Rock of Ages

Elephant Rocks in Iron County, Mo.


St. Louis City Hall

The stuff that St. Louis City Hall is made of is granite, pre-Cambrian granite to be exact, some of the oldest stuff on the planet. This particular stone came from a quarry in Iron County, Mo. at the turn of the last century. Elephant Rocks, the amazing rock formations that are near the now-defunct quarry have fortunately been preserved as a state park.

Wigged Out

They are among the most disturbing sights I've encountered on the street, appearing sometimes alive or recently alive, at least, like a small decaying rodent. But they only move when the wind blows. They are tufts of human or synthetic hair that have for some reason been deposited on the city's sidewalks and streets. They're presence matches or exceeds the disgarded single-shoe phenomenon, which has mystified great thinkers since the dawn of civilization.

Deja Vu: Plaza After the Rain

The branches of the trees in the picture are naked, songs without words, a quality I have only recently learned to hold dear. But the painting itself has long been my favorite. Plaza After the Rain used to have a space among the impressionists in one of the main galleries at the St. Louis Art Museum. But it has now been relegated to a spot next to the elevator on the ground floor, where some ill-informed bureaucrat has chosen to protect the work by covering it in glass. Paul Cornoyer's painting depicts a street scene at the turn of the last century. A woman in a long dress is approaching in the distance her children in tow. The chill air is wet, as winter refuses to yield to the inevitable. A moment captured like a memory from another lifetime.

Allen Cab

Allen Cab Company's garage on Delmar looks somewhat out of place among the non-descript warehouses that surround it. One of the city's oldest black taxi services, the building housing its dispatcher resembles archietecture you might see somewhere in Europe, Brussels perhaps. The gabled tile roof, the most distinctive aspect of its design, evokes a Flemish ambiance, a striking contrast to the adjacent Club Chinchilla and Club 747 nightclubs.

Directions

Out on the street, people ask for directions almost every day. A guy once asked me how to get to City Hall and I pointed to building across the street. But the most frequently asked question is how to get to the Social Security office at 17th and Delmar. I try to avoid answering this query if at all possible because even though the agency's local headquarters is nearby the shortest route involves a couple zigs and zags. The office is located across from Bob Cassilly's City Museum, but on the one occassion that I instructed a couple of lost souls to head in the direction of the building with the school bus teetering on the corner of the roof I was met with quizzical looks.

Memorial to an Unknown Printer

I've been reading the library lately. Specifically, the outside walls of the big one downtown, which are covered with quotes by philosophers Milton and Carlyle and Carnegie, the 19th Century robber baron who donated money to start the public library system in St. Louis. The outside walls also pay tribute to early printers, dating from the 13th to 18th Centuries. Among those so honored is an "Unknown" printer from St. Albans whose contribution is noted as being from 1480, more than a decade before North America was discovered by Columbus.

Missing Keepsakes at Eastertime

The wirey guy approached me near the corner of 20th and Olive. He was smoking a stogie and talking out of the corner of his mouth with his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His main complaint to anybody within earshot was that anonymous parties, who he referred to only as "cocksuckers," had ripped off his grandfather's gold watch and his crucifix.

Garden Lock Out

The Chapel Garden of the Healing Christ, at Saint Louis University's Hospital on Grand, is padlocked. Last week, I saw an indigent couple sharing a cigarette on the steps leading to forbidden sanctuary.

Cocka-Doodle-Doo

Millions of St. Louis Zoo visitors a year watch the peacocks strut around the grounds. The birds, with their fancy plummge, are the only animals privelaged enough not to be caged. Nearby at the Forest Park maintenance headquarters other fowl also run loose. The park employees keep their own flock of free-range chickens, including a feisty banty rooster.

Secret Corrals

In this auto-driven city, horses are an anachronism. So an equesterian sighting can make the mind down shift momentarily and harken back to a time when life moved slower, and, less romantically perhaps, road apples filled city streets.

Most people know about the St. Louis Police Department's horse barn in Forest Park. Less known is the corral near the Hampton Avenue entrance to the park. It's easy to pass it by and not notice it even on a bicycle.

Another horse corral, located in the railyard across from the Amtrak Station, can be seen from the 14th Street viaduct. An unreliable source informs me that these horses are used for carriage rides in Laclede's Landing.

Harry' Bar

I'm not talking about Hemmingway's favorite watering hole in Venice. This one is located on 22nd Street south of Market. The St. Louis Harry's is painted pink on the outside, and, when the sun is hitting it just right, it could pass for a swank South Beach nightclub. Having seen some of the management loitering outside the entrance, one of my co-workers, a hiphopper with street smarts, suspects the joint may be mobbed up. The irony of his assumption, he points out, is that Harry's is located directly across the street from the new St. Louis field office of the FBI.

There goes the neighborhood.

A Good Day to be Italian

My first memories of St. Pat's Day in Dogtown are exclusively associated with the now-defunct O'Shea's Bar, which was located next the drugstore at Tamm and Clayton. Each March 17th, Norm Journey, a card-carrying steamfitter, low-level racketeer and owner of the establishment would throw an all-day wingding featuring green beer and corned beef and cabbage. O'Shea's, unlike the current bar at the same location, was named after a real person, the late Jack O'Shea, the original owner and a Democratic ward committeeman. O'Shea opened the bar sometime before or after the repeal of Prohibition, give or take a few years, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a place where an under-aged drinker could buy a drink with no questions asked, especially on St. Pat's Day. By closing time on that day, if not before, the drunks would sprawl into the street, a few fights would break out and the cops would come and chase everybody home.

