Last Thursday, a crowd packed into Leviathan Bookstore for a conversation about one of St. Louis’s most quietly transformative mayors: Raymond Tucker. The evening featured Dr. Andrew Theising, author of Mid-Mod Mayor: How Raymond Tucker Shaped St. Louis, and Tim Tucker, grandson of the former mayor. The speakers painted a compelling portrait of a leader whose legacy still shapes the city today.
An accomplished mayor
As we learned in the talk, Raymond Tucker brought a pragmatic and principled approach to governance. As mayor from 1953 to 1965, he navigated a St. Louis struggling with post-war decline, white flight, and crumbling infrastructure. Tim Tucker offered a deeply personal view, describing a grandfather devoted to public service and civic responsibility. Andy framed Mayor Tucker’s tenure as a turning point—marked by stability, moral clarity, and a collaborative style that helped secure long-overdue progress. Together, they highlighted major accomplishments like the 1955 bond issue that modernized the city’s infrastructure, the creation of the permanent earnings tax, and ambitious regional planning efforts that included Civic Progress and Bi-State. They also spotlighted his early work as Smoke Commissioner, where he dramatically improved St. Louis’s air quality through science-based policy, becoming a national model for environmental reform.
You can check out the slides below:
The cost of urban renewal: Mill Creek Valley
In the Q&A that followed, audience member and historian Gwen Moore offered a powerful reminder of the costs of urban renewal, pushing back on the depiction of Mill Creek Valley as merely blighted. She emphasized the community’s cultural vibrancy and the trauma of displacing over 20,000 residents—a sobering counterpoint to the narrative of progress. The exchange acknowledged that Tucker, like many leaders of his era, operated within the constraints and blind spots of his time, making it all the more important to revisit these histories with care and complexity.
Lessons for the future
Asked to reflect on Tucker’s legacy and what lessons our new mayor might take away from Tucker’s example, both speakers emphasized that getting the basics right—like reliable trash pickup, infrastructure maintenance, and clean, safe streets—must come first.
Tucker’s legacy wasn’t built on flashy rhetoric or sweeping promises, but on steady, competent leadership that restored public confidence through action. In a city still facing many of the same structural challenges, his example underscores a powerful lesson: build trust by delivering on the fundamentals, and lasting progress will follow.
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