MO Day 3- City Museums, Smoked Meats, and Some Serious Arches
My first full day in St. Louis began with a trip to Park Avenue Coffee for some fine morning caffeine and signature St. Louis sweet (say that three times fast) called a gooey butter cake. This confection is sort of a mix between a blondie and a cheesecake, baked with a bottom layer of butter and cake-mix and a top layer made out of cream cheese and eggs with a dusting of powdered sugar when it’s all done. The story goes that it was invented by mistake when a St. Louis baker accidentally swapped the proportions of butter and flour in his cake mix, but fortunately, his buttery blunder ended up being a huge success with his customers so he kept making it. I can see why, because it was delicious, although you do have to just do your best not to think about what all that butter does to your insides.
My first major stop for the day was a popular St. Louis attraction that quickly became one of my favorite stops of the trip: the City Museum. That deceptively plain name does little to prepare visitors for the strange, fantastical museum it describes. The museum was the brainchild of the artist Bob Cassilly and it’s a lot like the House on the Rock (without the rock), in that every room is loosely built around a theme so that as you walk through the building it feels like you’re traveling through several different worlds, and at no point does it feel like it should be possible for all of these things to be in one place. All of these worlds are housed in what was formerly the International Shoe Company factory, which both ties the museum to the city’s industrial history and gives them a ton of space to play around with. If there’s one overarching theme, it would be in the artists’ use of repurposed materials from various buildings of either local or historic significance in nearly all of the installations to explore the hidden magic within everyday city environs.
Even before you enter the museum, you’re disoriented in the best of ways because as approach you start to notice all sorts of funky details around the roof like a schoolbus dangling over the ledge, a towering spire, or a full-size Ferris wheel. Once you’re even closer you can see the first large-scale installation, MonstroCity, right outside the front gate. The piece is a massive assemblage of various pieces of castle, jet engines, fire trucks, wire sculpture, treehouses, slides, and other flotsam transformed into a giant outlandish jungle gym. It makes for a heck of a first impression, and sadly I couldn’t really capture the scale of the building’s exterior in one photo but I thought these ones I found online do about as good a job as possible:
After taking in the impressive exterior, I made my way into the museum proper. The first thing that greeted me was a life-sized sculpture of a bowhead whale with his huge mouth agape. Adding to the aquatic ambiance of the space was a ceiling covered in shimmering fiberglass icicles and a huge glass mosaic of various nautical creatures and scenes sprawling along the walls.
If you enter the mouth of the whale, it takes you up to a network of secret tunnels and man-made underground caves filled with sculptures and wacky little artistic flourishes. The tunnels in one direction lead upward to a giant treehouse playground that serves as a sprawling jungle gym overlooking the first floor. Naturally, there are also more tunnels and passages that you can take up to the third floor, but it was so easy to get lost in the treehouse (both literally and figuratively) that you wanted to take time to explore before moving on to the next thing.
Highlights from the treehouse area included a small pond with live fish (which you don’t normally expect to see on the mezzanine level) and a twisting series of metal tunnels that let you sort of crawl around and get a bird’s eye view of all the scenery. It made for a very fantastical experience, but one probably best suited for younger visitors as even at 23 I don’t think my knees were quite cut out for all that crawling.
Another advantage to being a visitor on the younger side is that some of the tunnels and passageways were only accessible through openings that were small enough you might walk right by them. In some cases, you might not even notice a tunnel entrance until all of a sudden a small child starts popping out from under the elephant sculpture you’re looking at. It can be quite shocking, but the whimsy and joy of discovery on the kids’ faces make any minor heart palpitations worth it. All these interactive components must make the museum an absolute blast for little kids, but parents might have to work a little harder to keep track of everyone well enough to leave with the same number of kids they came in with.
Another attraction on this floor was a large aquarium filled with various fishes just a-bobbing along. I already like the aquarium a lot as it was, but I believe in the time since I’ve been to the museum (god I’m a slow writer) that the aquarium has been expanded upon with larger tanks and more original art which I would love to go back and see sometime.
The aquarium was also connected to the network of underground caves that got me to the treehouse but the entrance here was a little bit more ominous albeit absolutely incredible from a sculptural point of view. I just loved the way this museum really blurred the lines between where the art ended and the architecture began.
