Public Art in St. Louis

 Missouri, Saint Louis
Apr 302021
 

April 2021

Saint Louis is an amazing city for art!

City Garden

Between Chestnut and Market Streets and 8th and 10th Streets is City Garden.  Founded by the Gateway Foundation the park consists of a cafe, stunning landscape, a fountain or two and a modern art collection that made this public art enthusiast sing.

The photos I have chosen are a small sample of the pieces in the park.

Eros Bendato by artist Igor Mitoraj. – The dismembered head of Eros, the Greek god of love and desire, is wrapped in bandages suggesting that the desires of the eyes and mouth have been imprisoned. The bandages also symbolize two opposing views of the world – either that civilization is broken beyond repair, or that it is being held together despite destructive forces.

La Riviere by artist Aristide Maillol. This female nude is the subject of nearly all of Maillol’s later works. Here. the artist creates the feeling of instability and movement. It is the personification of water.

With Bird, Laura Ford creates playful and disturbing hybrid creatures. Part human and part animal they are developed through observation of her own children and recollection of her feelings of growing up. It represents her ability to move easily between the real and unreal, the creepy and sweet, the funny and mean.

Erwin Wurm chooses everyday objects as the subject of his work in an attempt to inspire viewers to question both the traditional definition of sculpture and their relations ship to the world.

Jim Dine has been intrigued by the story of Pinocchio for many years. Creating Big White Gloves, Big Four Wheels Dine said “the idea of a talking stick becoming a boy, is like a metaphor for art.

Aesop’s Fables by Mark di Suvero is indicative of so much of his work, large pieces of industrial metal welded, bolted and painted.

Mimmo Paladino created Zenit with a combination of art, science and mathematics. A geometric form that mathematicians call a stellated dodecahedron appears to balance on one of its points on the horse’s back.

Unzip the Earth, by Canadian artist Floyd Elzinga – What a delightful whimsical piece!

Tai Chi Single Whip by Ju Ming depicts a faceless Tai Chi practitioner in the basic pose with the same name as the piece.

Clausses creates a tension between the light tone of the subject and the weight of the bronze forms. This bronze, enveloped in white paint gives the impression of marshmallows.

Classen’s bunnies took on even more meaning when you enjoy the small rabbits hopping all around the park.

Laumeier Sculpture Park

A friend turned me onto the outdoor sculpture park at 12580 Rott Road in St. Louis.

Founded in 1976, Laumeier is one of the first and largest dedicated sculpture parks in the country. In 1968, Mrs. Matilda Laumeier bequeathed the first 72 acres of the future Laumeier Sculpture Park to St. Louis County in memory of her husband, Henry Laumeier. In 1976, local artist Ernest Trova gifted 40 artworks, with an estimated market value of approximately one million dollars.

The entire park is a teaching facility and a divine place to spend a day just wondering the stunning grounds.  The pieces change, these were just some of the more interesting ones I found on my visit.

Blue Eyeball by Toni Tasset and Bornibus by Mark di Suvero

Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall! by Donald Lipski

Man with Briefcase at #2968443 by Jonathan Borofsky

The Way by Alexander Liberman

If the World is a Fair Place Then… by Rags Media Collective

Finding the Offbeat in Saint Louis

 Missouri, Saint Louis
Apr 302021
 

April 2021

The Union Station Hotel in St. Louis

Designed by the St. Louis firm of Theodore C. Link, the 600-foot long granite structure stylistically reflects the Romanesque influence of H. H. Richardson.

Now a National Historic Landmark the St. Louis Union Station was opened in 1894. At its opening it was the largest in the world with tracks and passenger service areas all on one level. Traffic peaked at 100,000 people a day the 1940s. The last Amtrak passenger train left the station in 1978.

In the 1980s, it was renovated as a hotel, shopping center, and entertainment complex. with two more renovations in 2010 and 2020.  The shopping center and entertainment complex is a blight with loud music, horrible restaurants and a feeling of a tacky and cheap town.

The lobby of the hotel has kept its historical quality and is worth a visit or a drink in the bar.  The hotel itself is a Hilton, and not one this author would recommend.

This gothic corridor with gracefully vaulted ceiling once lead to a Renaissance private Dining Room.

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City Museum St. Louis

City Museum is a one-hundred-year-old warehouse in downtown St. Louis in which artists have repurposed found items to build miles of tunnels, slides, climbers, bridges, and castles.  There are secret passages and grand galleries, playgrounds and ball pits, a circus and a train and a rooftop with a school bus and a Ferris wheel.

The amazing part of the museum, to this architecture history nut was the two floors of rescued building parts from now vanished buildings.

This amazing cornice is from the Wainwright Building that stood at the NE corner of 7th and Chestnut. Built in 1891 it was designed by Adler and Sullivan, with the chief Draftsman being Frank Lloyd Wright.

