ST. LOUIS, Missouri — Great things can happen simply by being recognized as human.
“She just walked up, and said, ‘hey, can I talk to you for a second?'” Monique Reese said of her initial meeting with Lindy Drew. “And it just went from there.”
Drew, 36, is one of the founders of Humans of St. Louis, a Facebook page that features portraits of people in and around St. Louis and snippets of wisdom or stories gleaned from interviews of them. The site is based on the popular Humans of New York, run by photographer Brandon Stanton, which has spawned a book and has recently raised more than $1.4 million for a Brooklyn middle school.
The Humans of St. Louis site recently featured Reese and her husband, Marion. Drew photographed them after walking down Wabada Avenue in north St. Louis and seeing them in front of a dilapidated home.
“I found it on Craigslist,” Monique Reese explained, as posted on the site. “Bought it a week and half ago. It’s hideous. It was only a $6,000 house, and it needs a lot of work. It was even raining inside. But it was affordable. And who wouldn’t want to own a house and not pay rent? My husband said, ‘It’s our dream home.'”
That post sparked a huge response, and now volunteers have stepped forward to offer supplies, help and labor to renovate the house, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
This is the first big “hands-on” project that has grown out of Humans of St. Louis since Drew teamed up last spring with Caroline Fish to launch the page.
Fish, 26, then a student at Washington University’s George Brown School of Social Work, was a fan of Humans of New York. She’d expressed interest in creating such a site for St. Louis to a friend but lamented she didn’t know any photographers. That friend introduced her to Drew, also a student at the school, who had a photography and journalism background. Drew is originally from Arizona and Fish from North Carolina. They had grown to love St. Louis during their time at the university.
“Once you get to know (St. Louis), the little coffee shops, or you take the MetroLink, you see this really amazing city that has all this life and all this story and all this history,” said Fish. “And it’s not really visible to people who come for just the day. I kind of wanted to put a face on the city.”
Fish moved back to New York over the summer after graduation, but she helps maintain the site by monitoring reader comments, editing interviews and constantly talking and texting with Drew.
Drew often drives to different neighborhoods in St. Louis, taking her bike out of her car to ride around and find people to interview. She figures if somebody is outside, she can approach them. Sometimes friends come along to help conduct interviews. Standard questions include: “What was your most embarrassing moment?” ”What’s your greatest struggle?” ”How do you know you’re in love?”
One of her favorite entries came after she went up to a woman smoking in a hospital gown outside Barnes Jewish Hospital. “What’s your biggest piece of advice for the largest group of people?” Drew asked.
“Don’t smoke,” the woman responded.
Early last summer, she found a young couple with their young child in the Grove neighborhood and photographed them in front of a mural with the Gateway Arch and the words “bridge of hope.” The woman was white and the man black, and their child was pictured in the center between them. Drew and Fish held onto the photo, waiting for the perfect time to post it. They did on Aug. 11, during the unrest after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The photo caption said, “For all neighborhoods. Today. Every day.”
Fish loved the picture. “We didn’t need to say more,” she said.
The post sparked a big reaction and discussion, providing St. Louisans a human connection at a time when some of them felt particularly fragile. Drew loves to help facilitate that.
“I always say half the process is putting the picture up,” she explained. “But the other half is people commenting and reacting. We put it out there and we let that happen and watch that unfold. Our hope is that some of those biases get broken down.”
The most recent big outpouring came after Jan. 31, when Humans of St. Louis carried the picture of the Reeses on their front stoop. Readers asked if they needed help and supplies.
Chris Ferrara, 47, of St. Louis, who has volunteered during cleanup efforts after tornadoes in Joplin and Alabama, stepped forward to coordinate help for the Reeses.
“It’s not a tornado, but I think we’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do,” in St. Louis, he said. “I just think there’s a lot of people out there who really care about their city and really want to do something.”
Volunteers who want to help can look for times and dates on a separate Facebook site called “Reese Family Renovation.”
Marion Reese, 47, is from Atlanta and says people are friendlier in the South, and the outpouring of help he and his wife have gotten has helped change his view of St. Louis.
“It just takes reaching out sometimes,” he said.
Monique Reese, 43, had a rough upbringing in north St. Louis and relied on neighbors to look out for her. When she drove a school bus, she brought baby wipes and a comb to help clean up children before they walked into school. As a St. Louis Metro bus driver, she says she buys extra chicken sandwiches during her daily Burger King runs and gives them to people, and lets homeless people ride her bus as long as they want to get out of the cold.
She understands the value of helping others.
“It makes me think of when people say, ‘you’ll get your blessings,’ because I do a lot of good for people,” she said. “I’m getting my blessings.”
Leave a Reply