By now you've heard all the fanfare over STL's newest and most exciting music festival, LouFest, which will be held in Forest Park on Saturday & Sunday, Aug. 28-29.  This 2-day rock-o-rama featuring 18 local, national and international bands promises to be St. Louis's answer to Bonaroo, Lalapalooza and SXSW.  If it's successful this year it will hopefully become an annual event.  So that's why this city needs to support it.  If acts like She & Him, Broken Social Scene, Jeff Tweedy, Built to Spill and 14 others aren't enough to get you there, then hopefully we are.  Because STL-Style will be there in force, with a merch booth in the main vendor area as well as in the VIP lounge backstage for all you high-rolling stargazers and groupies.  We'll have increased supplies of some of our most popular tees, undies and other merch, as well as the official LouFest t-shirt, designed by our very own Kadie Foppiano.  Meet us in St. Louie, Louie, meet us at the Fair!

WHAT:  LouFest

WHERE:  Central Field, Forest Park, STL

WHEN:  Sat & Sun, Aug. 28-29

WHO:  18 bands, 2 stages

WHY:  Because St. Louis is a musical city that knows how to throw a party.  

I'm not old enough or lucky enough to have had the opportunity to experience Gaslight Square, but I'm certainly sentimental enough to appreciate its legendary history, and pissed enough to lament its senseless demolition.


A monument that commemorates all the interesting people and places that used to be here.

  VanishingSTL documents the systematic loss of Gaslight Square's built environment in a sobering 2-part series: Part 1 and Part 2.  (You might want to have a box of Kleenex close by.)

Today, the stretch of Olive between Boyle and Sarah is pleasant enough as a residential neighborhood, but the rich soul and sense of place that made the district famous throughout the world seems to have died along with the historic buildings that lined the streets until 2004.  

But all is not lost in Gaslight Square!  If you look closely, you'll find some sporadic survivors amidst the mass redevelopment of the neighborhood.  

I was elated to discover that this small but handsome piece of the original neighborhood has been lovingly restored, and new residents were moving in as I snapped this picture:


The newly-rehabbed Edwin Apartments, corner of Whittier & Delmar.


Looking north from Olive:  This lonely brick home would be unremarkable in countless other neighborhoods around the city.  But in the blocks immediately surrounding Gaslight Square, its existence is crucial in retaining even a tiny semblance of the original historic context.  


Across the street, these solid twin mamas are keepin' it real on Whittier.  In the distance, the Selkirk's building-- the only original building still standing on the main drag of Gaslight Square-- anchors an otherwise uninteresting intersection.  If you squint, you can almost imagine what the entire neighborhood once looked and felt like.


A closer look at the Selkirk's building, the lone survivor of Gaslight Square.  

Just south of Olive on Boyle stands a diminutive commercial building that time forgot.  The owners have tried unsuccessfully to obtain a demolition permit, so what's to become of this scrappy little guy?  

414-18 N. Boyle: Survival by neglect.  A future wine bar, perhaps?  Or maybe a neighborhood bakery?

Though its future may be uncertain, its historical value is anything but.  Through the roughest of times, this baby has held on tight to its cozy corner as larger buildings around it have disappeared.  The fact that it's one of the last remaining original buildings in greater Gaslight Square makes its prospect for restoration all the more exciting.

Despite the gradual depletion of one of St. Louis' most storied neighborhoods, there are a handful of successes worth celebrating, and a few still-endangered ones worth fighting for. 

So now we know that St. Louis is a finalist to host the Democratic National Convention in 2012.  We know we can do it.  Other contenders are Minneapolis, Cleveland and Charlotte, NC.  Minneapolis doesn't deserve it, since St. Paul hosted the RNC in '08.  We love Cleveland (see previous blog post), but when push comes to shove we of course have to stand by our own mama.  Charlotte?  Your guess is as good as ours on that one.  The DNC is a major league event, and it requires a big league city to accommodate the crowds.  It also needs an enthusiastic local populace to support the bid.  That's why STL-Style partnered with the Young Democrats of Saint Louis to design a fresh limited edition t-shirt that will surely bring out the blue in you:

Front Back

This design incorporates the catchy phrase "Paint the Town Blue" along with our city's beloved namesake, King Louis IX, who is wielding a paintbrush on a galloping...Democrat donkey.  