Walking up to the next floor of the museum (I should have mentioned earlier that there are also stairs and elevators if you don’t feel like traveling through secret tunnels), I passed by a pipe that made me do a double take because the delightfully cheeky art on the side of it really made worry for a hot sec that one of the kids in the museum got his head stuck in there.
The next floor began with a relatively more straightforward museum gallery set up, but the word relatively is necessary because right in the middle of the gallery space was a spectacular, in every sense of the word, stone sculpture of St. George battling a dragon. The sculpture was salvaged from the former St. George’s Catholic Church in Chicago and it’s crazy to think how many incredible pieces of art and craftsmanship like this all over the country have just been destroyed or lost to time as old buildings changed hands or fell to the wayside over the years.
The gallery around Ol’ St. George was filled with various vintage opera posters which were just incredible. They ran the stylistic gamut from sweeping Romantic tapestries to harsh angular modernist compositions that reminded me of classic Saul Bass movie posers. I can’t say I know anything about any of the operas themselves but these sure did succeed in piquing my interest.
After the opera posters, I made to the next gallery through a dizzying and dazzling hall of mirrors that puts a literal spin on the the funhouse charms of the whole museum:
With no detail spared from imaginative flourishes, you exit the hall of mirrors through a huge bank vault door that had originally been part of the First National Bank of St. Louis. The vault is surrounded by about a 1000 vintage safety deposit boxes and intricate carved architectural relief panels. The room has a classical sort of dignity and it’s weird to think that you could have gotten there after exiting from the mouth of a giant octopus. The way out is guarded by two beautiful terra cotta lions who seem to have an oddly sad expression in their eyes.
The next gallery may seem to continue the air of dignity from the bank vault appearing to be a display of various home goods from turn-of-the-century America. This is partially true, but the City Museum spin is that each and every one of the of these items had been recovered from cisterns, latrines, and outhouses. The Privy Museum, as they affectionately call it, is full of wonderful craftsmanship and more than a few genuinely beautiful artifacts so it’s really a fascinating mystery how they all ended up going down the drain. Perhaps carelessness, perhaps jilted lovers, or perhaps just not having anywhere else to dispose of things, the lack of answers is honestly half the fun. I think my favorite piece had to be a shockingly realistic flask that looked like a big salted pretzel, because I can’t really wrap my head around how it came to exist at all let alone how it got into an outhouse in North St. Louis.
Leaving the Privy Museum, I passed by a bronze sculpture by the artist Tom Otterness who is famous for his public art that blends cartoony imagery with hints of violence and anti-capitalist sentiment (though the artist himself has been the subject of some criticism for the large price on his public commissions and some less than savory works from his younger, more confrontational punk days, including a video of him shooting a dog on camera). Whatever your feelings on the man himself, I’ve always liked his quirky little sculptures whenever I see them pop up in museums and publics spaces around the country, and this slapstick Moby Dick riff was a particularly fun one.
Next up was another somewhat more traditional gallery, which was probably the most pure statement of the museum’s thesis that there is magic and beauty hidden in the very fabric of City architecture. This architectural gallery put cornices, reliefs, gargoyles, and other decorative elements that are usually sky-high and puts them right at eye level for visitors to appreciate all these incredible details that had just been hidden in plain sight. A number of these pieces were by Louis Sullivan, one of America’s most celebrated architects and Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, including several pieces from the cornices of the Chicago Stock Exchange.
Naturally my favorite piece was this surprisingly anatomically correct relief of a bemused baboon pawing some fruit because I just can’t imagine any fancy early 20th century buildings wanting to have this on their exteriors but stranger things have certainly happened.
Next up was a gallery space that felt like an old-timey curiosity cabinet (which would certainly make my mom immediately turn around and say “oh gross”). This space was filled with little glass displays of various insects, minerals, sea shells, animal bones, and other naturalist collections.
In the corner of the curiosity shop was a another adorably doofy Tom Otterness sculpture of a little man drawing on a the toes of a big fish with legs. Not sure what it means, but I love the look on that big dumb fish’s face.