But things changed in the early 1980s, when the Ancient Order of the Hiberians got into a donnybrook with the official organizers of the downtown St. Pat's Day parade. The civic-minded citizens who promoted the festivites banned the participation of a pro-IRA float. The Hiberians reacted by pulling out the of official parade and forming their own parade in Dogtown, the closest thing St. Louis has to an Irish neighborhood.

After 20 years, the Dogtown parade has grown leaps and bounds and now rivals the downtown fete. And so it was that I found myself blocked from getting home Thursday. Streets leading into Dogtown were either closed or jammed with traffic. I realized my attempts were futile when the green-clad teenager riding in the bed of the pickup truck in front of me began screaming incoherently, prompting me to flee to the Hill, the adjacent Italian-American neighborhood.

Here the streets were empty. I went grocery shopping at Viviano's; sipped an espresso next door; and topped it off with dinner down the street. By the time I crept back home way past dark, the crowds had waned, but there were still college-aged hooligans hooting on the front porch across the street and downstairs a troupe of young Irish dancers shook the floor joists.

All and all, it was a good day to be Italian.

The Price of a Hat

In the folk-blues ballad Stagolee, which is based on a real murder that took place in St. Louis way back when, "Billy DeLeons was killed over a $5 Stetson hat." You can still see vestiages of the thriving hat trade along Washington Avenue, including a faded sign on the western edge of downtown advertising the now defunct Bee Hat Company. At Levine's, one of the last surviving purveyors of hats on Washington, the price of a Stetson cowboy hat is now $275.

If It Please the Court

The woman stood bundled in several layers of winter clothing outside the 7-Eleven at 17th Street and Pine one afternoon last week. Beside her a shopping cart overflowed with her worldly possessions. Most of the homeless people I encounter at this location ask me for a buck. Instead, she chose to make a plea to the court of public opinion concerning the estate of her late uncle. Being the only one within earshot at this particular moment, I became both judge and jury. As she continued addressing the court, I sipped my coffee and walked with deliberation quickly across the parking lot, deciding that court had already been adjourned for the day.

Snow Cone Juice

The snow cone guy used to come down our street in the summer, ringing a bell as he drove his station wagon. Kids would come running from out of houses and backyards. They cost a dime back then. The syrup that the snow cone guy used (and which is still used by purveyors of shaved ice in St. Louis) was Rio. I just stumbled across the Rio syrup factory last week. It's located on 23rd Street north of Market.

Underground (Electric) Railroad

McKinley Bridge was originally used to transport electric trains across the Mississippi
The clue is above the front door of the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat building on Tucker Boulevard. Carved into the limestone over the entrance is the image of a locomotive with railroad men on either side. Most people don't know that the building wasn't originally built to house the newspaper, but instead was constructed as a depot for the Terminal Railway, a passenger and freight service that served St. Louis and central Illinois. The unique aspect of Terminal's operations was that its locomotives were powered by electricity not coal or diesel. Access to their depot, on what was then 12th Street, was located under the street, where the vestiages of the old railroad are still visible. The railroad crossed the Mississippi on the now-closed McKinley Bridge on the near northside, where the old electric standards that carried the wires can still be seen. The passenger service on the line continued between Granite City and St. Louis until the late 1950s.

Backscape Revelations

Motorists driving downtown rarely venture onto Lucas or St. Charles Streets. More like alleys, Lucas and St. Charles run north and south of Washington Avenue, acting as service entrances for the once-thriving garment and shoe manufacturing district, these narrow passages nowadays are crowded with construction equipment from the many loft developments that are changing downtown's character. Walking through this hubbub at noontime, you can glimpse time merging with patterns of everyday life. Fire escapes, iron lattices, dissect the sky with web-like lines. Broken patches of asphalt reveal previous surfaces of brick and cobblestone. Dumpsters, askew, brim with discarded things of the past, no longer valued. Fashionably-clad women busy themselves in the windows of a real estate office, as a disheveled woman leans against a brick wall behind the Missouri Bar and Grille, crying.

Coyotes in Forest Park

They streak across the bike path running in a pack, four or five ghost-like silouhettes back lit by sodium-vapor lights in the distant parking lot; moving low to the ground, legs extended, mouths agape, the backs of their tawny, mottled coats sleek and shining as they run across the rugby field, conjuring up the ancient wildness of the night, when a waning moon still holds mysteries and nature moves through the city undetected.

March

If April is the cruelest month, March is most fickle, when winter dallies in the morning and spring flirts in the afternoon.

Pennies

Pennies may still be considered coins of the realm, legal tender, but many people no longer consider it worth their while to stoop over and pick them up when they slip through their fingers. Consequently, city sidewalks are littered with dirty copper. The most penny-laden concrete I've encountered is near Union Station, which is now, of course, no longer a station but a shopping mall.

I Put a Spell on You: Papa Legba's Lenten Special

Get Your Mojo Workin' Dept.
Not so long ago you couldn't find a black cat bone north of Memphis, where they're sold along with other voodoo stuff at an old general merchandise store on Beale Street. But times have changed. On Friday, the sign in the front window of Papa Legba's Spiritual Supplies store on Gravois advertised customized "mojo bags."