The little boy and I strolled along a winding path inside the Climatron, a glass-enclosed tropical rain forest at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
“It’s cool, isn’t it?” yelped the boy. “It’s just like a jungle in here.”
“Actually, it’s kind of hot,” I replied. “Humid, too.”
The boy looked up with a puzzled frown and skittered away to find his mother. Only then did it strike me that he had been expressing approval, rather than making an observation about the climate. For a second there, I had forgotten how kids talk.
And I agreed with him. The Missouri Botanical Garden, which beautifully dominates one west side St. Louis neighborhood, certainly is cool. In fact, the same could be said for much of St. Louis. Cool-not to mention gnarly, rad, boss and fresh.
The tourist crowd here leans heavily toward family groups that evidently come from places a bit less exciting than St. Louis-Galesburg, Ill., for example, or Jefferson City, Mo.-but they do know a cool scene when they find it.
To some people, Missouri Botanical Garden-with its lush South American plants, exquisite Japanese garden and flowered walkways-might appear more exotic than Oz.
The 100-year-old St. Louis Union Station, now a mall but still showing off its glorious past as a depot designed to accommodate the western sweep of immigrants in the 19th Century, offers a mercantile cornucopia of non-essentials. Its restaurants range in style and taste from the elegant Station Grille near the arcing, stained-glass temple of the Hyatt Regency hotel lobby to yet another branch of Hooters.
St. Louis strives to qualify as the capital of sports-celebrity bistros: Brett Hull’s improbable mix of hockey pucks and California nouvelle-cuisine; Dierdorf & Hart’s, where Dan and Jim, respectively, provide steaks and memories of Cardinal football (both places in Union Station); base-stealer Lou Brock’s Sports City Grille in the downtown mall called St. Louis Centre; Mike Shannon’s Steaks and Seafood, a major-league hangout near Busch Stadium; and Busch Stadium itself, which offers a variety of dining experiences, a St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame museum and a gift shop splashed with logos.
All this and a lot more lends St. Louis a playground aspect, enchanting those who visit a metropolis hoping to make it their toy. And from almost any downtown perspective the playful will catch glimpses of the great Gateway Arch, a gigantic silver jump rope caught in mid swing.
Families wait in line to stand under the Gateway and explore its curves. One of them, a teenager, told his family, “Hey, you guys, look up! It’s cool!”
This time I understood, and I also could comprehend the awe expressed by one father as he patted the massive Gateway Arch base and whistled. “Gee, that’s got to be an engineering feat of some kind, doesn’t it?”
In a theater down below, a 35-minute film explains every step of Gateway Arch construction, from the daring design work by architect Eero Saarinen to the delicate placement of the final section-630 feet above the ground-in 1965.
The Gateway Arch reigns supreme as the loftiest national monument, 75 feet higher than the Washington Monument, 325 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. And if anyone ever added proportionate bodies to the heads on Mt. Rushmore, the presidents would stand 465 feet tall (allowing a few extra feet for Honest Abe) and still could easily stroll under the arch without ducking.
Little five-passenger trams carry adventurers to the pinnacle, where they get the kind of generic skyline view available from any office building anywhere. Kids enjoy the trip, but some derive nearly equal satisfaction when they begin to understand what the Gateway Arch represents.
As National Park Service rangers eagerly explain in the underground Museum of Western Expansion between and beneath the archway legs, the monument honors Native Americans, explorers, trappers, farmers, miners and anybody else who took a hand in settling the frontier.
Rather than neatly label artifacts, the museum spreads out the tools, costumes and conveyances of the past in a way that plunges visitors into the pioneer experience. Rangers roam among the various displays, ready to interpret. So do Moms and Pops.
Alongside a prairie schooner, one mother informed her young son, “They didn’t have cars in those days.” A map of the United States embedded in the floor highlights the extensive real estate covered by the Louisiana Purchase. “That shows all the land we bought from France,” another parent told her brood. “No, not just Missouri, but Louisiana, Colorado, South Dakota . . .”
In 1764, French trapper Pierre Laclede set up his fur-trading operations here, effectively founding the city he named for King Louis IX.
By the time Thomas Jefferson engineered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, St. Louis stood out as a bustling commercial center with 3,000 residents. In a sort of post-purchase appraisal effort, President Jefferson sent explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their westward expedition, which began in the St. Louis area. Jefferson wanted to know if those 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi were worth the $15 million purchase price.
