Fourteen Things in St. Louis

1. Interesting pieces inhabit the Laumeier sculpture park, notably a cluster of Mark di Suvero constructions (a rusty orange tripodal one my favorite among them), an Alexander Liberman assembly of large red-painted fuel tanks, and a wall-line of spherical metal buoys. Trails lead into leafier parts of the park and more sculptures. It’s quiet and pleasant, similar in feel to Storm King on the Hudson, though on a smaller scale.

2. The City Museum is utterly fantastic, especially if you’re grown up but not that grown up and you want to feel like you’re 10 again. I agree with what Nate said. This place is amazing. On the minus side, I whacked the soft part of my left knee off one of the slides. On the plus side, wow, slides! Also turtles, caverns, etc. Late at night (I think we got there about 10) it’s just a neat and unlikely thing to be out doing.

3. I forget the name of the neighborhood around Delmar Avenue, kind of near Washington U., I think? We drank Schlafly and ate toasted ravioli Friday night at a kinda-retro place called Pin Up Bowl, though we didn’t actually go bowling there. (Not that it was the best kind anyway.) There are Hollywood-style stars on the sidewalks outside for famous St. Louis figures: Charles Lindbergh, Miles Davis, Bob Gibson, Nelly, Harold Ramis, Bob Saget . . .


4. The Chain of Rocks Bridge spans the Mississippi a mile across, somewhat north of the city. It used to convey Route 66 but now it’s a pedestrian bridge, and a fine morning walk. Good old functional architecture.



5. The Gateway Arch looks really fine up close, I think – the design is remarkably fresh considering Saarinen drafted the first designs in the late 1940s. You may ascend the interior of this 630-foot stainless steel catenary construction in one of 16 small pods. The view of St. Louis is not unforgettable, but it is there.

6. St. Louis has, surprisingly, its own style of pizza, propagated first and foremost by a chain called Imo’s (say it EE-mo’s) with a halfway-fast-food vibe. The pizza itself comes across as glorified bar food, with a thin, densely bready crust and a cheese unknown to God and nature called Provel, which is closer to American cheese than any actual variety. A sausage & olive pizza serves as a satisfying midafternoon snack.

7. The Missouri Botanical Garden is gorgeous and impressive, rather like Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia. The grounds were lush and in early summer flower; there was of course a wedding party there. Tropical flora are housed in a large, glass-ceilinged geodesic dome identified as the Climatron®.

If the course of a Saturday takes you to the top of a 630-foot stainless steel catenary arch and later into a glass-ceilinged geodesic dome, I think you are doing something right.

8. The Opera Theatre of St. Louis is one of the best-regarded English-language opera companies in the country. They perform in a relatively small house with nice clean acoustics out in the suburb of Webster Groves (which is where Tom’s parents live, within walking distance). Vincenzo Bellini’s “I Puritani” (1835) is not the most exciting opera ever – largely it’s a setting for a big soprano role, in which Pamela Armstrong really shined. (I’m starting to appreciate opera singing a bit more recently, as it turns out.) Bellini’s music is docile and over-mannered, like Berlioz but without the wildness; the plot kind of clocks its way along. The main male leads were less gripping than Armstrong was, though a bass by the name of Arthur Woodley tackled a side role gracefully and movingly.

9. Ted Drewes sells frozen custard concretes and has since 1929. A Heath bar concrete hits the spot after three hours of Bellini, that’s for sure. Your concrete comes with a spoon and a straw, the latter for the blissful melty part as you reach the bottom. I do not know why this is called a concrete.

10. Blueberry Hill (back on Delmar) is a music spot, but not during brunch hours on a Sunday. More Schlafly: a hefeweizen, which was very mild, but appropriate for Sunday brunch, by which I mean a hickory burger. Cold beer is ever important, especially since it was essentially 90 degrees and humid the entire weekend.

11. Forest Park is lovely, though it does not turn out to have been designed by Frederick Law Olmstead like I thought I heard. The St. Louis Art Museum is there, and impressively they’ve got completely free admission whenever they’re open. (Same deal for the zoo, also in Forest Park, which we did not see.) We checked out the romantic American paintings, the contemporary collection (points of interest, among others, being a sizeable wall of Gerhard Richter and a couple of typically visceral works by Anselm Kiefer), and kind of on a whim the furniture & tableware section, right before we got chased out for closing time.

12. The Central West End is a yuppified neighborhood, but (from what I saw) not obnoxiously so. A quick browse into Left Bank Books (I picked up a new Jean Thompson story collection that's out) was followed by beers at a sidewalk spot and further conversation. On a Sunday it was a pretty low-key time & place; I’m told it gets a bit more active in the evenings.

13. Back around A.D. 900 to 1200 the St. Louis area was a major cultural seat of the mound-building Mississippian culture, and a city called (or now called?) Cahokia across the river in Illinois thrived for a time as a major capital. (And at population 20,000, the largest city in the present-day U.S. till Philadelphia circa 1800.) The earthen ruins left over are interesting, a quiet testament that’s slowly been melting back into the landscape, though the largest mound (apparently a temple platform) is still 100 feet high or so. There’s a pretty slick educational center there too; otherwise it’s oddly in the middle of an unremarkable stretch of rural roads ’n’ telephone poles kind of contemporary Midwest. Depressingly, the mounds are outmounded a mile to the west, where there’s a larger and much uglier contemporary landfill.

14. Pete will think less of me if I say I went on the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour, but I did, and I liked doing it: it’s pretty neat to see a large industrial facility that’s kept clean and well-maintained (at least in part) for the sake of goggling tourists. They really shuffle you along this thing; it’d be neater to linger places for a bit and watch where the pipes go, but it’s not that kind of place. There’s an enormous scale to everything, of course. Afterwards we sampled the Budweiser Select and Michelob Amber Bock, which were both remarkably free of flavor, body, or texture.

* * * * *

St. Louis experiences that I did not encounter include:
* The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and their excellent conductor David Robertson – though Nate & I saw them at Carnegie Hall back in March (blazing through a red-hot Harmonielehre) so I think that’s checked off my list;

* the St. Louis Cardinals, who were unfortunately out of town – maybe I can track them down on the road later this summer, for closure;

* a days-long power outage brought about by the universally loathed AmerenUE.

And needless to say it was great to spend some time with my onetime college roommate Tom, who I’ve seen a few times since graduation but never for more than a couple hours at a time. As you might be able to guess, he was the one who knew about all this stuff to do in his hometown.

On Sunday my college friend & ’02–’03 Astoria roommate Kathleen (now studying at Wash U.) came along for brunch/museum/conversation; also nice to catch up with her for the first time in a while.

It’s been a decent year for getting into better touch with college friends, in between some of these city hops & the 5-year college reunion a couple of weekends back.