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ST. LOUIS — Johnel Langerston moved quickly to tarp the basketball court in the gymnasium of the old St. James United Church of Christ Campus, near the southeast edge of O’Fallon Park.

Some warping of the floor was still obvious two weeks after the tornado that tore through north St. Louis ripped the roof off of the gym, exposing the court where Langerston has hosted youth basketball and reading programs for over a decade. The roof’s remnants laid just over the fence, on the property next door, where the cloistered “Pink Sisters” stay at the Mount Grace Convent.

Langerston has run his Urban Born basketball and education program from the St. James campus since 2012 when he purchased the old church buildings in the College Hill neighborhood, not long ago considered one of the city’s most dangerous.

Langerston likes to say he came to the neighborhood after searching online for the “worst place to live,” leaving behind his roots in California, where he did prison time for drug dealing and then sought to turn his life around after he got out.

The faded phrase “No books, no ball” is still visible on the gym’s wall, yet there will be no basketball camp this summer.

Langerston said it will return. He’s already repairing the gym’s ceiling, using his own money, he said, because he didn’t have insurance covering the building.

“Never give up,” Langerston said, pointing to a quote on a poster hanging from the gym’s walls. “What happens if I give up? And I’ve been teaching children that for 12 years, so it’s not an option for me.”

Langerston said he’s spent $30,000 so far on lumber and other material to repair the roof.

“I’m going to go through whatever I have to go through to keep going,” he said. “I’ve done it before to get here.”

He ran a marketing company in Los Angeles, which netted him enough to buy the property at 1505 East College Avenue when he first came here. As he got the organization running, he began buying up houses on the surrounding blocks and fixing them up. He rents some out. And others he has sold, including one last year for $300,000. The buyers took out a mortgage for the purchase, a rarity in north St. Louis where lenders are hesitant to finance home sales because of the lack of comparable sales.

Earlier this year, Langerston sold another house down the street at 2147 College Avenue. The mortgage was worth nearly $340,000, according to real estate records.

He planned to begin work on another property recently purchased from the Land Reutilization Authority, the city’s land bank for abandoned properties. In the College Hill neighborhood, nearly 60% of properties are vacant, according to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, the second-most behind the Ville, another neighborhood slammed by the tornado.

While the repairs to the gymnasium roof are his first priority, Langerston said he still plans to keep working on his home rehabs. He has to if he hopes to produce any residual income, he said. He’s already had help from church groups, neighborhood organizations and other volunteers, and Langerston is hopeful that the work rebuilding his little corner of the north side won’t stall out.

“When people go through some stuff this devastating, I’ve never seen a culture come together as strong as I have in this particular instance,” he said. “The initial impact of it, it opened up the whole part of someone’s soul to feel like we all have a common problem here.”