Next up was Beatnik Bob’s, the museum’s cafe which is a delightful hodge-podge of art inspired by 50s sci-fi, beat poetry, and 60s and 70s counter-culture in equal measure. They are also a fully operational coffee shop and a performance venue if you want to take a break and get a snack or take in a show after exploring the first few galleries. They also had several vintage pinball machines and classic arcade games so I was in heaven.
The cafe also sold merchandise by artists collaborating with the museum, and I found this shirt’s cheerful disregard for existential worry refreshing.
Around the floor of the cafe, more funky Tom Otterness sculptures would pop up in unexpected places.
Leaving the cafe, I came across this charmingly dystopian model train set featuring a small city beleaguered on all sides by various giant monsters.
Across from the monster train, there were some dynamic sculptures of a football player and a sumo wrestler seemingly just hanging out with each other. I don’t know what it had to do with anything around it, but it was fun to see in the corner.
Next up was a Toddler Town, which is like a little castle full of games and equipment designed for visitors aged 6 and under. Fortunately, it was closed off for renovations so I didn’t have to feel left out by how much fun the kids were having.
After Toddler Town, I made my way to the Everyday Circus which is fittingly named as they have actually do have live circus performances every day. I was expecting it to just be another themed room, and then a bunch of acrobats came out and it became clear that I was actually in for a professional show which was a fun surprise. They also do circus arts classes for any local visitors looking for a new hobby or an excuse to get the kids out of the house.
After taking in the circus show, I started making my way up to the next floor where I passed by a giant antique Wurlitzer Pipe Organ that formerly belonged to the Rivoli Theater in NYC.
Next up was Art City which is like a fun craft corner where different museum employees help visitors young and old try out various different art techniques. It seemed like a really fun bit of community engagement, but at this point I really had to run to the bathroom so I couldn’t stop to craft but I did really enjoy this sign that was hanging on the door:
Walking out of the bathroom, I passed under this great relief featuring various penguins looking oddly mythical but still sort of goofy because it’s impossible to make a penguin look to dignified.
Next up was a contemporary art gallery featuring various works by St. Louis-based artists. Favorites fo me included: a sculpture that appeared to be a mysterious dark Gumby hugging a toxic elephant smoke cloud by the artist KAWS; a bronze rodent couple trying to get their car to start by Tom Otterness; and a strangely emotional golden sausage man who appears to be cursing God by the artist Erwin Wurm.
After the contemporary art, I made my way to the center of the museum which features these long spiraling chutes that used to be used for transporting shoes from various floors to the loading docks back in the museum’s factory days. The Shoe Shafts have now been modified and turned into slides that visitors can ride down. There are 3-story, 5-story, and even a 10-story slide if you were feeling particularly adventurous. They really looked like something straight out of Willy Wonka.
While the slides are a fun way to get down, I opted for a more traditional elevator route up to the museum’s rooftop which offered spectacular views over the vistas of St. Louis.
Beyond the views, the roof offered several other attractions. Highlights for me included: a giant statue of a praying mantis; a Ferris Wheel a traveling circus left for the museum in the parking lot (the transportation must have been slightly ridiculous); the precariously perched schoolbus that was visible from ground level; a very cute sculpture of an elephant playfully running its trunk through some trees; some haunting discarded beluga whale sculptures that seem to be swimming through a nearby roof like it was water; and big ol’ bulldoze because what rooftop could be complete without one.
The roof also had a little, which was obviously placed under a dome that had formerly been part of the planetarium at the St. Louis Science center. I got to enjoy a can of the house City Museum Pilsner, brewed in collaboration with 4 Hands Brewing, and it was a perfect summer beer, light, crisp and packed with flavor.
After my refreshing rooftop brew, I started to make my way back down to the first floor but I decided that, rather than tale a conventional route, I had to experience taking one of the multi-story slides down. It was a blast, but standing at the top of the slide it’s not something I’d recommend to anyone with a fear of heights.
Leaving the museum, I stopped to take one more photo of the outside because even the parking lot was fairly fantastical.
