Artist Peat Wollaeger is "Eyeing" Powell Square 3:42 PM

Powell Square, a long abandoned, long vandalized landmark right off of Interstate 55 south of downtown St. Louis, is about to get a new use of sorts--civic billboard. Click here to see a series of Flickr photographs of Powell Square.

According to the Post-Dispatch, Wollaeger was approached by Chivvis Development, developer for the stalled Chouteau's Landing project in which the Powell building sits, to develop a large mural with a positive message to the city.

The message soon to be scrawled across the Powell in a 16 by 16 feet display? "Eye" Heart St. Louis. Yes, Wollaeger's trademark "eye" will stand in place of the letter "I". Above is the Post-Dispatch photograph attached to their article "Peat Wollaeger has his eye on St. Louis", which gives an indication what the piece might look like.

As someone who has called for more uplifting civic images and messages to be placed across St. Louis, I think this is great! I am especially happy Chivvis seems to have backed away from the idea of cleanly renovating the Powell Square building, renaming it the Chouteau's Landing Art Center, and then painting it the least "artsy" of all colors--beige.

McKinley Heights Billboard Now Advertises Art, Not Slots 12:43 PM

I don't know how I feel about urban billboards. Usually, they're ugly and dwarf the buildings they're superimposed upon. Sometimes, at their best, they add color and life to barren streetscapes. The venerable Skyscraper Page forums have a great thread dedicated to urban neighborhoods that take billboards to an awe-inspiring extreme--lighting them and allowing them to consume entire facades of buildings, a la Times Square in New York City. Check that out here.

Here in St. Louis, we don't have a Times Square. We just have some rusty billboards often attached to turn of the century commercial buildings--such as on Gravois Avenue.

Well, one art gallery in McKinley Heights (on Gravois) has taken a billboard and made it a true urban asset. According to an excellent Post-Dispatch article highlighting unconventional art galleries, Good Citizen owner Andrew James chose a spot on high-speed Gravois due to the billboard that came packaged with the building. Now the south side of the billboard is handed over to artists who wish to promote their shows, while the north-facing side is open for arts organizations to rent. The vacated billboard used to advertise Casino Queen slots. Below is a shot of artist Jennifer Flores' work on the Good Citizen billboard. To see others, click here to visit their Facebook page.

While the following discussion deserves its own post, I recently had a brief Twitter back-'n'-forth on whether/what parts of St. Louis constitute a "real city"--and what that terms means. To me, a real city is surprising and interesting around every corner. St. Louis's architecture--and often its people--pull these requirements off already. But one thing under-represented in St. Louis's landscape is both informal and formal art--murals, thoughtful graffiti, and other random and possibly unsanctioned bursts of color and ideas on city objects. Don't get me wrong--I know some of this is here already. We just need more. Artists reclaiming billboards is a great step in the right direction! This reads "real city" to me--whatever that means!

Make a Call to Support Transit Investments! 3:09 PM

As a sort of update to the previous post, I have a bit of news for you.

The "Hive" sculpture, pictured below, which resides at the Delmar Metrolink Station will be one of the subjects of Mark Reardon's show on KMOX TODAY, from 2-4.

The discussion is similar to that of Elliot Davis's "You Paid For It"--"why did we waste our tax dollars on this?".

PLEASE call to show your support for the arts and for transit. If you disagree with me, check out the post "Why We Invest in Public Art in Transit" for a defense of the reasoning.

The segment will air at 2:35 pm CST. Please call in to the show to express your support for public transit!

You may listen live here.

(314) 436-7900

Fox 2's Elliot Davis Assails Infrastructure Improvements; Misses the Mark 1:58 PM

Recently, Fox 2's ever vigilant Elliot Davis covered streetscape improvements on Delor in Bevo in his "You Paid For It" segment.

For a summary of what was done to the street, see Mark Groth's post from St. Louis City Talk. Essentially, the street was widened on both sides by removing the tree planting wells and grass buffer. Yet, the city decided to plant new trees in their old locations, basically creating curb bump-outs in the place of the former tree lawn. The resulting look is somewhat odd, though functional. What would have been an overly wide street is now at least mitigated by the fact that one cannot use the parking lanes to pass.

I agree with Elliot Davis that the need for this project was not extreme. I grew up two blocks from here and know that, sure, the street was narrow in its old incarnation and more than a few people saw their mirrors get clipped off by overeager motorists. Wouldn't a no parking sign from 7-9am and 4-6pm have solved the issue, even if just on one side of the street?

Instead of assailing the idea of widening a street in the city of St. Louis, Eillot Davis's "You Paid For It" inexplicably mocks the tree wells, confronting 14th Ward alderman Stephen Gregali about the "issue". "Won't the trees outgrow the planters and tear up the street you just fixed?" Davis repeats several times, to which Gregali responds, "Call a botanist". Watch the hilarious and puzzling video here.

