Missouri - Day 11 - St. Louis

St. Louis West KOA, Eureka

Sunday, 11 April 2021

today's route

a more detailed version

and still more detail

I didn't much want to get on the road without more than 1 night's rest, but I figured I'd have an easier time of sightseeing in St. Louis, pop. 319,294, if I wasn't fighting work-week traffic.  That turned out to be a serious miscalculation.  

For one thing, it's a young town: more than 2/3 of the residents are under the age of 45.  For another, it's an active one: today I had to contend with traffic problems for a marathon, a St. Louis Cardinals home game, and a massive COVID vaccination clinic.  Aside from folks who wanted to do other things on a Sunday.  And I learned that local roads have an amazingly high number of potholes and broken pavement - even those newly paved - and that St. Louis is actively involved in infrastructure improvements.  

Because of all these things, I ran into detours and traffic jams everywhere.  So for the most part I couldn't take my own photos - I was lucky if I could even drive by some of these places.  But here's what I saw.

Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing

This is the first site designated in Missouri for the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, operated by the National Park Service.  It commemorates an 1855 attempt to help enslaved people escape across the Mississippi River to freedom in Illinois.  Here's the sign they've erected explaining what happened.

And here are pieces of that picture enlarged:

That's Illinois across the river -
you can see that it looks possible to get there by boat.

This sign is on the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, a 21-mile long hike-and-bike trail along the Mississippi River.  As it happened, a good part of the route for the St. Louis Marathon was on this trail.  I would normally have avoided this whole mess (including trying to find a place to park), but I really wanted to see this memorial so we braved it.  

And the dogs were pretty well behaved.  The trail's not particularly wide, but the dogs were mostly willing to stay to one side and let the runners go on the other without bothering them.  People either ignored us or called them "pups" or "pup pups," apparently the phrase used in this town.  And absolutely nobody told us to get out, including a golf cart of officials who went by us (and called the dogs "pup pups") so we just kept walking toward where the internet said the sign was.  And it was.

On a retaining wall across the trail from this sign above was a mural celebrating Mary Meachum and her bravery.

Mrs. Meachum's husband was a pastor who had purchased his way out of slavery, and then paid for the freedom of his wife too, so she was a free woman by even the standards of that time and place.  But her freedom was so dearly bought (literally) that it's remarkable she'd risk it over and over to help others.

Next, I drove 5 miles or so upriver for this next sight.

Chain of Rocks Bridge

The name for this bridge came from rocks in the river nearby; the bridge itself was part of the old Route 66.  The remarkable thing about it is the 22° bend in the middle of it.

Chain of Rocks Bridge

The only reason I was able to get this close to it is that the marathon started here, so they'd temporarily opened up this parking area which was normally blocked off.  I hope you can tell from my photo that the bridge, which is heading straight, seems to stop, and then you can see through the bridge that it continues beyond this section.  It was odd - I'd seen pictures of it but didn't really understand what they showed until I saw the actual bridge.  And then my reaction - with dropping jaw - was, "I don't believe it."

It's now a pedestrian bridge, but they were taking down all these cones and things because all the marathon runners had started, and I didn't want to get stuck here if they closed off the parking area.  One of the marathon organizers saw me dawdling and asked if he could help me.  I told him I was just gawking at the bridge and he said, "Gawk away."  I asked about the marathon and he was pleased with the turnout - said they'd had 400 full marathon runners and 2,000 for the half marathon.

From here on out, all these photos are pulled from the internet except the few I'll identify as mine.  With the traffic and crowds of people, it was simply impossible for me to get many photographic angles on these things.

On my way back downtown, I passed through historic neighborhoods, seriously declining neighborhoods, old old brick buildings that were warehouses and factories, now mostly closed and abandoned.  When I tried to drive all the way down Broadway - it runs almost from the Chain of Rocks Bridge into the heart of downtown - I found one block had been blocked off to allow pedestrian traffic for a vaccine clinic.  I followed the detour around it - I think it was being held in the Convention Center - only to find myself stymied by one-way streets. 

That detour, though, took me past these buildings:

National Blues Museum

Federal Reserve Bank

 

The Blues Museum opened in 2016 in a renovated 1907 building.  The bank was built in 1924 - looks very substantial, huh?

I passed the headquarters for Stifel financial services and was startled by the huge bull-and-bear battle on the corner.  The statue is 12' tall and is titled Forces.  That little picture can't begin to convey the impact of this statue.  It's taller than my RV.

Just as I thought I had clear sailing back to Broadway, I found a cross street blocked off with barricades and the car in front of me was frustrated enough to turn around.  I was fairly frustrated myself because there'd been no warning at all that the road was blocked off with no way out but to turn around.  So I started to turn around.  Now this is a serious maneuver with my 24' RV on an ordinary downtown street with no real rear visibility.  While I was working on this, I realized the cross street was blocked off to allow marathon runners to go by.  The police officer working that intersection first offered to help me back up, then he just picked up the barriers to let me get around.  Meanwhile, I wasn't alone here - there was a long line of cars behind me and I saw a line of cars heading in the opposite direction, so I was trying to get turned around before they started to come by me again.  The cop stopped all the other traffic to let me get around these various blockages (his patrol car was another blockage) and get out of the mess.  Nice of him, though it was likely just a sensible traffic decision too since I was thoroughly blocking both lanes.  But I got back on Broadway.