In case I haven’t quite done justice to how insane and incredible this museum is, here’s a drone video they posted on their website that helps capture the full scale of the place:
After the city museum, I set out to get some lunch. Along the way, I had to stop and take a photo of the hilariously-named and shockingly ornate launderette Dinks Parrish Laundry. I looked it up later, and apparently Dinks Parrish was a real human‘s name (as hard as that is to believe) and the building was apparently involved in a pretty intense rivalry with another launderette with escalating signs proclaiming that each laundry was in fact the “world’s slowest laundry”. It’s a strange thing to brag about, but apparently slowness was valued in laundry work circa 1910 so much so that the rival shop made their mascot a turtle and added stone turtles to the building’s facade. What a fascinating story to come out of just thinking the word “Dinks” was funny.
For lunch, I went to a St. Louis barbecue institution called Pappy’s Smokehouse, which has been voted as having the best ribs in America by the Food Network. Naturally that wasn’t something I was able to resist, so I got a half-rack and some sides. The ribs were exceptional, fully living up to the hype. Pappy’s does their ribs Memphis-style which means they slow-cook the ribs with a dry rub and no sauce (but of course they have a large selection of sauces that you can add afterwards) until the meat is packed with smokey flavor and fall off the bone tender. For sides. I got crispy sweet potato fries and baked beans, and I was in heaven.
Because Pappy’s has garnered such a sterling reputation, they’ve received a number of celebrity visitors over the years and they had their photos on the walls. This one of Willie Nelson was easily my favorite:
After lunch, I stopped for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up at Comet Coffee, which had a cool, sleek aesthetic and a dang fine cold brew which was just what I needed.
Properly caffeinated, I made my way to St. Louis’ most famous landmark, that staggering bit of geometry: The Gateway Arch.
Before checking out the Arch itself, I went to see another St. Louis landmark prominently featured in the adjoining Gateway Arch National Park, the Old Courthouse. I didn’t go in right away because I was talking to my cousin on the phone so I just sort of did a lap around the building. I was glad I did though, because otherwise I might never have learned that back gate was covered in turtles which is such a weird funny detail. Though I suppose they are quite a judicious animal.
Probably the big attraction going into the Old Courthouse is the absolutely jaw-dropping rotunda featuring murals by Karl Ferdinand Wimar. It makes for a pretty impressive wow factor when you first walk in, and the dome is in incredible shape considering it was finished in 1864.
The Old Courthouse also features various exhibits about the history of the building and St. Louis more broadly. It’s a complicated history with the building being both the site of slave auctions and later a stop on the Underground Railroad, which feels very reflective of Missouri’s hotly contentious relationship with slavery (aka The Missouri Compromise) which helped fuel the divide between slave states and free states and hasten the onset of the Civil War. The Old Courthouse played a role in all that complicated history from its completion in 1828 (6 years after Missouri was officially granted statehood) until 1930 when the city moved on to a more modern courthouse.
The first exhibit I looked at featured a beautiful clear plastic model of the building which lets you really appreciate all the intricate architectural details.
The next few galleries were all about the St. Louis region in the years before Missouri’s statehood. Pre-European colonization, the region was primarily occupied by Mississippian Native American tribes who established a cultural center around modern-day St. Louis and the area directly across the Mississippi River. They built numerous temples as well as both residential and ceremonial earthworks mounds, which were sadly largely destroyed during the development of the city which seems like a pretty great loss. The first Europeans to arrive in the region were French fur trappers and eventually, the French would establish colonial settlements there. The land then came under Spanish rule, but still maintained French and Native influence as all three groups opposed British rule. Eventually, Napoleon got the Spanish to agree to cede the territory to France, but basically as soon as the ink was dry on that deal the land was given to the newly formed American colonies as part of the Louisiana Purchase. From there, St. Louis became known as the Gateway to the West (hence the name Gateway Arch) as one of the Westernmost established cities in America which then served as a jumping-off point for more Western exploration.