Or here:



Another angle to approach the issue, besides the need for widening the street at all, could have been the tree selection itself. The city seems to think that these tiny trees survive; they often don't. Shouldn't we pay a little bit more to get some more mature and larger trees that could live through an ice storm, vandals, etc.?

Rumor is (it's not yet on their website), Davis is next set to attack Metro's Arts-in-Transit investments as wasted taxpayer money. I cannot begin to list all of the ignorance involved in that statement, but, luckily, Metro could. Read their eloquent response to such attacks here. Oops...it's essentially a federal funding requirement. And boosts transit-ridership. I applaud Metro for swiftly correcting misinformed critics.

And Elliot, please, make it a semi-annual report if you can't find anything worthwhile. Or at least read more deeply into the value (and faults) of particular infrastructure improvements in the city.

Adopt-a-Track? 8:33 AM

We've all seen these along our interstates:

Just a quick thought: why doesn't Metro start an Adopt-a-Track program for Metrolink? That way, a corporate or philanthropic organization could pay for track or station upkeep and maintenance. A sponsoring organization could even help fund Arts-in-Transit for its particular station or track segment. There could be a competition amongst donors, who get a bit of advertising out of the deal, to see who has the best Metro stop.

There could also be Adopt-a-Route, for buses.

What say you, Metro?

Ghost Signs / Exploring St. Louis 11:28 PM

St. Louis's urban blogosphere is getting so large it's hard to keep track of everyone's musings on the built environment of our fair city!

That's why I'm lucky to have discovered "Exploring St. Louis", one of the latest entries into the foray.

I think you'll really enjoy the author's post on St. Louis's numerous and storied "ghost signs". Don't forget to check out the accompanying Flickr photo set. And don't forget to bookmark!

Would Bus Ridership Increase... 6:44 PM

...if the bus stops looked like this?


Source: Planetizen, via The Design Blog

Instead of rusting in a junkyard, these decommissioned school busses contribute to the urban streetscape and busrider comfort.

Metro's Arts in Transit program's director should consider contacting the artist.

Speaking of Arts in Transit, the Poetry in Motion program seems intriguing. I'm assuming (it's not explained on the website) that these poems and the graphics that accompany them adorn the sides of busses and possibly Metrolink cars as well.

This poem, by Mary Ruth Donnelly, was my favorite:



Bringing art and life to transit will only endear people to it. Well done on both accounts.

Skinnytown Sculptures / South Grand Road Diet 11:53 PM

I am in love with the new Morganford--AKA Skinnytown--sculptures that have arisen along the funkified stretch over the past couple weeks. I first learned out these little pieces of whimsy through St. Louis Brick's post entitled "Morganford is the new South Grand", but St. Louis Investment Realty's Matt Kastner has snapped photos of still more sculptures here. From that very blog comes the photo below. Its legginess makes it the perfect tease photo to get you to follow the link to see nine (9!) others (This doesn't even include the giraffe sculpture staring across the street at the Three Monkeys). These appendages strut their stuff outside Vintage Haberdashery, an homage to the legs suspended from their second story window.

In other Tower Grove South news, South Grand is going on a road diet and you, St. Louis, can vote on the resulting slimmer design at an upcoming public meeting. I hear high-tech touch pads will be used for the voting process. Here's a cut-and-paste of the meeting announcement from the Tower Grove South website:

GREAT STREETS INITIATIVE SOUTH GRAND: Public Meeting and Design Charrette Announcement
Good Evening Everyone,
Please accept the attached postcard as an invitation to participate in the Public Meetings and Design Charrette scheduled for Monday, August 10, 2009 – Wednesday, August 12, 2009 from 4:00PM to 7:00PM. Also, please share the postcard flyer with your constituents so that they may have the opportunity to participate in the meetings as well. Should you have any comments or question, please give us a call at (314) 436-3311. We appreciate your immediate attention to this matter, and we look forward to meeting you.
Bridgett S. Willis
Hudson and Associates, LLC
1204 Washington Ave., Ste. 402
St. Louis, MO 63103
Office: 314-436-3311
Fax: 314-436-3503
Cell: 618-560-3225

Maybe a slimmed down South Grand will be able to compete with the charming, wacky Skinnytown along Morganford?

Homegrown Art to Come to Southwest Garden's Streets 12:41 PM

As part of the Southwest Garden Streetscape improvements along Vandeventer and Southwest, local artists Agnieszka Gradzik and Wiktor Szostalo will be providing the Southwest Garden neighborhood with one of their famed TreeHugger art installations.

