Meet the Anarchists

Bolozone supports itself as a collective. Each occupant of the three-bedroom house shares in the cooking, gardening, maintenance, etc. In exchange, they get cheap rent -- $155 a month -- and kindreds for roommates. Only two people were living on the premises at the time of the May 16 arrests, 23-year-old Molly Dupre and 24-year-old Kelley Meister. Both spent the day in jail. The dozen other Bolozone arrestees had come to town for the protests.

Meister and Dupre grew up in the St. Louis area, went away to college, then decided to return. "I knew that I wanted to live with people," Dupre says of her housing choice, "and that I probably wanted to live in a collective. And I started talking back and forth with people at Bolo and really liked the idea of a place that is owned, that's not controlled by a landlord, that you can live in very cheaply." The collective repairs neighborhood kids' bikes for free out of the back garage; in an electronics workshop in the basement, they build guitar effects pedals.

"It's very project-oriented," Dupre explains. "Everyone has a project, and the space itself is a project on all these different levels. It's a social project to have people interact, it's a project of urban sustainability to see how we can live more ecologically in the city, and that's really interesting. It's just a place where there's always something going on, and a lot of people consider it their home whether they live there or not."

Bolozone was born in 1998, when Green, unwilling to go into debt with student loans after scholarship money dwindled, left the University of Illinois engineering school after a year there. "Me and a friend of mine started asking around Champaign if anyone knew where cheap buildings were," he recalls. "And someone there had lived in St. Louis and said, 'Oh yeah, there's tons of buildings in St. Louis. So we came down, went to the CDA [Community Development Agency]. And they had a list of buildings that no one had paid taxes on for years and years and no one had bid on. So we looked around, and we found that house there." He points toward Bolozone. "We offered $800 on it, and they accepted it."

A few months before they bought the property, the entire back of the house collapsed into the alley, which caused the city to condemn the building. After taking possession, Green and his friend set to work to reconstruct it. "We built a 60-foot wall by hand," he says. "It took us a long time, but it's just as good as a wall you could have built with all the tools."

What they didn't do, however, was check in with the city's building division. "I was dirt-poor," Green recalls. "I couldn't afford the permits. I just needed a place to live. But we didn't start on the right foot with the building division, and it's been haunting us ever since."

Before any St. Louis resident undertakes major construction, the city requires permits; as part of the process, architectural and engineering plans must be reviewed and approved by the building division. "We didn't bring them out and fully do all the inspections before we started work," Green confesses. "We started working on it, and then later we're like, 'Oh, let's get our permits together.' They want to get their nose into everything before you even touch the building, whereas we saw it as an emergency situation. A wall had collapsed, and we just wanted to get it stable and secure, not go through the red tape."

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Building inspector John MacEnulty kicked off May 16 like any other day. The go-to guy when it comes to problem properties -- crack houses, homeless havens and the like -- MacEnulty that morning had received from the police a list of addresses slated for investigation in South City: on Illinois, Cherokee and Lemp.

MacEnulty says he wasn't told why police were interested in the properties. He looked up the records for 3309 Illinois. According to the city's paperwork, the property had been condemned since 1999. Work was under way to bring the building up to code, the records indicated, but the last construction permit had expired in February; with no proof that the owner was still working at the property, the city had nullified the permit. The owner, MacEnulty says, should have received a letter from the building division informing him of the status.

Next, MacEnulty pulled up the records for 3022 Cherokee, a mixed-use storefront owned by members of CAMP, and noted that some of the owners had listed Bolozone as their primary address. "These two addresses set off warning bells with me," MacEnulty recounts. "I'm looking at these thinking: Okay, something's not right. Someone's pulling a fast one somewhere. We have the Community Arts and Media Project giving their address as a condemned property -- and a residential property to boot."