After the first room of exhibits, I made my into the actual courtrooms which were beautifully restored to their 19th century glory. They each had little mini-domes of their own which added some grandeur, and I don’t know why 19th century Americans were so obsessed with Ancient Greece but I thought all the columns were a nice touch. Probably one of the most famous cases to be heard in these courtrooms was the infamous Dred Scott case where the slave Dred Scott sued for he and his wife’s freedom on the grounds that they had moved to Illinois, a free state, and lived their for several years before returning to Missouri. Their request for freedom was denied on the grounds that the court did not believe that the laws of other states should govern Missouri (which seems hypocritical because it’s essentially saying every state needs to do what Missouri tells them but I digress), so the Scotts appealed. Their case got all the way up to the Supreme Court, who ruled against them on the grounds that they felt African-Americans were citizens in the eyes of the Constitution and therefore, free or not, they were not entitled to the rights of citizens, which has since become regarded as very likely the worst decision the court has ever made. This decision essentially nullified the existence of true freedom for Black people because if they set foot in a slave state and were called a slave they essentially just lost any ability to legally defend themselves. Even without the vile racism of the decision, the ruling also essentially swayed power in the favor of slave states over free states which worsened national relationships and hugely contributed to the onset of the Civil War. Really just as bad as it gets, and that little bit of disastrous national history started right where I was standing which was both fascinating and a little terrifying in a banality of evil kind of way.
On the second floor, I got an even closer look at the impressive murals on the cupola and noticed that there was a smaller equally ornate dome nested into the larger dome. If you love domes, this courthouse has got you covered!
The next few exhibits were about the history of St. Louis early in its statehood. These artifacts covered your classics like the importance of buffalo (and the overhunting by the influx of white settlers), the covered wagons that brought settlers out west, and most surprisingly, and interesting to me, the rise of beaver fur top hats as a huge early industry in the state. Through a a chemical process, which involved a lot of mercury fumes thus giving us the expression “mad as a hatter”, hatters were able to turn beaver pelts into a felt-like material so the hats actually were more modern looking then you’d expect from something made out of beaver fur. Apparently there was one hat shop, called Keevil’s, that went so far as to put a giant top hat on top of the building to help advertise which is just delightfully eccentric.
After the Old Courthouse, I made my way to the Gateway Arch itself. Underneath the arch itself, there is a subterranean Visitor Center and Museum which makes for a great place to kill some time while you’re waiting to go up to the top of the arch. The first exhibit I saw was fittingly dedicated to the first peoples to inhabit the region, the Mound-Builders. This gallery featured actual stone carvings by early indigenous Americans, as well as larger versions to help show visitors every detail.
The next exhibit was about the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition which essentially doubled the size of the fledgling United States and was when most European-Americans first became invested in the West. The biggest takeaway here for me was how crazy it must have been for all these white settlers to encounter all sorts of flora and fauna they never imagined before. The sheer variety of landscapes in this country blew me away and I was prepared for it, so I can only imagine how flabbergasted early explorers must have felt.
One bit of text from the Louisiana Purchase galleries really jumped out at me for so stating the fatal flaw of the notion of Manifest Destiny and Western Expansion. Americans wanted to think of the West as wild and uninhabited but it’s simply a myth that has never been true.
After pointing out the key fact that Native Americans did, in fact, exist, the next gallery collected various artifacts from the Native people who inhabited the land after the Mound Builders but before the Europeans, in particular the Osage and Missouri peoples. These artifacts included a mix of weapons, pipes, and accessories which showed off both the skilled craftsmanship of various tribes as well as their constant need to protect themselves.
Next up was a bit of a jump in time with some of the finer home goods settlers brought with them when they made the trek out west including ornate ceramics and etched precious metals, because even when people feel like they’re going to tame a wild new land they still want some of the comforts of home.
Next up was a display about the fur trade that helped put St. Louis on the economic map. The fur trade was big business, with furs being both practical for light-weight warmth and considered quite fashionable so there was always high demand through the middle of the 19th century. For European-Americans, the fur trade also had the advantage of filling the region with people of European descent who had already mapped out big chunks of the area for the influx of White settlers.
Up next was a display about the boom of patent medicines and various snake-oils in the 19th century. Even the best medical science at the time was a long way off from being particularly evidence-based, but when your options were limited out west you just had to go to whoever was calling themselves a doctor and maybe just maybe they were on the level. It’s sort of horrifying to think about though sometimes so absurd you have to laugh, such as when one prominent St. Louis doctor prescribed cholera patients with pills made from opium and black pepper (Somehow the pepper doesn’t strike me as the active ingredient) to be taken every four hours until the patient either recovered or died. Nice odds.
The next gallery used a fun combination of diorama and archival photographs to show the rise St. Louis as a metropolitan area thanks to its prime location as a port city on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
Up next were more galleries about the settlers who made the trip out west to St. Louis, starting with a classic symbol of westward expansion, the covered wagon:
While the settlers traveled via the covered wagons, once they got where they were going they eventually decided to put down roots, and the next few displays showed how early homes were built and what kind of art may have been hanging up on the walls.