This terra-cotta pediment once crowned the Broadway Strand Museum in Chicago. Built in 1917, the building was demolished in 1998.

Behind this fish you will see a wall of stainless steel pans originally used as steam table pans for food service.

Everywhere you look there are elaborate mosaic floors.  In the beginning several artists were brought in to create the mosaics, but eventually it was reduced to one, Sharon von Senden. Tile used in the museum comes from a variety of sources, including donations, closeouts, or surplus. Due to the shifting concrete slabs and heavy traffic, new designs are always being laid as the floors are repaired.

Bellefontaine Cemetery

A trip through any town would not be complete without a visit to a cemetery for this taphophile.

In 1849, the Rural Cemetery Association purchased the former Hempstead family farm located five miles northwest of the St. Louis, with the intent to turn it into a large rural cemetery modeled after Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. The 138-acre Hempstead farm was situated along the road to Fort Bellefontaine, and as a result the Association decided to name its new cemetery after the fort. Within a few months, the Association had hired landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss, who helped design Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, to implement a master plan.  The Cemetery is a stunning arboretum with a botanical garden and landscaping that invites one to wander for hours.

There are several notable people buried in the cemetery, these are just a few.

The Grave of Virginia Minor

Virginia Louisa Minor (March 27, 1824 – August 14, 1894) was an American women’s suffrage activist. She is best remembered as the plaintiff in Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 United States Supreme Court case in which Minor unsuccessfully argued that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave women the right to vote.

Susan Elizabeth Blow (June 7, 1843 – March 27, 1916) was an American educator who opened the first successful public kindergarten in the United States. She was known as the “Mother of the Kindergarten.”

The grave of William Clark of the Meriwether Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804 – 1806. The men led the first major effort to explore and map much of what is now the Western United States.

The Wainwright Mausoleum was designed by renowned architect Louis Sullivan. The mausoleum was addd to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.

Compton Hill Water TowerCompton Hill Water Tower St. Louis

The Water Tower sits adjacent to the Compton Hill Reservoir and was the third to be built in the St. Louis (after the Grand Avenue Water Tower and the Bissell Street Water Tower). Located at Grand and Russell Avenues, the tower stands 179 feet high and is 130 feet around at the base. It was designed by Harvey Ellis, for the firm of George R. Mann in 1897.

The three water towers were actually standpipes encased in architectural towers and a vital part of the City’s early water system. The standpipes absorbed surges from the late-19th-century reciprocating water pumps, providing consistent water pressure. In 1972, The Compton Hill Water Tower was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A close up of the stunning carvings on the water tower.

St. Louis is an amazingly rich town in art, architecture and culture, I wish I had had more time.

Gateway Arch

 Missouri, Saint Louis
Apr 282021
 

April 2021

I have wanted to see the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis ever since I stood in the Saarinan house at Cranbrook. The arch was designed by Eero Saarinan, son of the great architect Elliel Saarinan, and a rather phenomenal architect in his own right.

The Arch sits along the west bank of the Mississippi River and takes its name from “Gateway to the West” celebrating the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

I could wax poetic about the architecture and the construction of the Arch, something I have been doing all day to anyone that would listen, but there are books and books and movies and movies about those subjects.  Here are a few fun facts.

On a clear day you can see up to 30 miles across the Mississippi to the Great Plains.  We weren’t so lucky, it was a very rainy day when we visited.

Looking out from the top of the arch

The project required the demolition of 40 blocks of waterfront property which St. Louis city engineer W. C. Bernard called “an enforced slum-clearance program”  As a lover of historic architecture I would call the destruction of  dozens of warehouses and cast-iron buildings extremely sad if not criminal.

The two legs of the Arch were built separately.  If off by as little as 1/64th of an inch they would not join at the top.  As someone who spent her adult life in manufacturing building ornamentation, I shudder at having to be that accurate.

In the middle of the movie that one can see at the Arch there is a casual mention of the fact that it was determined prior to project start  that thirteen workers would die during its construction. No one did, and yes I am aware that that is the role of an insurance company, but it is a ghoulish discussion nonetheless.  The fascinating thing about watching the film is you will notice that despite being 630 feet in the air, no construction worker was tied off and most were not wearing steel-toed shoes.

Looking down upon the old courthouse from the top of the Gateway Arch

The arch is a catenary arch and it is as tall as it is wide.

The elevator was designed by Dick Bowser, an engineering school dropout whose family was in the elevator business.  It was not as easy as one would think as the arch curves.  Bowser was only given two weeks to come up with a design.  His solution was a tram that was part elevator and part ferris wheel.

A model of the tram car

Presidents are not allowed to go up the arch.  The only President that did so was Dwight D. Eisenhower after he retired.