.

Gordon casts St. Louis as perhaps the sorriest example of urban decline in America. I suspect his book will be little read outside the metro area — it's much too local for consumption in, say, Houston, or Boston.

And locally, "Mapping Decline" surely will spur some sputtering among the civic promoters who tout the St. Louis area as "all within reach."

But the proper reaction ought to be sadness. One of these days, I'll drive past 4635 North Market, just to let the sadness sink in.

Harry Levins of Manchester was once senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.