After reading about the kinda homes settlers built, visitors got to check one out first hand with a scale model cabin.
After spending some time with the settlers, the next display focused on the effect the influx of American settlers had on the people who were already there. While all Colonial powers brought their own grief to Native Americans, before American settlers the Spanish had made important trade agreements with the Osage people making them partners in the booming fur trade. This led to a period of wealth and prosperity for the tribes around Missouri until the Louisiana Purchase led to Americans dominating the fur trade. The Americans often refused to work with indigenous traders and trappers, which I can’t imagine worked particularly well for them (coincidentally the fur trade slowed down considerably around this time) and it was pretty disastrous for the Native people who had to look for other avenues of trade to attempt to hold on to some economic power in their shifting homeland.
Next were some displays about the unintended side effects of the Louisiana Purchase for people who weren’t land-owning white guys. For people of color things were not perfect under Spanish Rule, over one third of the population of St. Louis was enslaved, but it was much easier to eventually acquire freedom and free people of color enjoyed more rights and ability to participate in society than they had under British and American colonial rule. Similarly, women in the colonies had more rights before the Louisiana Purchase as the wives of fur traders were allowed to buy, sell, and own property take legal action for themselves all of which disappeared overnight under American rule. It’s not like things were exactly rosy pre-Louisiana Purchase, but I thought these displays were pretty eye opening about just how much even largely popular policies can have really harmful repercussions for more vulnerable populations.
On a lighter note, the next gallery featured dozens of old silver-print photographs from the 1800s which captured real people from that time in gloriously offbeat Black and White. I love super early photographs, because between the novelty of the experience and the lengthiness of earlier picture-taking processes everybody always looks sort of uncomfortable in amusing ways.
Next up were more 19th century home goods which are a fun blend of craftsmanship and insight into how people really lived their everyday lives.
Lastly, we had some galleries about the development of the Gateway Arch itself. The idea to build a monument in the St. Louis riverfront came to civic leader Luther Ely Smith in 1933 after he saw the success of George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Indiana and thought a similar National Park could revitalize and beautify his own city’s riverfront district. The museum captured what the riverfront looked like before the Arch in a really neat painting, which had some of the expressionist Americana of Thomas Hart Benton but I can’t say for certain if he actually painted it or not.
While initially city officials were taken with Smith’s idea, and they even secured federal funding from FDR, public opinion turned on the idea of spending so much for a potentially frivolous project as the Great Depression worsened. The project went into and out of development several times, but eventually, in 1945, it started to really move forward over 10 years after the idea was first pitched. That year the city announced a two-stage design competition so that the world’s best architects could vie for the opportunity to create a permanent feature that could potentially be seen by millions of people and come to define the city. The museum included models of some of the finalists that didn’t win, and it was fascinating to see what might have been. The models also help you have a greater appreciation for how just purely different the arch design was compared to other front runners which may have been beautiful but much more similar to other monuments in different cities.
The winning design went to Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who worked closely with mathematicians to come up with the particulars of the arch but admitted to ultimately prioritizing what he felt was most pleasing to the eye. When describing the meaning of the arch, he said that it symbolized “the gateway to the West, the national expansion, and whatnot” which is just perfect. Saarinen was assisted by his wife Lily, a celebrated sculptor in her own right, and the original designs included a sculpture garden she designed that sadly never came to fruition. I was charmed to learn that one of the other finalists for the competitions was Saarinen’s father Eliel, and when Eero was supposed to be announced as the winner they accidentally mailed the notification to his father instead. The whole family busted out a bottle of champagne to celebrate, and then a few hours later they were notified of the correct winner, and, rather than have any hard feelings, the dad busted out another bottle of champagne and toasted his son.
After choosing the winning design, it was still a long road ahead before turning the arch into a reality. There were still funding challenges and contracts to sort out and it would not be until 1959 that ground was broken. During the construction of the arch, the initial choice to hire an all-white work crew stirred up a lot of understandable ire among the city’s African-American unions and they held protests. These protests resulted in the National Parks service re-evaluating their hiring practices and one of the first successful suites for equal employment opportunities in a Federal agency under the 1964 Civil Rights act.