You can order these spiffy threads for $15 at www.youngdems.com.  GO BLUE!

We’re taking a rare break from extolling the virtues of our beloved St. Louis in order to pay homage to another wonderful-yet-underappreciated Midwestern city: Cleveland.  STL-Style is a proud member of the Great Lakes Urban Exchange (GLUE), which is a collective of urbanists from all over the Rust Belt who share strategies to improve our aging cities.  GLUE's annual conference was held last week in the great city of Cleveland! 

And what a gem of a town Cleveland is.  Anyone who loves St. Louis would undoubtedly love Cleveland, as the two burghs share much in common: similar metro populations; similar demographics; both have experienced startling population and industrial decline over the past 60 years; both have a wealth of cultural, educational and medical institutions; both are fierce supporters of their sports teams; both have limited but awesome rapid transit systems; both struggle with image problems, in national media as well as internally; both are home to passionate, creative and devoted residents.  Like St. Louis, Cleveland is a city of high culture and dive bars, beautiful parks and abandoned neighborhoods, a vibrant arts scene and dysfunctional government.  Saint Louis and Cleveland are two peas in a pod in so many ways.

One glaring difference between Cleveland and St. Louis is the housing stock.  Cleveland boomed a bit later than St. Louis, so it appears less dense.  While St. Louis is overwhelmingly built of red brick, Cleveland is predominantly comprised of wood frame structures.  St. Louis has alleys.  Cleveland has driveways.  Overall, Cleveland exudes a style that hinges somewhere between gritty industrial and leafy bucolic.  A distinctive mix indeed.  Cleveland does contemporary new construction much better.  St. Louis easily wins in historic preservation.  The comparisons and contrasts go on and on. 

But as with every city, Cleveland’s soul is best found in its people.  And what great people they are.  They aren’t flashy or pretentious; they are the genuine article.  The Clevelanders who attended the conference with us were extremely knowledgeable about their city and couldn’t wait to show off the town.  There’s no way to adequately express how impressed we were in a single blog post, but we thought this would be a good way to thank the good people of Cleveland for a great time.  Your city makes us love our city even more!

Check out our booth at Cherokee Street's Bizarre Bazaar Flea Market!  We'll have a bunch of sale items, including our new STL-inspired totes for your buying pleasure.  Here are the deets:

Date:  Sunday, June 27, 2010
Time:  10:00am - 7:00pm
Location:  2800 block of Cherokee Street (Binge & Purge, Apop Records, Cranky Yellow)
City: STL

For more information, check out the event's Facebook page


While you're at it, you should also check out Fort Gondo's Sidewalk Sale for a bunch of kitschy goods, benefitting a great cause:

"Things here never change."  This characteristic seems to be one of both the charms and frustrations people have about Saint Louis.  But looking back at some old photo albums that Randy and I have compiled over the years tells another story.  Many changes-- some big, some small, some bad, some good-- have occurred in the last ten years.  By no means is this a comprehensive collection of the city's recent evolution, but these are just a handful of subtle changes that my brother and I have captured incidentally over the last decade.

Weinberger Garment Company, near Washington & 14th Street.
Mural, Delmar & Hamilton.  (Now a vacant lot.)

Forest Park Parkway before overhaul.  Check out the original concrete wall.

St. Louis skyline, 2001 - the Century Building can be seen on the lower right.

Erlich's 4-Hour Shirt Laundry, 14th & Washington.  Now a vacant lot.  (Notice Marte Shoes across the street.)

Grand sign, Forest Park Parkway.

Pencil mural - permanently erased.  Building rehabbed into condos.

Rossino's - a longtime St. Louis mainstay.  Building rehabbed into apartments.

