Meet Me In St. Louis (reprise)

I don’t really have a spring break this year. I have an online class that never actually ends – students sign up for 90-day periods and every month a new group climbs aboard and an old group falls off the back end. I teach a remote class for a campus whose spring break was last week, and Home Campus has this week off. Not counting the online class, I basically get two “half-breaks” with a weekend of overlap in between.

Naturally, we had to do something for that weekend.

Way back in 2011 we took Oliver and Lauren to St. Louis to get away for a bit from the swirling madness of Governor Teabagger (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) and his assault on Wisconsin and we hit as many of the tourist sites as we could bounce off of on a long weekend. We went to the Gateway Arch. We sat in the Dred Scott courtroom. We spent a glorious day at the City Museum and if you have or know any children between 4 and 11 you must take them there – it is by far the best children’s museum I have ever been to. We had gooey butter cakes at Gooey Louie’s and spaghetti at Amighetti’s and generally had a grand time and many fond memories of the city.

This year Lauren had too much to do in her semester and Oliver preferred to stay home, so when we decided to go back to St. Louis it was just me and Kim making the trip.

We left Thursday right after work and headed south through the wilds of Illinois, which is a very long and very flat state. Pretty much the only memorable part of it was when we stopped for gas at some little town by the highway and I noticed the tall stack of Ammosexual Weekly newspapers right outside the men’s room, because clearly there aren’t enough people in this country defending firearms. I do wonder about this country sometimes. Well, most of the time to be honest. Not all the time. Sometimes I sleep.

The apartment where we stayed in St. Louis was on the fifth floor of a refurbished factory building in a neighborhood full of old factory buildings – one of those post-industrial neighborhoods that real estate people like to describe as “up and coming,” which means that it’s not as dangerous as it was five years ago but you still have to search a bit for amenities and everything you walk by is behind at least one fence and two locks. At one point we walked over to what Google Maps insisted was a grocery store that turned out to be a wholesaler for a local pizza chain. Needing to be buzzed in was probably a good tip-off, as were the rather puzzled (but friendly) office staff we found there. In the end it was a pretty nice area if you enjoy urban post-industrial landscapes, as I do. There was free parking right on the street in front of the place – we never did pay for parking the whole time we were in St. Louis – and there was a nice little café a few blocks away where we had breakfast on our first morning there. The café definitely catered to the post-industrial theme, all decorated in black and metal with the only real splash of color in the place being what might have been a raised dance floor shaped like a gear and painted bright yellow. The food was good, though.

The apartment was the sort of place that made you feel you should be wearing flannel and drinking an IPA. It was clean and comfortable and perfectly fine for everything we needed, but entirely made of exposed concrete, bricks, and a color scheme that was mostly black, white, and grey. I’m not sure why they coated the hardwood floor with grey laminate but I assume there was a reason. The kitchen had been stocked by someone who had heard of kitchens and thought they were fascinating but had never actually tried to cook anything or handle a hot saucepan. There were no hot pads, but there was a foosball table by the window. We thought that was a nice touch, if somewhat inexplicable. It had immense windows in every room but no curtains or shades of any kind, which is fine on the fifth floor but made for some early mornings as the sun came in. We’d watch the birds play around on the cell tower outside of the bedroom.

Also, the place howled when the wind blew. It would have been a great spot to have a small Halloween party.

Getting in took us a while to figure out. You needed an app. The rental place sent us a link and that took you to an app of some kind with a list of buttons, and you brought your phone to the sensor for the main gate and pressed that button to get it to unlock, and then you repeated this with the main door and the elevator. There were other buttons we never did use. I’m not sure what you would do if you forgot your phone.

Friday was the warm day so we spent as much of that outside as we could. We walked up to the café, then walked down to the pizza wholesaler (waving at the City Museum along the way) before heading off to see the Botanical Gardens. It’s late March so not much was in bloom but it was a lovely place to wander around and see the various plants and sculptures. The biggest thing was the Climatron, a giant geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller’s architectural firm and stuffed with tropical plants and blown glass sculptures.

We walked all over the place. There were a few things in bloom despite the season and some interesting things to see, and in the end I got to see what a tea plant looks like which made me unreasonably happy.

For lunch we went over to a place called The Foundry, which turned out to be – wait for it – a refurbished factory, though this one had been converted into retail space rather than apartments, in this instance a giant food court full of local vendors. There were a LOT of them, everything from Afro-Caribbean chicken to St. Louis pizza to desserts and wine. There were a lot of chicken places, actually. I decided I’d try one of the things that St. Louis is known for and have toasted ravioli, which is exactly what it sounds like and very tasty. I’m not sure what my Italian ancestors would have thought of it. My guess is that would have been puzzled but happy to eat it if you put it in front of them. Practical people, my ancestors.

From there we went out to the Hill, which is the Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis. It is a mass of groceries, bakeries, churches, festivals, and brightly painted streets. We went to two different little grocery stores to stock up on whatever looked good to us and I can highly recommend the garlic butter at DiGregorio’s because that stuff rocks. The only issue was that almost everything there closes at 5pm, and the bakery we went to was actually closing at 4 when we walked in at 3:55 but they let us pick a handful of cookies and then wouldn’t let us pay for them. They were really good cookies. You can’t beat a good Florentine. We stopped at a homemade soap shop as well and they gave us the tour of the back room where they make the stuff. Kim and I had our own soapmaking business for seven years so we knew a lot of what they were saying but it was a very nice tour and I ended up buying a bar of their soap because I could tell it was good stuff and they were really friendly. We also found a little café that had cannoli, which we ate outside.