From the artists:

The Tree Hugger project is an ongoing work of Environmental Art designed to help us re-discover our relationship with nature at a very personal and intimate level. Made from twigs, branches, sticks, vines, and other natural materials, these playful sculptures remind us that we humans are still very much a part of our natural surroundings.

The Southwest Garden's Communicator reports that the neighborhood will be purchasing one (they cost $1,500 each) while seeking donations to provide more throughout the neighborhood.

I am excited to see St. Louis artists' work being featured internationally. I've seen a TreeHugger at Forest Park's Earth Day Festival and found it intriguing and whimsical. It would be even better to see this art on a city street, where it would by default make St. Louisans stop and consider the wonderful effects of trees on their city. Whether it's shade, beautification, energy cost reduction, urban runoff collection, protection of pedestrians on sidewalks, raised property values, cleaner air...trees are heavy on benefits and low on costs.

I'm no tree expert, but the TreeHugger project forces me to ponder the state of St. Louis trees. The trees imported to the soon-to-be-opened Citygarden were relatively large. Yet the typical streetscape project includes trees so small and young that they're easily destroyed by the elements or vandalism. This is especially a problem on some of St. Louis's main streets. Ever see an aerial of the city? You can spot Kingshighway, Gravois, and others by their uninterrupted expanse of gray, contrasted from surrounding verdant residential neighborhoods.

Maybe the TreeHuggers can convince the city to spend the extra amount for more mature street trees that will one day tower over the streetscapes they're meant to improve.

Hip Hop and Preservation in Detroit 2:16 PM

Watch these videos and tell me you're not the least bit interested in packing up and moving to Detroit. The suffering is palpable, but so are the outcries against the continued downward spiral that the city's leadership has failed to stem. The city continues to rip the city's history and heritage down, but the economy isn't looking any better.





Thanks to my friend Karen Gadbois of the excellent New Orleans preservation-and-activism site Squandered Heritage. for alerting me to the presence of this thoughtful and intriguing duo.

Light as Art. 9:00 PM

We witnessed how transformational light can be with Grand Center's "Light Project", which turned this:

Source

Into this:

Source

Well, look what Cleveland has done!



St. Louis could definitely use light to spruce out some dreadful downtown deadweights, such as this!:


View Larger Map

It sadly occurs to me that the stark-whiteness of the felled Century Building would have been a great canvass for light...

Seriously. Cool. Public. Art. 6:30 PM

Check it out--from Lvov, Ukraine.



Can we just copycat this for Chouteau's Landing?

A mini movie-making boom in St. Louis? 9:56 PM

Just reviewing the incomparable IMDB, I found a couple movies that were filmed in St. Louis recently.

> Edgar Allen Poe's Ligeia

Synopsis:

Successful writer and scholar Jonathan Merrick falls under the spell of the irresistible, bewitchingly beautiful Ligeia. She's fighting a fatal illness and she will stop at nothing to defeat death, her one true enemy. She steals other people's souls and on her quest to immortality she tricks Jonathan into supporting her work, breaking him apart from his fiancé Rowena and pulling him into her dark, mysterious world. They settle down in an old manor by the Black Sea where Ligeia's everlasting presence slowly drives Jonathan to madness...

Filmed in:

St. Louis
Maplewood
University City
Kirkwood

Special notes: Michael Madsen is in the movie! That's pretty big time, right?

> The Informant

Synopsis:

"The Informant" is a true story that parallels a mixture of "A Beautiful Mind" and "The Insider" -- where real life Ph.D.s had done something extraordinary. Based on Kurt Eichenwald's 2000 book, "The Informant" is the tale of Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon), an Ivy League Ph.D. who was a rising star at Decatur's Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s. He wound up blowing the whistle on the company's price fixing tactics and became the highest-ranked executive to ever turn whistleblower in US history. Whitacre secretly gathered hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes over several years to present to the FBI which became one of the largest price fixing cases in history. In the story -- a dark comedy / thriller in director Steven Soderbergh's hands -- Whitacre's good deed dovetails with his own major infractions and struggle with bipolar disorder

Filmed in:

St. Louis
Lambert International Airport

Special notes: Matt Damon's the star. Steven Soderbergh (Michael Clayton, Syriana) is the director. That's even BIGGER time! I'm guessing they only filmed in Lambert though. Who knows?


> The Lucky Ones

Synopsis:

After suffering an injury during a routine patrol, hardened sergeant TK Poole is granted a one-month leave to visit his fiancé. But when an unexpected blackout cancels all flights out of New York, TK agrees to share a ride to Pittsburgh with two similarly stranded servicemen: Cheever, an older family man who longs to return to his wife in St. Louis, and Colee, a naive private who's pinned her hopes on connecting with a dead fellow soldier's family. What begins as a short trip unexpectedly evolves into a longer journey. Forced to grapple with old relationships, broken hopes and a country divided over the war, TK, Cheever and Colee discover that home is not quite what they remembered, and that the unlikely companionship they've found might be what matters the most.