In the years that followed, St. Louis became a thriving river port, and the population swelled to 160,000 by 1860. Civil War blockades shut off the influx of stern-wheelers, however, and the Union placed trade restrictions on Missouri, a slave state.
Midwestern commercial momentum, spurred by the growth of railroads, shifted to Chicago, and it wasn’t until 1874, and the completion of the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi, that St. Louis could easily distribute its flour and manufactured goods eastward.
In 1894, Union Station opened to accommodate the flood of immigrants heading west to St. Louis and points beyond. Around that time, the city established a convention bureau to promote itself. For the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase in 1904, the bureau organized a whopping World’s Fair. Nineteen million visitors poured in to examine Thomas Edison’s phonograph and light bulbs (along with hundreds of other eye-popping attractions) and to taste such theretofore unknown delicacies as hot dogs, ice cream cones and iced tea.
Currently, about 453,000 people live within the city limits and 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, some of them working at such corporate giants as Anheuser-Busch (which offers free brewery tours), Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas and Ralston Purina.
This is not to say that St. Louis has evolved into a grinding, drab industrial burg. Often, casually dressed family groups seem to outnumber the suits downtown and one sees more camcorders than lunch buckets almost everywhere.
Forest Park, the 1,300-acre World’s Fair site, ringed by good-burgher mansions, holds a wealth of attractions, including a fine zoo, a treasure-filled art museum, the St. Louis Science Center with its hands-on exhibits and an informative History Museum.
But the main attractions, particularly for adults, lie in the unique St. Louis neighborhoods. They exude ethnic diversity and superbly display various levels of socio-economic strata. Ornate and gigantic globed street lamps mark the entrances to glorious blocks of huge colonial, Tudor and Italianate houses in the Central West End district on the edge of Forest Park. Euclid Avenue, the main shopping street there, basks in the lamplight with a parade-several blocks long-of with-it restaurants and sophisticated boutiques.
I was told that on the Hill, an enclave southwest of downtown, I could walk into nearly any restaurant and enjoy an outstanding meal. But St. Louisans already know this and tend to fill up most of the booths. Fortunately, a place called Cunetto had a parking space, and there I ate-filling up on linguini with fresh clam sauce and an intricate salad that the kitchen obviously had given some thought.
The Hill, with its red-white-and-green fire hydrants and Little Italy-style cheer, occupies only slightly high ground, just enough to offer occasional peeks at the distant Gateway Arch. Small, neat houses feature gaudy lawn ornaments-usually with a religious theme. Family-owned and friendly meat markets, bakeries, restaurants and, of course, churches pepper the commercial strips.
The Hill’s influence spreads throughout the city, where Italian restaurants abound and most of them vie to produce the tastiest toasted ravioli (a creation best described, in my experience, as Chef Boyardee meets Col. Sanders-with delicious results). And this is serious stuff, not another example of the nationwide opportunism that leads so many restaurateurs to include “pasta” on the menu so they can charge $7 for 50 cents worth of noodles.
In Soulard, a few blocks south of the Gateway Arch, a former blue-collar neighborhood strives to polish itself. Fancy iron work and imaginative paint jobs speak of gentrification. So does the proliferation of jazz and blues clubs and chichi cafes.
This influx of discretionary income frequently drifts toward the open-air Soulard Farmer’s Market. Most of its booths may be piled high with basic produce, eggs and cuts of meat on busy Saturday mornings, but gourmets also can pick up pricey rare spices, imported cheeses, exotic teas, fresh-cut sassafras and wild honey. All this without snobbery. Nearly every stand bears a sign that says “food stamps accepted.”
The south end of Soulard comprises a kind of heritage center with the huge, baroque Anheuser-Busch brewery and Cherokee Street, five blocks of antique stores, boutiques and junk shops. Set apart and properly promoted, Soulard would constitute a fit destination all by itself for those who appreciate old houses, dusty treasures and the mass production of beer.
Visitors can manage St. Louis with a series of determined walking tours mapped out by the information centers, but that approach negates some of the city’s playfulness. Roaming around by car brings out another of those “cities of contrast” so cherished by travelogue narrators. (On foot or behind the wheel, exercise caution at night.)