After resting a bit at the apartment we decided to try another of the foods that St. Louis is known for and sought out some barbecue. I love barbecue. It is one of my favorite food groups, and the main problem with finding barbecue in St. Louis is narrowing down your choices. We ended up at a place in a neighborhood called University City (for obvious reasons) and it was also very good. We ate well in St. Louis, though I never did get a gooey butter cake. I know how to make them, though. Perhaps I’ll do that soon.

The drive back to our apartment was kind of odd, though. University City is a fairly affluent area, as you would expect in a neighborhood that caters to college students, and our apartment was in an area that was a bit rough around the edges but perfectly fine. But in between we drove through literally two miles of abandoned houses – block after block after block of them, maybe one house on a block with lights on. The staggering inequality of this country jumps out at you now and then, and it was a bleak sort of end to the day.

Saturday was significantly cooler and started early, as the sun rose into our bedroom and the birds played in the cell phone tower.

Our first stop was the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, a gorgeous structure covered in glass mosaics. Whoever designed them was really good at their job because they have a way of glowing in the sunlight that makes them seem almost backlit and the whole thing really is amazing.

Also, they have mosaics for things that you don’t often find in cathedrals. One celebrated both the Religious Liberty Decree from the 1965 Vatican Council and the Racial Justice Decree from St. Louis in 1947. Another was the city seal of St. Louis.

Plus there was an intriguing mishmash of styles. This one has some rather classic Byzantine iconography surrounding what looks like an illustration from a 1950s illustrated Bible.

From there we went to the St. Louis Art Museum, or SLAM as it’s colloquially known. I am not making that up.

It’s free to the public, though they have specific exhibits sometimes that have a ticket price – there was a giant Matisse exhibit that we thought about seeing when we arrived but by the time we got to where the exhibit actually was we were pretty much museumed out and were glad to get back to the apartment. But in between those two points we had a good time. The museum has a pretty extensive collection covering a lot of periods and places – there are things from ancient Rome, from Africa, from medieval Europe, from Oceana, and a pile of modern stuff (I counted four Picassos), and you could happily spend a day there if you enjoy art. I liked this ancient Andean cat pottery, just because I like cats, and this 18th-century English soup tureen because it’s just turtles all the way down.

My favorite, though, was this painting. It’s Dutch, from the early 17th century, and I love the fact that she’s smiling in it. So many of the people in these paintings are just so deadly serious and it’s nice to see someone who looks like they might actually be enjoying their day.

Yes, I’m aware of what the painting actually is. No, I don’t care.

On our way back to the apartment we decided to take a detour and find an Eastern European bakery, since that’s Kim’s heritage. We got to know some of the roads in St. Louis pretty well over the weekend and never once ran into traffic, not even on the freeways during rush hour. So haring off in search of new bakeries seemed like a perfectly reasonable plan, and eventually we found a couple and made our purchases.

We also found this.

You can’t tell from the photo but the blades were slowly spinning. It appeared to be a restaurant of some kind, but it is a surreal thing to be driving down the streets of St. Louis in search of Eastern European bread and see a functioning windmill at the next traffic light.

Our final adventure in St. Louis was to go to a soccer game. St. Louis has an MLS team that was scheduled to play DC United that evening, and the stadium was all of three blocks from our apartment. You’re supposed to get there early, as they have all sorts of food vendors (all local) at the stadium and the crowd of supporters gets fired up long before kickoff. We walked over and found ourselves weaving through the massed superfans and their drums.

We found some barbecue and a good spot to eat it, and then headed to our seats. We were fairly close to the field.

It’s a really nice stadium, actually. It’s new – only a couple of years old, in fact – and the seats are a bit snug but the sightlines are great and it’s a good place to watch a game. The game was sold out, which tells you that the team gets a good amount of support. The superfans get the north end and there are signs warning you that you’re not allowed in that section wearing opposing gear and that your views might be obstructed by the giant flags people wave. It was interesting to see just how socially progressive the views of the superfans actually were. The guy waving the LGBTQ flag with the team’s logo superimposed on it was there all game, and on the way in I noticed one of the superfans with a large button prominently displayed on his jacket that said “Fuck Abortion Bans,” to which I could only nod in agreement.

Eventually they introduced the players, sang the national anthem, and started the game. Nobody sat down. The only reason they have seats at all in this stadium is so you know where to stand. The superfans kept up the drumming and singing for the entire game and they had some good songs. My favorite was the one to the tune of We’re Not Going to Take It, which went “We’re St. Louis City / Who are you?” – they did that at kickoff and at random moments throughout the game and we all sang along.

It was a pretty good game, though it was a lot chippier than the ref bothered to notice – there were a lot of fouls uncalled – and the opposing goalie was deeply annoying in his time-wasting tactics. After not doing much of anything for 87 minutes, the ref started handing out yellow cards like confetti after that, almost entirely for time wasting. There were originally going to be 10 minutes of added time but that got stretched to 14 so we had a lot of bonus soccer. We had a great time watching the game and it ended in a 2-2 draw after St. Louis was awarded a penalty kick late in the second half. There was a group of guys behind us who kept up a running commentary on pretty much everything that happened – they were a lot of fun to listen to.

We walked back to the apartment, wound down a bit, and the next day we headed off back home, back to our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.