Filmed in:

Chesterfield
Edwardsville, IL
St. Louis
Lambert International Airport

Special notes: Tim Robbins! Rachel McAdams! This is too much for this small town!

> One Lucky Elephant.

Synopsis:

Five years in the making, ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT follows the poignant journey of circus producer David Balding as he tries to find a nurturing and permanent home for Flora, the 18-year-old African elephant that he rescued as an infant, raised as his "daughter" and made the star of his circus. David's love for Flora is put to the ultimate test when he realizes he made a terrible mistake keeping her as a solo elephant, and decides to retire her from the circus after 17 years of performing. Knowing Flora will outlive him, and with his health and finances becoming an issue, David sets off on a quest to find a home for Flora can live freely with other elephants. This complicated task begins with Flora's final circus performance in St. Louis and takes us on an emotional trek across America, then to Africa and back. We follow David's journey as he discovers just how difficult it is to find a proper home for an elephant in a world that reveres these animals for their majesty yet slaughters them for their ivory, adores them as cuddly Dumbos yet brands them "rampaging creatures". ONE LUCKY ELEPHANT raises critical issues about the well-being and future of the hundreds of thousands of endangered and exotic animals kept in captivity, the overdevelopment and destruction of their natural habitats, our intense and often damaging relationship with wild animals, and how all these issues have impacted the life of one very lucky elephant.

Filmed in:

St. Louis (and Kenya, of course)

Special notes: Documentary-haters, beware!

> Say Goodnight

Synopsis:

Three guys tell a friend the stories of how they met the loves of their lives, and how they managed to completely screw up the relationships.

Filmed ENTIRELY in:

St. Louis

Special notes: May be pretty low-budge, for those that care.



---

There are a couple more. Check them out for yourself here.

A Coming of Rage Story 5:29 PM

There’s profound disappointment in your voice when I say no that’s no longer there;

no; that belongs to the wildflowers; the ghetto palms; there’s a piquing curiosity in your brow; why so many prairies in the Fourth City?; there’s a sweeping anger at the loss whose pangs you never had to feel; directly; whose stinging slap; the idiocy of it; you experience; only in an unquenching visual dosage;

something by nothing begot;

but your fire is kindled nonetheless; and you leave an arm; a heart; an eye; on a clearcut lot; and don’t worry; the pictures like fangs of mangled stained glass; come together to reveal a sacred biting whole; worthy of veneration;

if only more blood had been spilled sooner.

Can our north side borrow this mural from Cincy? 10:19 PM

Thanks go to the Skyscraper Page forum's grasscat.

As North St. Louis Burns 7:24 PM

A dozen homes in flames in JeffVanderLou and St. Louis Place. Some are owned by Blairmont. The conspiracy theory curtains open to reveal a bald truth. Our mayor (who else?) rushes to enshroud the naked figure in a shadowy blanket by doing and saying nothing.

Audre Lorde has a fitting poem, especially having read Curious Feet St. Louis's chillingly true declaration:

I promise you that Paul McKee does not sit up at night, hearing rounds of sirens and wondering, nervously, nervously, what buildings near his home must be burning. I promise you he doesn’t live like this.

Future Promise

This house will not stand forever.
The windows are sturdy
but shuttered
like individual solutions
that match one at a time.

The roof leaks.
On persistent rainy days
I look up to see
the gables weeping
quietly.

The stairs are sound
beneath my children
but from time to time
a splinter leaves
imbedded in a childish foot.

I dream of stairways
sagging
into silence
well used and satisfied
with no more need
for changelessness

Once
freed from constancy
this house
will not stand
forever.

"Visit To A City Out Of Time" 12:46 AM

The following is a poem by the transcendent Audre Lorde, a legally blind black lesbian married to a white woman in the 1960s. She is called the "ultimate other," reflecting her intersecting identities and sources of oppression. Her challenging and often bitter poetry survives her; she died of cancer in 1992. She often spoke of the need to voice one's demons, one's anger and not to appeal to nicety. Her caustic words were meant to provoke, to incite change, to inform the status quo that there was a rift on the horizon.

Here is her poem (see title above) about St. Louis, written at some point in the early 1970s. Notice her scathing indictment--how St. Louis is a victim, like Lorde herself, but one who has surrendered and is perhaps carried as if driftwood down a "cutting" and uncaring river. What's your take?

If St. Louis
took its rhythms
from the river
that cuts through it
the pulse of the Mississippi
has torn this city
apart.

St. Louis is
somebody's home
and not answering
was
nobody
shoveling snow
because spring would come
one day.

In time
people who live
by rivers
dream
they are immortal.