The arch was eventually opened to the public in 1967 and the rest of the surrounding memorial site was completed by 1976. The finished product stands at 630 ft. tall making it the tallest memorial in the US and the largest arch in the entire world.
I never knew before I got to St. Louis that you could go up to the top of the arch (I think in my dumb brain, it was much more two dimensional even though that’s now quite obviously impossible) so I was especially surprised and delighted to find out that the way visitors get to to the top is in weird little egg shaped pods so the whole arch is essentially a big, futuristic Ferris Wheel. It’s a decidedly strange choice that reeks of people in the first half of the century assuming this sort of thing would be common in the future, and I loved it.
As weird as the pods were, it’s hard to deny that view from the top was pretty spectacular:
After all that exploring, I made my way down to The Laugh Lounge for an open mic. I was a little early so I had a drink at the bar, and while I was sitting there it hit me all at once that I was exhausted. Normally, if I’m tired I’ll buck up before a mic or a show, but I think because I did poorly earlier in the week and because I knew there was another mic I could go to later I decided to practice a modicum of self-care and go back to my Air BnB and take a nap.
A little more rested, I took in a later open mic at a fun divey-but-in-an-intentional-way bar called The Crow’s Nest. The bar was great and I got some good beers and a hummus plate to munch on while I was there.
The mic also ended up being a blast because they had a fun gimmick where every comedian could spin the “Wheel of Challenges” which would give you an extra minute but you’d have to complete some challenge during you’re set. It added a fun show game show element to the comedy and the silliness helped enhance the communal atmosphere.
My favorite comic of the night was a woman named Ella Fritts, who had to do her while fluctuating her emotions with every sentence. She was already doing a very funny bit about Jurassic Park but her commitment to really leaning into each emotion just made for gleefully insane and hilarious 5 minutes of comedy. I liked her set so much, I went up to her to gush and we ended up talking at the bar for most of the rest of the night and we made plans to hang out the next day so she could show me some St. Louis before the next day’s open mic (I also found out she opened for Maria Bamford so I fangirled real hard!). And even though I’ve been super slow at writing this blog, we’re still in touch now almost 4 years later so I feel pretty darn lucky that I got to make a genuine friendship at 10pm on a Wednesday in St. Louis.
Other highlights from the night:
JC Sibala (also the host)- My son said “I know the f word.” and it was a real challenge to find out what word he meant without accidentally teaching him a new one. I was relieved it was just “fuck”
Adam Dacker- I have too much in common with ISIS. We both drive used Toyotas
Justin Luke- My dad got shot in the army. Don't worry he's not a hero though, it didn't happen overseas, it happened in Texas.
Laura Peterson- I had depression since a young age. I tried to overdose on flintstones vitamins
Andrew Frank- The Universe is expanding farther and farther away because you suck
Kenny Kinds- Sometimes I don't pay my taxes on time so I know someone's thinking of me
For my own set, my challenge was that I had to do my whole set in an accent, so I just did an over-the-top Boston accent which ended up being a big success and let me try out some different material than I would normally do because it felt more in character. It was a great night.
Favorite Random Sightings: Officer Darryl Hall Memorial Highway (somehow I don’t think he’s the same one from Hall and Oates); a tattoo parlor called Self-inflicted Studios; a restaurant called Juicy Jerusalem; and a place called the Bizzie Bee Printery
Regional Observations: Missouri accents are an interesting mix of mid-western with a bit of a southern twang about it. I know some people even call Missouri the South but it really is pretty close to being smack-dab-in-the-middle of the country so I personally found it more similar to the midwest.
Random Joke of the Day: A large two-engine train was crossing America. After they had gone some distance one of the engines broke down. "No problem," the driver thought, and carried on at half power. Farther on down the line, the other engine broke down, and the train came to a standstill.
The driver decided he should inform the passengers about why the train had stopped, and made the following announcement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that both engines have failed, and we will be stuck here for some time. The good news is that you decided to take the train and not fly."
Song of the Day:
I looked up what songs I had with St. Louis in the title and this charmingly weird Duke Ellington cover from Steely Dan came up first, and it’s a fun one