Kirkwood Gadfly was founded in 2017 while I was studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. Following along with the happenings of St. Louis from half a world away, I was struck by what a resource NextSTL was for me and by a desire to contribute to that conversation. Because St. Louis seemed pretty well covered, I settled on Kirkwood as a more manageable project.
The blog, a description I’ve grown more comfortable with in recent years (I previously insisted on calling it a website, but when you only have one writer, you can call it whatever you want, but it’s a blog), has since grown beyond my wildest expectations. Where early on it constituted little more than a creative writing project, it now breaks development news, is home to city council candidate interviews, hosts research projects and consistently tops 2,000 views a month. More recently the site’s ambitions have grown beyond simply a list of stories. Features like the Maps and Calendars pages were added to try to give people the resources they need to do the exact thing I do, but without facing the steep learning curve.
The blog’s social media presence has grown right along side it and now features active twitter and facebook pages. Most recently, a reddit page was added to that arsenal. And while it currently contains approximately zero posts (or engagements!) by anyone but myself, I hope in the long term it will prove to be a great way to transform what is currently primarily a one-way communication, into a dialogue where ideas can be offered and questions asked both related and unrelated to what is written on the site.
All of this is just to say, thank you so much for reading. Readers like you give the blog legitimacy, legitimacy that makes both developers and elected officials more likely to take what I, a twenty-four year old kid with long hair, seriously, to give me the time of day. They might not like all of it, but thanks to you, they can’t ignore it. At least not completely. None of that happens without you.