Old Courthouse

This building was completed in 1828 in the Federal style, but then renovated in 1839 in this Greek Revival style.  There've been other modifications and renovations since, but what you see is still an old building.  This is where the Dred Scott case was heard - that ghastly case ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court in 1857.  

The short version of the decision is three-fold: that Mr. Scott wasn't entitled to be freed from slavery simply as a result of living in a state where slavery was outlawed; that African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States, so they weren't entitled to constitutional protections; that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that prohibited slavery in all territory west of Missouri (among other things) was unconstitutional.  This complex decision, as much as any other factor, caused the Civil War to begin just a few years later.

Busch Stadium

Gateway Arch

The stadium was built in 2006 and a ballgame was clearly about to happen when I drove by.

The Gateway Arch, designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen and built in 1965, is 630' tall, 630' wide at the base, and built of stainless steel.  I had assumed those were something like rafters or girders, and maybe they are, but they're coated with what looks like shavings of stainless steel so it almost has a feathered appearance - and the feathers catch the sunlight and shine in a way I hadn't expected.  I really wanted to park and walk, but given the chaos in the area (all these things I've described since the Chain of Rocks Bridge are within maybe 10 blocks of each other) I didn't even bother to try.

From there I turned up Market Street and saw a lot of things I hadn't expected and a few I had.

I was stopped at a red light and grabbed this
photo of that pointed building, which is
the Civil Courts Building, built 1930

a closer view

In rapid succession, as I drove along Market St., I came to these:

U.S. Customs House,
built 1873-1884

City Hall, built 1890-1904, modeled after
the city hall in Paris, finished just in time
for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair

this pointed building is part of Union Station,
built 1892 (my photo)

another view - this building
takes up more than a city
block (internet photo)

St. Louis Wheel - 200' tall - makes 3 rounds
in a 15-minute ride - built 2019

Dinks Parrish Laundry - built 1916
It really was once a laundry.  This building has been
called "one of the city's greatest terra cotta
confections."  It looks much better in person
than in this fuzzy internet photo.

detail from building front

St. Francis Xavier College Church,
built 1884

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis,
built 1914

I felt a little overwhelmed with all this architecture I wasn't expecting in the least.

I also saw a heavily used playground next to a sculpture park right downtown.  In fact, St. Louis seems to have a large number of sculpture parks.  It also has an award-winning zoo just a few miles from downtown, not far from the Basilica (I drove past both).  The city has lots of grass and murals, in addition to the sculptures.  And you might have been able to see from the photos that it has very new buildings mixed among the very old.

I drove on a few cobblestone streets, along Forest Park Dr., appropriately forested (and the zoo neighborhood), where there are some very fancy houses built by people with lots of money.

I passed St. Louis University, a Jesuit school of 11,700 and the oldest school west of the Mississippi (founded 1818); Washington University in St. Louis (all of that is its name), a private school of 16,000, founded 1853; Fontbonne University, another Catholic school of 1,200, founded 1923.  All these schools had very attractive campuses, despite being completely urban.  But they're by no means the entire list of colleges in this town - I think there are 10 or 12 here - and I guess it would take a population of a third of a million to support all of them.

I saw something that referred to Missouri as a Midwestern state, which surprised me.  I tend to think of it as a Southern state, in sympathy if not in geography.  So I looked it up and learned that, sympathies aside, Missouri is indeed considered one of the 12 states that are called Midwestern.  They include the geographic block north of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky.  I've always thought including Ohio and Indiana in the list showed the insularity of the original states, but from my travels I can see the character of those states is more similar to Kansas (for instance) than to - say - Pennsylvania.

Trying to avoid the interstate on my way back to the KOA, I ended up on the original Route 66, aka Manchester Ave., and took that out into the country, past the town of Manchester, and turned south on MO 109 which runs right through Eureka.

On the way out of town, I stopped at a Schnucks (pronounced shnooks) - a chain of grocery stores in the eastern Midwest.  When I asked the checkout clerk what kind of place this was to live, he said he'd moved here some years ago from Kansas City and liked it okay.  But he said the people living here were unusually proud of St. Louis.  I wish I could remember the exact words he used, but he gave me the impression he saw folks here as smug, or maybe self-satisfied - sort of patting themselves on the back for having such a great city as St. Louis.  First time anyone's said that to me about the place they lived.

In a way, I could see why people might think like that.  St. Louis seemed to me to have a lot going for it, a lot of character, and be a pleasant city to live in.  I saw plenty of people of all ages who were clearly residents.  

On the other hand, no city should feel smug with the number of potholes and torn-up street surfaces that St. Louis has.  In fact, I started wondering if somebody's brother-in-law has the road construction contract with the government, because I saw quite a few potholes in a road that had very recently been resurfaced.  And this city must have money in it - based on the prosperity I saw in many parts of town - enough to afford to fix broken pavement I saw all over town.

Still, there were a lot of places I wanted to see but couldn't get to - partly for lack of time and partly for COVID closures.  I'd think St. Louis would be a good place to spend some time.