St Louis, Missouri, is the place where all the roads in the United States cross. The result is a multicultural experience that calls on all five senses. St Loui’s River is the great Mississippi, a little downstream from its confluence with the Missouri.
The omnipresent Gateway Arch, whose height of 192 metres makes it the tallest monument in the United States is an elegant catenary arch with the ideal structure, materialising in concrete and steel the mathematical function of the hyperbolic cosine. It was designed by one of the great contemporary architects, the Finn Eero Saarinen. Through the arch’s hollow interior, an ingenious cross between an elevator and a cable car, whose egg-shaped pods adjust their position to remain level, carries visitors to the top, where the view spans limitless horizons. Spreading immediately beneath is the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
St Louis became the country’s second most important port after New York, with moorings for more than a
hundred paddle steamers. These craft were converted by Mark Twain, the creator of Hucklebeny Finn, into part of America’s imagery, and today’s visitors can still embark on paddlewheelers for a brief river cruise.
At Union Station, it is still possible to sense the poetry ofthe railroad. First by boat and then by train, people of very varied origins anived in St Louis from the late 18th century until welt into the 20th.
There was a time when St Louis had over a hundred breweries. The Anheuser Busch Brewery, not far from the Arch, can still be visited. The Asian heritage persists in the food of the restaurants on Grand Street, and can be enjoyed with all the senses in the Missouri Botanical Garden, whose oriental gardens form just the right counterpoint to the Victorian fountains and statues of Tower Grove Park. Victorian taste survives in the Painted Ladies, the cotoured house fronts around Lafayette Square. Little Italy and The Hill dispiay their heritage proudly. Spanish traces are discreet, architectural and contemporary. The Afro-American heritage, on the other hand, is not so much visual as auditory.
The place to search for it is The Vilie, whose Sumner High School had Chuck Berry and Tina Turner among its pupils. Nothing, in fact, has done more to make the name of St Louis famous than music -from ragtirrr to jazz, and from the musical comedy Meet Me in StLouis and the first rock’n’roll to St Louis blues, which should be heard in the Soulard neighbourhood, even if it is no longer sung by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. The Walk of Fame on Delmar Boulevard is now paved with gold -stars commemorating perfomters from Josephine Baker to Miles Davis.
The old Pavilions, heritage of The Universal Expo, stiil stretch around the edge of Forest Park, now housing the Art, History and Science Museums, and the traces left atso include the largest open-air opera auditorium in the country and a fabuious zoo housing 23,000 animals in a setting of hills and lakes.
In 1928, Charles Lindbergh set off on the first solo air crossing of the Atlantic on a plane named “The Spirit of StLouis” in recognition of the sponsorship of local businessmen. A iife-size replica of the plane looms before us as soon as we set foot in the airport. But the spirit of St Louis is not only inthe skies. It lives in the streets of the city and the memories of images, sounds, aromas and flavours of ail those who have known it.