On Market Street, for example, City Hall offers a slavish replica of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, while nearby Union Station bristles with turrets and rough stones like the wall of a medieval village. Across from the station, 40 bronze nudes created by sculptor Carl Milles cavort amid fountains splashing on Aloe Plaza. In this work, called “Meeting of the Waters,” the women symbolize the Missouri River; the men represent the Mississippi. And the whole panorama celebrates their merger just north of town.
On Lindell Boulevard, near a sweep of apartment buildings, one suddenly comes upon the gleaming green dome and Romanesque majesty of the 88-year-old Cathedral of St. Louis. It demands a visit, and the Catholic grandeur of the interior is no less dazzling than the outside: 83,000 square feet of mosaic religious art glowing gold from walls and ceiling, plus intricate statuary and blessed silence.
From there, it’s not far from the northern border and University City, where the esteemed Washington University sprawls and a section of Delmar Boulevard known as the Loop exemplifies the city’s mix of respectful heritage, good food and high spirits.
The heritage can be found embedded in the sidewalks, where plaques mark the St. Louis Walk of Fame with names that may prove more enduring than those on its Hollywood Boulevard prototype: Tennessee Williams, Eugene Field, T.S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs, Stan Musial . . .
Chuck Berry rates a plaque, too, and he is further enshrined in a Loop bar called Blueberry Hill, where walls and display cases have been plastered and crammed with rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia-emphasis on Berry, Elvis and the Beatles.
Although fine dining and first-rate entertainment sparkle all over town, the Loop compresses all sorts of ethnic and cultural diversity into 10 blocks: student hangouts and art galleries, a foreign-film theater and restaurants that pretty much cover the globe from Thailand to France to Ethiopia.
Laclede’s Landing, nine square cobblestone blocks of renovated century-old warehouses and factories on the Mississippi waterfront, still lacks the nightlife pull that its various proprietors obviously desire. The scattered clubs, bars, cafes and shops look engaging enough, and crowds fill the streets on warm evenings, but somehow the magic still hasn’t struck. One quandary parents might come upon here: Do you take the kids to the National Video Game and Coin-Op Museum first, or save that as bait to get them through the Dental Health Theatre?
No problem. St. Louis offers plenty of tradeoffs. Alternate a tour of a historic home (several are open to the public) with a visit to the Eugene Field House and Toy Museum on South Broadway. Or trek out to the National Museum of Transport near the suburb of Kirkwood and explore its vast collection of vehicles, trains and airplanes. Or take in the Dog Museum in Town and Country, Mo., or the National Bowling Hall of Fame across from Busch Stadium, or the floating McDonald’s riverboat anchored near the arch.
Sadly, a lot of travelers could miss all that stuff. St. Louis makes itself easy to avoid because it has so many bypassing highways and an airport, Lambert-St. Louis International, that serves as a hub for TWA, whisking people in and out with O’Harelike dispatch.
But even from the air, most people can’t miss the big silver drawer-pull on the waterfront, and that should tell them something. It’s easy to get a handle on the city of St. Louis, and when they do they’ll find all sorts of cool goodies inside.
WHAT’S ON TAP IN ST. LOUIS
The annual VP Fair will be held July 2-4 along the St. Louis riverfront and in the adjacent Laclede’s Landing district. Sponsored by the Veiled Prophet organization, a business and civic group, the event has come to be known as “America’s biggest birthday party,” with daily air shows, concerts, food booths and fireworks displays.
Starting July 1 and running through July 10, the city will be host to the U.S. Olympic Festival. Some 3,000 athletes will compete at stadiums, arenas and tracks all over town.
From Sept. 3-5, the St. Louis Blues Heritage Festival at Laclede’s Landing will feature free outdoor concerts.
For more information, contact: St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission, 10 S. Broadway, Suite 1000, St. Louis, Mo. 63102; 800-916-0040.
St. Louis also operates a walk-in visitors center at 308 Washington Ave. downtown (314-241-1764) and an information booth at the airport.
———-
Although wheelchairs cannot be accommodated in the Gateway Arch tramway, a video, “Trip to the Top,” can be viewed at information kiosks. All other facilities at the Arch and the Museum of Westward Expansion are wheelchair accessible.
