The 234 Apartment

By Sabra Ayres August, 3, 2017 Ksenia Belayeva and Igor Zaitsev sit at their kitchen inside an apartment they are sharing in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Vasiliy Kolotilov / For The Times) By the time Marina Maslova was born in the six- room communal apartment at 65 Bolshoi Prospect, an entire generation had lived there and come of age since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Maslova still lives in the room where she was born 61 years ago , and she remembers the dozens of families that have walked down its twisting, dark hallways and lived in its crowded rooms during her life. It was here that the guests at her wedding party in the 1970s moved the furniture aside to make room to dance in the 345-square-foot room she shared with her new husband, her parents and her grandmother. And it was here, in a small room just off the kitchen, where a 16-year-old boy hanged himself with his belt in the early 1960s after his parents, with whom he shared the cupboard-size space, disappeared. Both the...

click to enlarge I can’t remember exactly when I started at the Riverfront Times , but it was a long time ago — the web site was a .PDF of the paper that was uploaded on Wednesday morning . I can say that I’ve lived or worked (sometimes both) in the Loop since Bill Clinton was in the White House. I've been coming down here for films, books, meals and weird people watching since the late ‘80s, back when gangs of feral kids camped out in the street- level parking lot across from the Tivoli. The stretch of Delmar between the St. Louis Noodle Cafe and the University City Public Library has been my psycho-geographical concept of St. Louis for more than half my life. But now I'm in the process of packing up my office in preparation for a move. This afternoon, the RFT is leaving our home of 21 years on Delmar. By tomorrow, the paper will be based in Downtown West, and so will I, at least during office hours. Goodbye to all that. We’re only the latest business to say that...