Residents of more than seven-dozen South Side streets share the same broken tale. Ten minutes after company is due at their house on Itaska Street west of Francis Park, the host receives a desperate phone call. It’s the guest, in a panic. He’s at Itaska Street at Ridgewood Avenue. The street just ended. What should he do? The host gives him directions and mumbles how silly it is that somebody gave the same name to an east-west street on the east side of the South Side and an east-west street on the west side of the South Side.
The question has occurred to people who live on at least ninety South Side streets. In fact, they live on at least 250 separate streets with beginnings and ends. But because they more or less were parallel, people assigned the same names to those streets, oblivious to the grief it would cause to people trying to locate addresses in the future.
It’s one of the tales in the Second Edition of Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. Most of the old favorites are back, guaranteeing this is a definite winner for the Hoosier or the Scrubby Dutch in your life.
You can get the new second edition at any bookstore or through the Internet. Or we can mail you an autographed copy for $21.50, tax and shipping included. That’s less than what Amazon charges for the book, handling and standard shipping.
Mail a check for that amount made out to Jim Merkel to Jim Merkel, 4216 Osceola St., St. Louis, MO 63116. Tell us how you want Jim to sign the book.
Jim Merkel the Writer 