Golden Furniture building, N. Kingshighway.  Now a vacant lot.  

Washington Avenue before streetscape overhaul.

Fox Theatre before replica marquis replacement.

Newsstand, 8th & Locust.  Now the construction site for Roberts Tower.


Ahh, the good old days...

It's hard to imagine what downtown St. Louis was like before the abominable St. Louis Centre drained the life from the sidewalks and into a failed soul-sucking vacuum of misery that unfortunately defined our CBD for an entire generation.  In honor of the long-overdue demolition of the St. Louis Centre skybridge, here's a snapshot of downtown St. Louis, circa 1980, where St. Louis Centre now rots...


(Photo courtesy of the cool dude at Soulard Market who sold it to me)

No doubt, the upcoming retrofit of St. Louis Centre will be a huge improvement to its current sad state, but a suburban mall-turned-parking garage with streetfront retail is still a far cry from the mixed-use urban fabric that used to be there.  

No use crying over spilled milk, but this photograph gives us a standard to aim for.  Will the shiny, new Merchants Exchange development attract the volume of pedestrian traffic that an average downtown street corner had 30 years ago?

Those of you who have been following our efforts to preserve our beloved mid-century high-rise San Luis Apartments know that the outcome wasn't a good one.   What used to be a sleek, retro apartment tower at the corner of Lindell & Taylor in the CWE has since been replaced with a drab surface parking lot. 

But all was not lost.  A impassioned group of city residents went to court to make sure that concerned citizens will have a voice in future preservation matters that violate city ordinances and historic district guidelines.  The final verdict is still out, but thanks to the dedication of our brilliant attorneys, we are hopeful that the laws will be clarified so public process is respected in the future. 

All proceeds go directly to our hard-working legal team and the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation, which is hosting the event.

For a lot more information on this issue, visit No Parking Lot on Lindell!

What: Anti-Wrecking Ball: Soulard Stable Hootenanny
Where: Stahl Stable, 2412 Menard Street
When: 8:00 p.m. this Saturday, May 22nd
Cost: $10 benefits the Friends of the San Luis and the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation

Bands, buildings and beer - Saturday night never sounded so good.

Anyone from St. Louis is well aware of this city’s identity crisis.  Yes, we are a decidedly Midwestern city, but do we have more in common with the North or the South?  We delve into this question with these facts in mind:

Southern:  St. Louis has a vaguely New Orleans-esque, lazy Mississippi River demeanor.

Northern:  Our industrial history is much more intertwined with places such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee than with any city in the South.

Southern:  Missouri was a slave state, and the notorious Dred Scott decision was handed down in St. Louis.


Jacob Lawrence's The Great Migration

Northern:  St. Louis was a bastion of pro-Union sentiment, and the city’s huge German population is what arguably prevented the entire state of Missouri from officially joining the Confederacy.

Southern:  We have debutante balls (Veiled Prophet, Fleur-de-Lis) and an old-school provincialism (“Where’d you go to high school?”)

Northern:  The unmistakable St. Louis accent is a northern urban dialect, with more traits in common with dialects of the Great Lakes and northeast than with any Southern accent, as assessed by a linguistics study by the University of Pennsylvania.

Image courtesy of University of Pennsylvania

Northern:  You’d be hard-pressed to find sweet tea and grits on most menus in this city, nor is “ya’ll” a feature of our local speech.

So while there are undeniable southern influences in St. Louis culture, there’s nothing about this place that screams “Dixie.”  In STL-Style’s opinion, St. Louis has economic, demographic, political and developmental characteristics much more similar to northern industrial cities than to southern cities.  So what do you think?  

I thought I'd share a gallery of random photos that my brother, Randy, and I have snapped over the years.  Some of these were taken as long as eight years ago-- others are relatively recent.  You may recognize some of the characters, but most are just everyday people doing everyday things in the great city of Saint Louis.

Enjoy...





 









 



 



















 





 









Your photographer thanks you for watching...